You’re find your seat in the movie theater. Not what you wanted, but better than you expected. You sit and wait for the lights to go down, wondering if the obnoxious teenagers behind you will settle down once the movie starts. The lights begin to dim; the teenagers settle. Small blessings, etc. You get through the previews, the screen goes dark, and you’re ready for the movie to begin–
Ah! But first! Every fly-by-night “production company” that replaced the toilet paper squares in the extras’ portable toilets has an animated logo, and they have one-up each other for your attention before you’ll be allowed to see the film
Some of them are innocuous, but most of them are frikkin’ obnoxious, which I was reminded of just now when I put *Rififi *on in the store. Gaumont’s isn’t the *most *obnoxious, but it’s obnoxious.
I grew to hate the THX one where the logo breaks down and the little robot has to fix it, if only because I saw it so many times that it got really old. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hAbEoqxmpQ
OH! How could I forget? The worst one of all, the one that makes me think of starting this thread every single time I see it, is the Lionsgate logo. Not only is it overblown and noisy and way to complicated, but it’s the most unavoidable. It’s worse than Disney. When it’s on a DVD, you can’t skip it, you can’t FF through it, you can’t do anything to get around it. And you sometimes see it 3 times on a disc: when you put the disc in; when the movie starts; and even when it ends. I’ve probably sat through that frikkin logo 5,000 times, and it just get’s longer and stupider every got dam time.
It is evil, but mostly because it makes no sense. Here’s this insanely complicated clockwork mechanism, behind what appears to be internal combustion engines…and this is all supposed to relate somehow to the old-style keyhole that we fly through? Why not have a complicated lock mechanism if you want something behind the keyhole. Nope, no connection at all. No lock parts behind the keyhole.
I dunno if I’d go that far, but I do make a game of trying to identify the production Co. from the first moment or two. Some like the giant lens looking at you for Spyglass or the skipping stone for Walden are pretty quick, others not so much.
