The grandpa in Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa is indeed a bad one. He hits on women, stuffs his wife’s corpse in the trunk of his Lincoln, and gets his penis stuck in a soda machine. But does Bad Grandpa need such a Bad Title? The movie’s boilerplate title is of a piece with a recent trend for lame, SEO-friendly titling, but this feels like a particularly egregious example. Hollywood has got to do better than the Bad [Something] title.
Studios release movies titled Bad [Something] for a very specific reason. In the spirit of the film that popularized the trope, 2003’s Bad Santa, Bad [Something] movies always aim for the outré and gonzo. (It’s no surprise that the [Something] is always something we’d otherwise believe, or at least hope, to be good: Santas, Grandpas, Lieutenants.) By 2009, the conceit had reached the book world. With the 2011 release of Bad Teacherand Horrible Bosses—just two weeks apart from each other!—the trend reached an apogee, and I’d hoped the lukewarm response to those movies might end it entirely. But here we are two years later with Bad Grandpa, which might as well be calledPlaceholder Title. The titles are reductive, disposable. This is not the stuff of which enduring classics are made.
No comments:
Post a Comment