On top of the fact that it is 58 characters long the title Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood isn’t even 1/8 as funny as the Wayans brothers would like you to think it is. Actually, it is just as stupid as just about every film these douches have made. When the title is a joke, and an unfunny one at that, what is an audience supposed to expect from the film itself?
Building on Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood we come to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, a film that was killed not only by Warner Bros’ lack of marketing but by an awful name. Yeah, I get it, the film is just as much (if not more) about Robert Ford than it is Jesse James, but that doesn’t mean the title needs to directly reflect the plot in every way, The Assassination of Jesse James would have been just fine.
On top of that I must complain about the recent trend in titles that have their own sentence structure. Why all the long titles Hollywood? Let’s see, we have: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (and its two sequels), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Night at the Museum 2: Escape From the Smithsonian. These massive titles are a movie journalist’s nightmare.
This next complaint has as much to do with Tyler Perry and his ego driven titles as much as it has to do with director’s names appearing before their movie titles more and more often now days. It’s a trend I believe that came in vogue as M. Night Shyamalan plastered his name all over his films, but unlike Perry you never saw M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water and Night has a huge ego… I wonder how Tyler Perry can fit his into a room. Whether it is Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion, Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?, Tyler Perry’s Daddy’s Little Girls or Tyler Perry’s Meet the Browns, it’s ego driven mania at its most blatant (and annoying).
I interviewed David O. Russell for I ♥ Huckabees and when I asked him why the heart was in the title he said, “For one thing because I like having a heart in the title, I like a picture of a heart and for another I like anything that shakes up your stable way of using your brain or your language. Third, if it annoys people I don’t really care.” I guess we should ask David O. Russell if he cares about directing feature films, because since the flop that was I ♥ Huckabees he hasn’t directed a film in over three years. Perhaps the sequel could be I (Middle Finger) Huckabees… at least the posters would be interesting.
