Hugo - not interested.
Let me try: Orphan Boy & The-Next-Jodie-Foster help Old-Filmmaker-Who-Made-Rocket-In-Moonmans-Eye all while being chased by Borat & getting books from Christopher Lee.
By skipping a highly acclaimed movie because you believe you are “not interested”, one may be missing some good entertainment. I’ve given movies, that to my mind were not going to be my cup of tea, a chance if there was overwhelming critical praise and a high audience score. As Roger Ebert said, “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”
On an academic level I agree with you, however in practice opinions and tastes vary, and a movie that is acclaimed by professional critics and audiences alike can still be steaming piles of totally pointless dog shit. I’ve been burned more than enough times to know better.
Take Drive for example. I’m a guy, and I like movies that guys like, and given a one-sentence blurb the movie would appear to have everything I’d want in a movie, everything I would put into a movie myself. However, the actual movie was a pointless jumble of Ryan Gosling staring at coffee cups, boring conversations about nothing, frenetic hyper-violence for no apparent reason, and surprisingly little actual driving. What a pile of shit. Why the fuck did anyone like this movie?!
Please Don’t Eat The Daises.
Yes! That title is so bad I had blocked it out of memory. Just reading it on the screen makes me think I’m slurring my words in my head, let alone trying to say it out loud.
Apparently except for the movies they nominate that you like. But then you reject movies solely based on their titles, makes it kind of hard to take you seriously.
You’re missing two excellent films here, FYI.
I’ve always been annoyed by titkles of plays, TV shows, and movies that are supposed to be clever ways of saying “this is a sequel”, but, if you’re coming to them “cold”, without any prior knowledge of the earlier works, don’t make any sense.
So I was very annoyed for years at the titles The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball and At the Drop of Another Hat. I didn’t realize that Let’s Do It Again was a sequel, which explains the title. Otherwise I wouldn’t be interested in seeing them do “it” – whatever that was, again.
I know why they called Sean Connery’s second return to Bond Never Say Never Again. Even though I understand the title, I don’t like it (They originally thought about calling it Warhead. They should’ve. Or even Thunderball II, for that matter) This movie, unlike the others I’ve listed, I’ve actually seen.
I have never rejected to see a movie due to a title. What’s the point in missing out on a fantastic film because the title seems strange (and, of course, it may end up making perfect sense after you’ve seen the film)? It seems silly in the extreme.
It worked nicely as a title for the book, at least.
I’ve never used a title to justify not watching a movie unless I’ve already decided not to go see it.
You’re right; the title sucks. But it was a pretty good movie. I am thinking of a very, very widely acclaimed movie, with a really excellent title, that I could compare it to, but it would be a spoiler.
I was going to skip it because of the title, until I saw the cast — Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, Bruce Willis, Josh Hartnett, and Lucy Liu.
I’m thinking that a more enlightening approach would be, “great movies with terrible titles”, but I expect we’ve already done that. Probably a few times.
My impression is that DCinDC has a taste in movies that sometimes intersects with the Academy’s, but not too often. So perhaps the statement that he would refuse to see a film because it got nominations was an overstatement… more like “if I heard a film got a lot of nominations, that would suggest to me that I probably wouldn’t like it.”
I’m assuming that he wouldn’t refuse to see, say, Casablanca or A Thousand Clowns. But maybe he would. There’s probably no such thing as a film that nobody hates.
I went to see a film with a friend, and there was a poster for the upcoming Harald and Kumar Go To White Castle and he commented that there was no way he would see that. I did and my wife and I laughed our asses off.
I can’t recall a film I have refused to see because of the stupid title. If it bothers me that much, I can get my wife to go to the box office to buy the tickets and close my eyes during the opening credits.
Hot Tub Time Machine. When a movie title tells your suspension of disbelief to take a flying leap, it’s not likely to be something that interests me. I did see parts of it on television and it was kind of entertaining in a stupid kind of way but I wasn’t interested enough to see the whole thing.
Dude Where’s My Car?. Let me guess. Some guys go out on a crazy night and lose a buddy’s car. They’re so hungover the next day that they can’t remember anything, and wacky hijinks ensure when the buddies search for the car. Subplots probably include a romance between owner of said car and some insanely hot girl he meets during the search for it. One of the buddies is a fat guy who is always falling or having stuff fall on him, and one of the buddies (most likely the fat guy but it varies) is revealed to have had sex with another guy, a transvestite, or a farm animal. In the end, everyone finds true love, including the gay/tranny/sheep-humper, they all get out of a nasty jam by pure luck just in the nick of time, and the car is trashed but the buddies fix it and it looks brand new. Amirite or amirite?
You forgot “inadvertently run afoul of the mob/gov’t agents/drug cartels/gangbangers/UFOs/etc.”
That’s the nasty jam they get out of in the nick of time. 
I gotta agree. Terrible title!
Maybe they should have called it Goody Two-Shoes and the Filthy Beast!
I find movie titles like “Bring it On” annoying. It’s generic, forgettable, and meaningless. I’d like to cite other examples, but none are coming to mind. Which I guess is the point. A title like that is something of a turn-off because it suggests that the movie is so bland that they couldn’t think of anything better. That’s certainly not true in the case of Bring it On. (and the line in the movie was “bring it” anyway)
Regarding John Carter: That one really makes no sense. They should have just gone ahead and used “John Carter of Mars.” That’s a much better title. It’s quite evocative. I’ll bet it would have gotten a lot more people in the door.
Plus, if you’re going to title a movie with just a name, it should be something a little more memorable than John Carter. Erin Brockovich is a better title than Mary Reilly.
As far as Snakes on a Plane, well, that’s one of the best titles in moviedom. It’s a perfect little capsule deconstruction of the action movie genre. Come up with a disastrous scenario, add a bankable star, and boom, you got a movie!