Good Movies, Bad Titles Part 1: GREEN ROOM and THE IRISHMAN

   No one, lately, has put as much effort into christening their work like S. Craig Zahler has. Bone Tomahawk, Brawl In Cell Block 99, and Dragged Across Concrete are all vivid, sticky handles. But his next movie has a fucking doozy of a title: Hug Chickenpenny: The Panegyric Of An Anomalous Child. He's going too far with that one but he's 3-for-3 so I'm excited for it regardless of that tryhard-ass name. In fact, my favorite movie of the 2010s has this problem.

I
Just like The Ain't Rights being billed as The Aren't Rights, Green Room's name is all wrong.

    I love, love, love this movie but I hate, hate, hate this title. Like, I get it, Saulnier is following Blue Ruin with another color title but it's nowhere near as memorable as BLUE RUIN. The Green Room is where you hang out and chill, which fits the hangout structure and that's where they spend most of their time. That's where it starts and stops; not much thought went into it. It's a boring, uninspired, weak title.

An Alternative: FLEISCHWOLF

  "It's fucking hard, man" and it would grab my attention more than Green Room does. Considering it translates, from German, to MEAT GRINDER, is fittingly brutal. Not to mention it's the Cowcatcher song that meant Emily's freedom. Then again, she was killed to Toxic Evolution, but that would be a bit much.

II

  The Irishman is unfortunate because it's a fucking great movie held back by avoidably terrible decisions. It's got a great script, stellar performances, and some of Marty and Thelma's best work together. But there's that baffling digital de-aging of the actors. It's not even bad de-aging because it never looks good. With Doctor Sleep, which came out the same year, Mike Flanagan made the wise decision to just recast the actors from The Shining and it completely works. Scorsese should have done the same; Jon Bernthal is a ringer for young DeNiro and he's just as good, too. Without those hideous synthetic faces, Irishman would be one of my top 20 of the decade, easily. So the title isn't the only thing working against it but I figured, while I'm bitching, I might as well get another word in.

  It's just such a -nothing- title to me; too small, too bite-sized, and uninteresting. I've actually forgotten it before. The thing about it, and this inspired the whole post, is how the title never appears until the very end. But what does appear, early on, is the title of the book it's based on. Thelma cuts it in between shots of the road and every time I see it I just pretend this isn't called The Irishman.
 

An Alternative: I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES

  This is an interesting, evocative, unforgettable title  - Charles Brandt knew that. Scorsese didn't want it to go to waste so he made good use of it but not the best use of it. Then again, if you recall DeNiro's pixelated face, Scorsese wasn't making the best decisions.