The best and worst annoyingly long movie titles

You’d think that there would not be any good “annoyingly long movie titles.” The very name discounts the possibility of them being good.

But I think it’s possible for something to be annoyingly long and still good, or at least, still funny.

Today I hope to throw some words at the topic of annoyingly long movie titles, inspired by the upcoming release of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which is decidedly an example of the latter. As in, the worst.

Come on, it’s just Birds of Prey, screw all that other noise. And most movie marquees around the country and the world will, indeed, be screwing all that other noise. You will not see the full title of this movie on any movie marquee in the world. But you will see it on every poster for the movie, albeit in significantly smaller type, which means some idiot in the marketing department at the studio is still trying to make And the Fantabulous Emancipation (breath) of One Harley Quinn happen.

But not every annoyingly long title is And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Maybe it’s only because I really liked the movie, naming it my #1 movie of 2014 and one of the top 25 of the last decade, but this new title reminds me most of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), a title for which I developed a limited fondness. As they are both, broadly, superhero movies, I even feel like Harley Quinn (I’m not writing that damn thing out again) is borrowing inspiration from Birdman. Both also seem to have pretentious ambitions, which again, I accept because the movie really worked for me in Birdman’s case.

Of course, probably the best example of the annoyingly long movie title is the one that does so specifically for the purposes of humor. Well, you might argue that most annoyingly long movie titles are done for humor, as otherwise you’d just switch to something more palatable. But there are certainly degrees to which the humor does or does not work.

Take, for example, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat’s broken, some might say strangled, English was one of the biggest jokes about the character, so a title that is grammatically awkward, unduly worshipful of the man’s home country, and also gets at an obsession with America and its pop culture, is like killing three birds with one stone. I’ve made it a point of pride that I can roll off this title without any errors, when asked. (Because that particular scenario arrives just about every day.)

But long character-based titles don’t work just because it’s a somewhat beloved character. Sometimes they just try our patience. A couple years ago, the movie with the longest title on my whole movie list came out. It was called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. So Tony Clifton may not be beloved, but Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman may both be, to varying degrees. But this title pretty much just made me smack my forehead. Suffice it to say that I definitely had to look up the correct wording just now.

The movie whose title is long just to make fun of the idea of long titles is also usually a bust. The first movie I’m discussing today that I haven’t seen is a prime example of that. That would be Don’t be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Now that I’ve written it out, I think the title is not trying to make fun of the idea of long titles so much as it is being silly by trying to literally string together about four different titles. At least it’s better than Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13^th. There’s one more of these titles that is like twice this length but I’m having trouble tracking it down.

My favorite purely innocent long title is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. I suppose there is something cheeky about this – they could have figured out a simpler title if they’d wanted to – but the title does do an admirable job of describing what the movie is about, as it is about a provincial debate in the Welsh countryside about whether a local elevated surface is better described as a hill or a mountain. For a while, this was my favorite movie title to bring up in joke circumstances, when I was looking for something awkward to encapsulate a small, idiosyncratic non-blockbuster.

Supplanting The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain as my go-to random long title was Jeanne Dielmann, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is not an easy choice as I always have to look up the exact wording, but is fun anyway. As this is an arthouse film with a very serious demeanor, this title exists to capture the everyday humdrum quality of a person’s life by naming the movie after her street address, not to be whimsical in any way, shape or form.

It’s probably worth including a subsection in this post about earnest documentaries with long subtitles, like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief or If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front or Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, but I don’t know that their length is “annoying.” Or if it is, it’s only annoying because it sounds more like the name of a graduate thesis than a movie.

I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of movies whose titles test our patience and don’t always reward us, but I can’t end this discussion without mentioning probably the actual best movie to be guilty of a thing like this, which is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. If Stanley Kubrick did it, there has to be some merit there, right?

As for this new movie coming out, I think the main things that annoy me about the title are that it a) makes up a word, b) uses the word “one” as though pretending we don’t know who Harley Quinn is, and c) suggests that the movie is entirely about the fact that she has been “emancipated” from her relationship with the Joker, or at least so it would appear.

I think I’ve had enough references to the Joker for a couple years, thank you very much.

Behind the scenes with weird guys

You can't plan things like this.

The last two movies I saw -- because one was released on Thursday night, and because the other had been available for a few weeks on Netflix and was really starting to itch at my viewing desires -- were The Disaster Artist and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond - Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. (And that's the last time in this piece I will write out the full title, I promise you.)

Both films happen to be a behind-the-scenes look at the filming of a movie whose production was affected -- some might say poisoned -- by the antics of a highly eccentric personality. In one, the guy couldn't help doing it -- he was just playing himself, as he always had. In the other, one highly eccentric personality was channeling another highly eccentric personality, doing it purposefully in pursuit of what he perceived to be some very specific brand of the comedic sublime.

Both films are funny, instructive examinations of these particular minds, and I enjoyed both quite a bit, though stopped short of loving either.

I came closer to loving The Disaster Artist. Not only does James Franco nail Tommy Wiseau and explore in a more serious manner the things that have been the comedic objects of much of his work (latent homosexuality among them), but the film has a ton of heart. As much as it considers Wiseau an oddball and even leans into that, it also considers his optimism and can-do spirit the perfect antidote to Hollywood cynicism. The Room was a singularly disastrous film but it was also the result of a type of purity of impulse that we usually do not see in the movies.

Jim & Andy is a fascinating document, to be sure, but I'm not sure it gets much beyond that (pun not intended). It considers how far Jim Carrey went in trying to channel dada comic Andy Kaufman, not only staying in character as Kaufman even after Milos Forman called "cut!" on Man on the Moon, but also playing Kaufman's alter ego, Tony Clifton, such that the actual "Jim Carrey" was almost never present. A cameraman shot all this behind the scenes footage and it has been sitting in the vaults for 20 years. Carrey gives modern-day interviews recalling his thinking at the time, impressive beard and all.

Both films provide a very interesting examination of what happens when the cameras aren't rolling. To be sure, they are not the first films to do this -- there's a whole interesting subgenre of films which show us what actually happened on the sets of movies we love. Few of them are quite so focused on the way a single man can hijack the production, while also shaping it into the movie we love as a result.

For those who love The Room, they only love it because Wiseau was unfailingly who he was and would not listen to well-intentioned advice. In one great example, Franco's Wiseau either refuses to listen to the suggestions of the first AD (Seth Rogen), or simply has a disconnect between hearing the advice and acting on it, as he proves incapable of filming a take in which his character does not laugh as a reaction to a story about a woman being physically abused by her boyfriend. Exasperated, Rogen's character just gives up so they can move on to the next shot. It's moments of pure and unspoiled cluelessness like this that make The Room sing. Had Wiseau had an ounce more common sense, he would have made a bad movie that no one saw. Instead, he made a bad movie that everyone saw.

Less of what Carrey was doing behind the scenes on the set of Man on the Moon is directly visible on screen. As he terrorized fellow actors (most notably the wrestler Jerry Lawler, playing himself, with whom Kaufman had a real-life mostly fake rivalry), he drove many of them to the brink of quitting the project. You get little bits of the frustration of people like Judd Hirsch and Danny DeVito. You'd have no way of really knowing that by watching the movie, except that it does feel like an uncanny embodiment of Kaufman, and if Carrey had just been switching back and forth between "Jim Carrey" and "Andy Kaufman," who knows if such a transcendent performance would have emerged. There's a telling recollection by Carrey in one of the modern interviews about how Forman felt about it. According to Carrey, Forman called him one night, out of ideas about how to regain control of his actor and bring the production in line. When Carrey threw him a lifeline and volunteered to "fire" both Kaufman and Clifton and then to do impersonations of them, Forman seemed to recognize the value of Carrey's process and rejected the idea. "I don't want it to stop," Forman allegedly told Carrey. "I just wanted to speak to Jim."

In a strange way, director Chris Smith seems to be the link between these two films. Smith, the director of Jim & Andy, was also the director of a documentary classic called American Movie. Like The Disaster Artist, that was also a movie about a Wiseau-like dreamer -- who also happened to have a long mane of black hair -- using his own resources to try to make a film. Mark Borchardt had much more meager and much less mysteriously sourced finances than Wiseau -- he borrowed much of the money from a senile uncle -- but it also cost him a lot less to make his horror short Coven (which I still have not seen, unfortunately). But in his own way he was probably just as delusional as Wiseau ... with, in some respects, an equally happy outcome. The film has turned Borchardt into a cult figure in horror and independent film communities, while Wiseau has eventually turned a profit on the $6 million he spent on The Room, though no one apparently still knows where he got the money to finance the project originally.

I saw The Room four years ago just before leaving Los Angeles, but it's been nearly those 20 years since my viewing of Man on the Moon. I'm curious to watch both again to see if I can see what I now know about these films creeping in from the corners of the frame.