What are some movies whose titles lead you to believe they’re about something that they’re not?
“The Squid and the Whale” is the perfect example. The title makes you think it’s going to be an undersea monster flick. It’s actually about divorce.
Also I think the Simpsons did a joke about this, but “Naked Lunch.” I can understand how that would be disappointing to someone expecting to see one giant nude fest.
Actually you could probably include pretty much any non-porn movie with “naked” in the title.
Either Bravo or Showcase had a few commercials based on this. One had a few dogs splashing around in a reservoir, another featured nudists having a picnic. There may have been others, but I don’t remember them.
Fight Club
Tears of the Sun, which for the life of me sounds like it should star Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger and not Bruce Willis as a Navy SEAL.
28 Days Later was surprisingly not about Sandra Bullock going through rehab again.
Happiness
Wrestling Ernest Hemingway features neither wrestling nor Hemingway.
The Last King of Scotland
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
Come on. I liked the movie a lot, but you think it’s about, I don’t know, demons and angels or something, but instead it’s about Southerners.
The Naked Lunch should’ve been about naked chicks eating lunch. Now that I think about it, the original novel would’ve been better if it was about naked chicks eating lunch, too.
I, Robot.
If they had just called it something else and gave Calvin and Lanning different names, it would be like “Hey, cool! A big Will Smith action pic about robots and stuff! and there’s even stuff about the three laws of robotics in there! Awesome!!”
But as it is, it makes nerds on the internet very grumpy. Including me.
p.s. I absolutely love the movie, in spite of the fact that it has virtually nothing to do with the real I, Robot.
ETA: In case it wasn’t clear, it’s misleading because it is not a movie of I, Robot. It just uses a few concepts, and doesn’t even use them well.
The Neverending Story
As Good As It Gets
Serenity was not a chick-flick. Or about Buddhism.
I sat through it. Believe me, it’s Truth In Advertising.
And of course its sequels.
Eagle vs Shark is, disapointingly, not about an eagle fighting a shark.
All Dogs Go to Heaven. Sounds like lightweight Disney fare about a dog who perhaps sacrifices his life to become a guardian angel for his 8 y/o owner, right? Nope.
Ordinary People
This damnable fraud, perpetrated on innocent viewers, inexplicably winning Best Picture in a year with quite a few actually good movies, is about people so disfunctional that the mother hates the son, the son hates himself, the father hates his life, and the good guy in the whole boring, mind numbing fiasco is the psychiatrist, who is a smarmy dick.
I like that one.
And the scuttlebutt is, apparently, that the Die Hard sequel that was in development for approximately 40 years and eventually became Live Free or Die Hard was, at the time, going to be titled Die Hard: Tears of the Sun. Bruce Willis told the studio that he’d sign on for Die Hard 4 so long as he could steal “Tears of the Sun” for this movie
So not only is it not appropriate, it’s not even that movie’s title. The words don’t mean anything, but they’re pretty.
The Silence of the Lambs. My husband hadn’t heard of it when it first came out and was killing time between meetings in another city. He looked at the movie posters outside a theatre and thought, “Hey, it’s Jodie Foster, and there’s a butterfly, and something about lambs - might be cute! I’ll go see that!”
He loved the movie, but it wasn’t quite what he’d expected.