Apple has dumb ideas about the name of Gran Turismo

Last night I got through a little more than half of Neill Blomkamp's Gran Turismo. That's been a bit of a pattern the last few weekends. Exhausted from the day, start watching a movie at close to ten o'clock and then take a loooong nap in the middle. Then wake up around 1 and have the good sense not to try to watch the remaining hour of the movie before going to bed. I mean, the next day is going to involve more buying of presents.

I haven't watched enough of the movie to tell you what I ultimately thought of it, but I have watched enough of the movie to laugh about what Apple thinks this movie is called.

On my iTunes rental, I noticed the full title was Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story.

Oh brother.

Is this an Apple thing? The last time I wrote a post about the silly titles Apple gives movies was when I told you I refused to call the Michael J. Fox documentary by its complete title Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. I'm still at Still on that one.

Not all instances of title lengthening are ones I disregard. I was all in on Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. It was just weird enough that I allowed it.

But the Based on a True Story part of Gran Turismo is come by dishonestly.

When the title flashes up on screen, it's only Gran Turismo. About five seconds later, you get in block letters: "BASED ON A TRUE STORY." Which is a pretty standard disclaimer -- is disclaimer the right word? -- at the start of a movie.

Why someone decided to incorporate this into the proper title, I have no idea. To distinguish the movie from the Playstation game on which it was based, I guess? But even in the poster above, you can see it is a tagline more than part of the title. 

As usual in these cases, I go to IMDB and Letterboxd to get a final ruling. Fortunately, they're both with me on this one. No Based on a True Story to be found in either title. 

They do both go with the longer title of Still, so I guess maybe I need to re-think that one.

Taking a stand on Still

When a movie title appears differently in different places, I always think a good rule of thumb in determining what is "correct" is: How does it actually appear on screen in the movie?

There's little doubt, by that standard, that Davis Guggenheim's new film about Michael J. Fox is called Still. The title appears during the opening and closing credits, possibly twice in the closing credits, and in each instance appears as exactly that one five-letter word.

However, AppleTV+ wants to call the movie Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. And IMDB and Letterbox'd have followed suit, Letterbox'd even capitalizing all the letters in STILL for some unknown reason. (See this post.)

Way to take a profound and thought-provoking title and render it clumsy, busy and needlessly explanatory.

See, Still doesn't just refer to the condition for which Fox is always striving, to keep the tremors of his Parkinson's at bay. It has a secondary meaning of him "still" being here, a reminder that he's alive, and sort of well, and with a loving family, even after being mostly out of the public eye for the past 25 years.

With the subtitle, it's just a display of marketing insecurity. Will people know this is a movie about Michael J. Fox if we don't put it in the title?

Yeah, if you include his picture with all the promotional materials, they will. 

In this case -- at least for now -- I'm going with the shorter and more poetic Still. I'm sure it's what Davis Guggenheim and Michael J. Fox wanted the movie to be called. Just look at the way they listed the title in their finished film.

Which is a really good one. It's not so different from the similar Val Kilmer film Val a few years ago, but I think I might like Guggenheim's choices even more here, telling the story of Fox's life using relevant bits of footage from his films and TV shows. It makes for a really lively document, one with a lot of forward momentum. Plus there's the fact that Fox plays a larger role in my personal cinematic history than Kilmer does, starring as he does in my second favorite film of all time, Back to the Future.

If the condition of stillness is elusive for Fox, the least we can do is allow him to achieve it in the title of the film about him.