Top 7 Movie Title Sequences

I love title sequences.  The opening title sequence sets the expectation for a movie.  And, as any marketer knows, managing expectations is the key to customer satisfaction.  The title sequence hooks us, gets us ready to suspend disbelief and enter into the story.  It sets the tone and hints at what’s going to happen.  It has become an art in its own right. The following are my personal favorites.  I’ll start with Saul Bass’s famously pioneering title sequence from North by Northwest.  Simple and effective, it’s one of Bass’ most famous sequences.

Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb”, starring Peter Sellers, George C. Scott and Sterling Hayden.  The title sequence design by Pablo Ferro.  It is dreamy, surreal and memorable. It’s funny that I don’t remember a lot about the movie, but I remember this title sequence vividly.

SE7VEN, directed by the master of weird, David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow.  This sequence uses creepy, slightly disorienting closeups and threatening music to awesome effect.

James Bond Casino Royale.  Just awesome use of the playing card themes.

Thank You For Smoking.  This is one of my all time favorite title sequences.  The song is perfect and it’s a great use of object labels as titles.

Eurotrip has to be included. Though not the best movie, it’s opening title sequence is gold.

And finally, the one and only Napoleon Dynamite.  The use of food is pathetic and funny and sets the tone perfectly for the weird, coming of age American comedy. Why type when you can use food?

If I missed any really good ones, let us know in the comments.  I’m sure I haven’t seen the best title sequence out there.  Maybe I’ll change this post to “Top 10 Movie Title Sequences” if there is a “must see.”

Torrents – friend or foe to whom?

Bit torrents. The easiest way to get the latest movie. Even before it’s released. Are pirates an essential part of a capitalist system?

“Torrent freak, a dedicated torrent blog, unsurprisingly places The Dark Knight, the highest grossing film of 2008 with over a billion dollars taken at the box office, as the most downloaded torrent with over seven million downloads. With these levels of illegal downloads occurring it’s no surprise to find that Warner Brothers, along with MGM, Colombia Pictures Industries, 20th Century Fox, Sony BMG, Universal and EMI took a stand against one of the largest torrent search engines  Pirate Bay (a Swedish site).” (from IABUK)

Does there have to be a degree of creative destruction to usher in better technology?  Whatever happens, the distribution methods are changing rapidly.   Maybe Torrent Freak’s April Fool’s news that WB bought Pirate Bay for a massive sum is not very far from future truth.

So, my questions, related to my previous post on bit torrent: is movie piracy a crime to be punished or an inevitable new form of distribution which should be embraced.  If you can’t beat them, join them?

And, a recent podcast on TWIT (This Week in Tech) was bemoaning the plans Time Warner is rolling out for metered broadband… charging for broadband internet usage by the gigabyte, instead of by the month. Is this a clever attempt to reap some benefit from movie piracy?

There is going to be an interesting forum on the future of media in Madrid for Universidad de Navarra students and alumni on May 5th.  I wonder if we’ll touch on the film piracy subject.

Questions?  I’ve got plenty more.  Thoughts?

INSPIRATION: Perfect Grey

Donnie Darko: what a weird movie, huh?  It’s uncomfortable to reflect on the strange sympathies we discover through that film.  I really appreciate what you said about the greyness of good/evil.  I thought the other day that maybe the best stories are the ones that bring you to the Perfect Gray: at some moment, the story disrupts the comfort of a viewer’s moral judgment.  Because that’s life, it’s where we live.  Millions of people have millions of opposing values, but we all want the exact same thing: happiness.

The way this can play out in a narrative is that we can be transported to a perfect blend of opposing values.  This can take place within an individual, or between an embodied protagonist and an antagonist.  Sometimes the Perfect Gray is bypassed by a violent transportation from black to white  or vise versa (remember the shocking “she’s my daughter AND my sister!” from Chinatown, or John’s example from Donnie Darko).  What’s-his-name calls this the Gap, a moral side-swipe.  I like the dramatic aspect of that technique too, and maybe it’s more cinematic.  But something about the subtlety of gray is very alluring to me.

Ultimately, though, there must be a moment of satisfaction where the audience comes to an educated conclusion.  Stories are meant to have meaning.  They are not purely mirrors of society.  They are reflections filtered through the lense of an artist, and evermore shall be.  Human objectivity is a tantalizing myth.

My two cents,

~Jacob