Something I’m surprisingly picky about are my opening credits. Sure, you could spends five bucks and put white letters on black and spell them out one at a time, but then you’d have to deal with the guilt of driving hundreds of people to the bottle while they watched them.
Opening Credits can be done so differently, that I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw some sort of award for “Best Opening Sequence” sneaking into one of the myriad of useless award ceremonies out there…(mumblemumble-mtv-mumblemumble) because it’s practically a whole art in and of itself.
David Fincher and Tim Burton are fantastic opening credits guys, add the Coen Borthers to that one after seeing Intolerable Cruelty.
Sometimes they’re shown on cards while an opening scene is developing like Requiem for a Dream.
Or Perhaps you’re shown a Kick-in-the-face action sequence with the final explosion kick-starting the credits like in The Rundown.
My personal favourite are themed credit openings, which capture the essence of the movie, but don’t necessarily hold essential parts of the story – Like Seven or Stigmata (Stigmata, I realize, sucked completely, but the opening credits were deadly.)
And then, next on my favourite list is when the opening credits are skipped completely – One of the few solid qualities of Independence Day.
Hollow-Man, besides redefining my future use of the word “Crap-tacular”, had absolutely brutal opening credits, so did Wesley Snipes’ “Art of War”. I’ve seen these movies once. YEARS ago. Never to be watched again, and the opening credits were SO BAD, I still remember their quality of Suck.
I’m sure there’s a billion more yawn-drawing opening credits out there.. in fact too many to mention is likely. Maybe if they DID make an award for them, it’d help, but then again, they already have an award for Best Picture and ‘Young Einsein’ still got made. Who knows.
