Remember when movies announced themselves with fanfares and elaborate opening credits? In the studio era, names were projected onto velvet curtains, or books opened to reveal pages packed with stars and screenwriters. In the 1960s, it was animated art-titles and jazz — think the Pink Panther leaving paw-prints on the actors’ names.
Fast forward to perhaps this decade’s defining motion picture event — Avatar — and there are no opening credits at all. Not even a title before the action starts.
Credit sequences are becoming something of a lost art in today’s cinema. Hot desert sands for Prince of Persia, phallic New York skyscrapers for Sex and the City 2 — this paltry level of creativity is what we’ve gotten used to. When a picture — even one as bad as The Back-up Plan — does something a little different, you think the film is actually going to be clever. The Back-up Plan is about a woman desperate to get pregnant, and starts with an animated Jennifer Lopez wandering through a city where everything reminds her of babies: streetscapes made of building blocks, a traffic cop whose whistle morphs into a pacifier, and so on.
The sequence swiftly establishes her mind-set without dialogue — and when the dialogue starts, you understand why that was smart. The idea here was a throwback to those openings from 1950s comedies, where, say, Doris Day and Rock Hudson threw pillows at their own names to wipe them off the screen at the beginning of Pillow Talk.
This was pure, but artful, mood-setting — a few seconds to let the audience forget the struggle it had parking and give the movie a bit of a running start. In that respect, the most effective title sequence of this summer — one of the coolest in years, actually — is for the thriller Splice, about scientists who add human DNA to a creature they’ve created from random genetic material in a lab.