Headlines, though, provide the perfect opportunity for anyone to summon their latent pun-maker, as you are looking for something with a modicum of cleverness that draws the reader in. I do it all the time on ReelGood.
The same logic applies, in theory, to titles. I don't know that you would call them puns, but you would definitely call them plays on words. Take the James Bond movie title The Spy Who Loved Me. It has already been parodied twice through plays on words, in the Austin Powers movie The Spy Who Shagged Me, and also in the forgettable spy comedy The Spy Who Dumped Me a few years ago. Neither of those movies might have been great (I have not seen the original), but in both cases I appreciate the title.
As I was finally watching Palm Springs last night -- more on the delay in a minute -- I couldn't help thinking that a better title would have been Palm Springs Eternal.
Palm Springs spoilers from here on out. Be warned.
The purpose of a good pun is not only to note a linguistic similarity between the part of the familiar phrasing you're replacing and the words you're using to replace it, most often a rhyme. It's also to underscore something about a theme you are exploring, one that's either inherent to the original phrase or illuminates a new scenario to which you are applying your newly created phase.
Both things are accomplished with the title Palm Springs Eternal.
Of course, the familiar phrase here is "hope springs eternal." There's an additional level of linguistic cleverness going on here, as "springs" is a verb in the original usage but a noun in Palm Springs Eternal.
But you've also got thematic cleverness. And now we get to the spoilers, if you did not heed my original warning.
Palm Springs is about first one character -- actually, two, but the second one is off screen most of the time -- and then a second (third) who joins him, who are trapped in a time loop. They are repeating the wedding day of the first one's girlfriend's friend, and the second/third one's sister. (The characters are played by Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti and, the one who is only in it periodically, J.K. Simmons.)
Even at the start of the movie, Samberg has already been in this time loop for -- years, maybe? -- and we're really just joining him at the time that Milioti joins him. But it soon begins to be years for her too, with no prospect in sight of it ending.
Hence, "eternal."
Someone, somewhere, likely considered it. After all, naming a movie after its location is a bit like throwing your hands up in the air and giving up. It seems like a last resort.
Whoever that was rejected it, though, because maybe puns don't play that well in movie titles either. Examples are not immediately coming to mind, but I'm sure I've groaned at as many over the years as I've loved. Maybe puns need to stick to headlines.
As for finally getting to see Palm Springs, which had been trapped on inaccessible Hulu (here in Australia anyway), it looks like Amazon and Hulu may have some kind of partnership, at least internationally. It says "Hulu presents" but then it's playing on my Amazon Prime. This strikes me as unexpected, at least, as I would assume the two were mortal enemies, both kind of trying to be the #2 streamer after Netflix.
Maybe it's a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing.
I did really like the movie. I'm kind of tired of these variations on Groundhog Day, which come along about once a year nowadays, but indeed, what others have said about it doing enough different with the concept turned out to be true.
We projected it on the sliding doors of our wardrobe in our Phillip Island hotel. It was the only suitable place to do it while still sitting comfortably in our bed. That meant there was a line down the middle of the picture demarcating the difference in depth between the two sliding doors, which distorted the image slightly in that one spot. But it was easy enough to adapt to -- and perhaps appropriate in a movie about a highly distorted version of reality.
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