What I Love: Delayed Movie Titles

Movie titles can be an art, in and of themselves. In March, Nerve compiled an admirable list of The Twelve Greatest Opening Credits in Movie History, which included some of my personal favorites, like Do the Right Thing and Dr. Strangelove. Of course, the list cited the work of the two biggest names in title design--Saul Bass, who did some of his best work with Scorsese and Hitchcock (e.g., Vertigo), and Kyle Cooper, who's best known for his collaborations with David Fincher . (Stanley Kubrick must, along with these other directors, be placed in the upper echelon of design collaborators, for his work on Strangelove, The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, etc.)

Sometimes opening credits are great because of impeccable graphic design (like in Catch Me If You Can), or sometimes because they set the perfect tone for the movie that follows (Monty Python and the the Holy Grail). Sometimes the credits are entirely better than what follows (Cooper's Dawn of the Dead [2004]).

There has been a recent mini-trend, however, which I absolutely love, and must acknowledge...

You expect a movie to have titles. You expect to see them, after the start of the movie, within a reasonable length of time. But sometimes a movie will play with that expectation, and make you wait. And wait. Until at some point, you've forgotten you're waiting, and you're simply watching a movie. The story has begun, there's no turning back. And then, BAM-- Credits.

I've got two examples--Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Martin Scorsese's The Departed (above). Both movies wait until the end of the first reel of film (about 20 minutes in) to get to the opening titles. And in both cases, watching them for the first time, it was at the titles when I realized I was watching a masterpiece. It's such a maverick decision to pull the audience out of the action of the (already developing) story, and remind us we're watching a movie--but it also displays the incredible control these directors have over their medium. In a time where it feels like, in Hollywood, everything's been done before, to withhold the credits and delay our systematic pleasure in the routines of even fine cinema--well, it seems audacious.

So, one thing I LOVE... is delayed movie titles.


(Oh, and great end credits, too. But not lousy ones. Like, alas, 2004's Dawn of the Dead remake. You don't get a link for that. Because it's end credits suck.)