titles better than the movie?

Its a fairly frequent happenings for me to get to the end of a flick bleary-eyed and think to myself, "Wow, that sucked balls.... but fuck me, the opening titles were great" Perhaps its just crazies like me who think such things but opening titles can be a real work of art.

They can forshadow the events of a film a la the fun Spielberg/DiCaprio flick Catch Me If You Can



Or even fill you in on a prequel, thankyou Spiderman 2



And sometimes they simply outshine the crap that comes afterwards. If you've ever seen the steaming pile of catshit that is Catwoman you'll know what I'm talking about. I can't quite bring myself to soil the blog with Catwomn, but you can watch the decent opening titles here.

Part of the reason why opening titles can stand out so much is that they're usually directed by an entirely seperate person to the movie director. And easily, one of the most famous titles director's at the moment is an Australian-born filmmaker named Kyle Cooper. He did the Spiderman 2 titles above. In Mission Impossible he brilliantly played the famous tv titles off the events of the movie. Cooper even got to stroll down a super-iconic memory lane with Superman Returns, thus reinvigorating the majestic titles from the original Superman movie. 

But the film that really put him on the map was a lil' ole movie called Seven. 

All of the the images, fonts and music are so menacingly jagged & sharp - it completely immerses you in this vicious world.  The brilliant thing about Cooper is that every sequence always embeds itself as a totally unique yet vital part of the movie. Not only does each sequence invite you into the headspace of a film, they all work as mini-movies unto themselves.

I think one of my favourite recent opening titles Cooper has done was for the recent zombie-remake Dawn of the Dead, and the opening titles speed you through the zombie invasion with cut-up of images of real life newsfootage of riots and massacres, a Johnny Cash track and titles being made from blood. It's unnervingly cheerful, unflinchingly gory and most importantly... it screams The End of the World

Of course there are literally hundreds of brilliant opening titles and titles directors. I seriously recommend classic director is Saul Bass, but he's worthy of his own  blog post.  Channel 4 and OneDotZero produced an excellent documentary on Kyle Cooper which you can find here: (Part 1 , Part 2)

If you love other opening titles lemme know below. Also, fans should check out the excellent Art of Titles blog. 

Appropriately enough,  lemme leave you with some brilliant Closing Credits from the severely underrated flick Lemony Snickets Series of Unfortunate Events. The animation by Jamie Caliri is beautiful and the music is by Thomas Newman (American Beauty, Six Feet Under)