Adventureland (2009 - Greg Mottola) - There was just something warm and almost comforting about watching "Adventureland" the first time. Maybe it was all the lovely blurred images of the amusement park's blinking lights from the titles that just pulled me back to my own late teens and early twenties. It won't be my favourite film of the year, but I couldn't wait to get it on DVD and I watched it again the very night I got it. There's a few things that don't play perfectly well towards the end of the film, but I liked the characters so much that I was easily able to forgive it all.
Mansion Of Madness (1973 - Juan Lopez Moctezuma) - The overall hallucinatory feel of this particular adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Feather" is foreshadowed right at the outset by blue and red titles. It's as if we're experiencing someone's actual hallucinations. The film has some great visuals and that off kilter feeling remains for much of it, but it loses a lot of its built up strangeness with long expository sequences.
Scream Blacula Scream (1973 - Bob Kelljan) - Perfect indication of the fun that is to follow. I only wish they had more of those characters that look like they were made with tangrams. I've now seen the original "Blacula" as well and though I liked it, this tops it on all fronts.
Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun (1969 - Robert Parish) - There's nothing overly stunning about this set of titles - except in retrospect looking at all the old technology which at the time may have appeared futuristic. You have to love those banks of lights...The film itself was reasonably solid stuff too. It didn't quite take the idea of a clone Earth (in our same orbit directly opposite us) as far as it could have, but it still ended in an interesting place. And it had terrific looking sets throughout.
5 comments:
Tee hee. You said titular.
Seriously, I love love love when you do this sort of entry. Gorgeous stuff.
Gorgeous indeed. even completely out of context those still look great.
And need I direct anyone to the fabulous ART OF THE TITLE who post high res versions of title sequences?
Some nice choices. I love the titles for Catch Me If You Can. An obvious choice because they're very flashy, but they do look great.
You can't beat a bit of Saul Bass either.
Thanks for the comments gents...
James, sometimes I struggle to spit out a pithy phrase, so I fall back on the visuals...
Kurt, you bet I know The Art Of The Title. What a terrific site. It's in my RSS reader, but I just realized it's not in my sidebar. I'll fix that now...
Dave, I still haven't seen "Catch Me If You Can" (my local video rental outlet - a good shop otherwise - only has it in the butchered 1.33:1 version), but I have seen the titles before online. I want to see them again...
And you're right. You can't beat Saul Bass. Love his work. The one thing that I can't illustrate here is the movement that some of the titles use - Bass as an example - so it limits my options somewhat.
I thought the Scream, Blacula, Scream titles were done by someone American International could afford, with the instructions to make the titles look like Saul Bass' work on Otto Preminger's films.
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