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McCrutchy wrote: Sun Aug 16, 2026 12:55 am Anthony Newley's Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? (1969), could actually be simultaneously good, bad and the "greatest" title ever, depending on how you define the last. As far as I can tell, it has never legally been on video.

One of the greatest ego trips to ever be financed by a major studio. It also shamelessly steals from multiple Fellini films

I've always been curious about the title of Robert Hossein's film Toi, le venin, which has the tawdry English
title of Nude in a White Car (presumably to cash in on the...

Spoiler

three seconds of nudity in the film.

I was wondering if the French title is perhaps a turn of phrase. I know that venin can alternatively mean poison
or spite so I wasn't sure.

It’s poison, a line from the source novel

Je suis peut-etre la vipere, en tout cas c'est toi le venin...

(I may be the viper, but you are the venom…)

BoltzmannBrain wrote: Sat Aug 15, 2026 2:46 pm I dislike short, extremely basic and bland movie titles like Father, or Mother, or Boy, House, Air, Life, Moon, Water, It, Good, Old, Michael, Patrick, The Woman, The Hand, The Accountant, The Room, The Monster, The Car, The Box, The Paper, The Road, etc. They feel like placeholder titles that were meant to exist only until the filmmakers could come up with something better, but because nobody had any good ideas the placeholder title stayed as the final title. They tell of a severe lack of imagination and make me think that the film's screenplay is probably equally empty and uninspired.

I feel the same. Especially with 'The ....' titles, where the subject is an everyday thing (unlike The Shining for example). Once a film earns its place the perception of those title changes completely, Sidney Lumet has a string of examples - The Verdict, The Offence, The Hill - all powerhouses, where mention of them vividly evokes for me the settings and the characters, but as a starting point, as a marketing hook, those titles are piss weak.
Paul Greengrass has a film coming out about the 14th century peasant revolt in England, which is a rare opportunity, and a very rarified and evocative setting, not to mention drama-scape, and yet they settled on 'The Uprising'?! A title that carries not one iota of the character of the era.