An incomplete history of Michael Giacchino's awful cue title puns

I ruddy love Michael Giacchino. Not as much as I ruddy love John Williams, John Barry, Hans Zimmer, Bernard Herrmann, Danny Elfman or David Arnold, but Giacchino can sleep soundly knowing that he's probably tucked away somewhere in The Incredible Suit's top ten film score composers, like, ever. His music is by turns cock-tinglingly thrilling and heartbreakingly lovely, and I fully expect him to take over Star Wars duties once John Williams forgets where he left his baton.

All that said, Michael Giacchino is a menace to the English language. His propensity for naming his cues with some of the world's worst puns is tantamount to wurder (word murder, yeah?), and now he's committed multiple punnicide with his Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes score. Have a look at these, if your eyes can take it:

"Gibbon take". "GIBBON TAKE".

Giacchino has been at this for years, and as much as I love him, it's time to expose his crimes. Stand by to cringe your face off because most of what follows, while in no way exhaustive, is certainly exhausting.

Giacchino started small with a couple of minor puns in his first major feature score: Lava In The Afternoon, which refers to Mr Incredible's volcano-based meeting with femme fatale Mirage, and Lithe Or Death, a nod to Mrs Incredible's loose-limbed bendiness. The Incredits seems innocuous enough, but even the most notorious serial killers begin by pulling the legs off spiders, and this was a mere hint of what was to come.

Michael Giacchino went literally insane with the puns for his cues for JJ Abrams' equally mad TV series, shoehorning character names into random phrases like a man being paid per homophone. Unforgivable punnery over six seasons of Lost include Getting Ethan, Thinking Clairely (ugh), Booneral, Shannonigans, Kate's Motel, Claire-a Culpa (seriously?), Heart Of Thawyer (what?), Jintimidating Bernard, All Jack-ed Up, Benundrum, Nadia On Your Life, Of Mice And Ben, Keamy Away From Him, Helen Of Joy, None The Richard and Hugo Reyes Of Light.

Giacchino reseved a special place in pun hell for Terry O'Quinn's John Locke though, working overtime on the likes of Crocodile Locke, Locke'd Out Again, Through The Locke-ing Glass, Locke-ing Horns, Locke-about and Locke At It This Way. People have been LOCK-ED AWAY for less, hahaha kill me.

Giacchino gave us a triple whammy in J-Jabs' 2006 Cruiseathon: Helluvacopter Chase and Shang Way High (because Ethan Hunt's on a Shanghai rooftop, yeah?) are pretty bad, but I do have some grudging admiration for The Chutist, combining as it does Hunt's joint loves of firing guns and parachuting.

Probably the raciest pun ever seen in a score for an animated film popped up with Ratatouille's Kiss And Vinegar, while Granny Get Your Gun and Heist To See You were mere appetisers for the truly atrocious main course that is End Creditouilles. Jesus.

Giacchino's terrific Star Trek score may be the work of a genius, but that genius is evil. For all the musical wonder and fairly mild punnery of Enterprising Young Men, it doesn't cancel out the horror of Hangar Management or Matter? I Barely Know Her!. And if you thought one play on the words "Nero" and "near" wasn't enough, you're in luck: just for you, Giacchino squirts out Nero Sighted and Nero Death Experience.

There's a bird in Up called Kevin. He has a beak. Therefore: Kevin Beak'n. Not sure if this counts as a step in Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon.

Swamp And Circumstance is as bad as we've been led to expect, but Pterodactyl Ptemper Ptantrum is something else. I think it might actually be genius but I suspect not.

Although GIacchino only composed a couple of cues for Fringe, his fingerprints are all over some of the other cue titles. The name of the series' supernatural location Reiden Lake was used to replace the word "riding" TWICE, with Reiden Out The Storm and Reiden Out To Madness. On a particularly bad day, Giacchino also apparently came up with Connecting The Fringe-cidents. And yet until now, nobody has ever investigated his own paronomasial activity.

As upsetting as My Heart Goes Vroom, Towkyo Takeout and Mater Of Disguise are, they're still not as woeful as the film to which they belong. And when all's said and done, The Turbomater is actually a little bit brilliant.

Location-based double entendres are the order of the day here: Give Her My Budapest, Kremlin With Anticipation, From Russia With Shove and Mumbai's The Word allow Giacchino to go global with his gobbledegook. He didn't forget those character-based puns though: Moreau Trouble Than She's Worth, Eye Of The Wistrom and Launch Is On Hendricks are all as forgettable as the characters on which they're based.

With no less than THREE puns based on John Carter's nemeses the Therns, Giacchino scores a hat-trick of horror with A Thern For The Worse, A Thern Warning and Thernabout. Fortunately he Therns it all around with the quite excellent Thark Side Of Barsoom, so I'll pardon him on this occasion.

Despite being set in space, we're brought back to Earth with a bump for a bunch of half-hearted lulz in the over-abused sequel: Meld-merized, The Kronos Wartet, Earthbound And Down, Warp Core Values and Buying The Space Farm all seem like a cry for help from a spent man. Only Brigadoom shines through the darkness, but by then it's too late.

Giacchino graced this Halloween TV special with some fine tunes, but then went and called some of them Motel Me A Scary Story, I've Got A Bag Feeling About This and Iguana Be Kidding Me. Truly terrifying.

*

With the evidence thus laid out, it seems only right that Michael Giacchino should be forced into pun-silence for the rest of his career. Fortunately for him there are mitigating circumstances, which are that all of these cues, no matter how appallingly-named, are quite, quite brilliant. The defendant shall walk free, but he should know that for a very long time he'll be on pun probation. Punbation. Proba-pun. Propuntion? That'll do.

Pigeon Impossible / Alma

Pixar films are great, I think we can all agree on that. If we can't then it's no wonder there's so much war and violence in the world. CGI animated films by other studios, however, are less good. Dreamworks' Shrek and Shrek 2 are fine, but Madagascar? Happy Feet? Ice Age? They're like Tesco's Frosted Flakes to Pixar's Frosties.

I don't know why this is. There are obscenely skilled animators out there making great short films that could be employed by someone other than Pixar. I don't know, maybe they'll only work for Pixar and would rather live in a hovel eating Tesco Frosted Flakes than work for anyone else.

Man, I'm hungry.

Anyway. To illustrate my point, here's Pigeon: Impossible, a short made by the freakishly talented Lucas Martell. It's so Pixary it could have a cameo by John Ratzenberger, especially with its The Incredibles-esque music. It took Martell five years to make, so you'd better appreciate it.



Whereas Pigeon: Impossible could happily park itself before a feature-length "kids' film" like Toy Story or Up, Alma is a different teapot of turbot altogether. It's brilliant, beautiful and, well, I won't tell you what else it is. Watch it a second time knowing what you know and it's a completely different experience.



Alma was made by Spanish animator Rodrigo Blaas, which is probably the best name of anyone ever.

There are loads more great shorts like this out there being made by people who aren't Pixar or Dreamworks. The Incredible Suit supports them in their efforts (as long as they're good, no timewasters please) and wishes them well in the future. Seek them out why don't you, there's nothing else to do on a miserable Friday afternoon except watch Diagnosis Murder. Amanda's boyfriend Ron did it.

More on Pigeon: Impossible
More on Alma

To comment on this post, click here

It's 'Obvious Visual Gag' Tuesday

Just to reinforce my earlier post about the ridiculosity of the Golden Globes, I notice they've even started giving awards out to fictional animated characters now.

Ahahaha.

To comment on this post, click here

The Greatest Films Of 2009. FACT.

So here it is. I'm well aware it's a bit late for this kind of thing thank you very much so stop going on about it. The thing is, right, there's no point doing it in the middle of December before I'd seen everything, so I've left it till now in the hope that I'd been able to catch up. As it turns out I've failed miserably on that front, and many other fronts in fact, so you'll have to make do. Like we did in The Blitz, remember?

TEN

Anvil! The Story Of Anvil

NINE

Moon

EIGHT

Watchmen

SEVEN

Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1

SIX

Timecrimes

FIVE

Review here

FOUR

Review here

THREE

Review here

TWO

Review here

ONE

If you know your movie onions (or, in this case, Swedes), you don’t need me to tell you how great Let The Right One In is. But if your onion and/or swede knowledge is deficient, let me tell you how great Let The Right One In is.

I hope that's clear enough.

Let The Right One In’s crowning achievement is to take two genres that I have pretty much no time for – Movies About Kids That Aren’t The Goonies or The School Of Rock, and Movies About Vampires – and glue them together with some achingly beautiful cinematography and skilful economy of storytelling to make a downright draculaspectacular film.

I won’t bang on about it too much because in all honesty I’m a bit embarrassed that I’m writing about it so long after it came out, and you’re all like, “er, HELLO, we KNOW, this is why we prefer PROPER film websites to The Incredible Suit you LOSER”, but I would just like to point out one last thing that makes Let The Right One In so very, very great, and it is that the swimming pool scene at the end is probably the finest five minutes of cinema I saw this year. And that includes the Owl Ship saucytime scene in Watchmen, although I may have to go and re-watch that to be certain.

To comment on this post, click here

Promogasms & Adspasms

Remember when DVDs were introduced? Great days. Here’s a disc, stick it in, there’s a menu, press play and Bob’s your uncle, you’re off and watching something disgusting and a bit phallic plop out of John Hurt’s guts in nauseatingly gross detail and super-squidgy-sloppy-squealy 5.1 digital surround sound. All well and good.

But at some point some Hollywood marketing drone realised there was a small oasis in our lives that wasn’t crammed to bursting with adverts, and as a direct result most DVDs now feature about six days of trailers before you even get to the main menu, and this makes The Incredible Suit very very cross. I have a suspicion that Blu-Ray was introduced because standard DVDs no longer have the capacity for all the promogasms distributors want to force into our faceholes every time we watch a film.

Take the following examples of a few DVDs released in the last twelve months:

The Dark Knight – Four ads before the main menu, one of which is for Warner Brothers’ Blu-Ray range, a pointless exercise if ever there was one. Not only can you not see how much sharper the picture is or spangly the sound is because you’re watching it in standard definition, but the standard definition pictures look chuffing magniferous anyway, so why bother? The Dark Knight also features a trailer for Get Smart, in which Steve Carell is extremely unfunny, only this time in a phone box.

Quantum Of Solace – Three trailers, two studio stings and that bloody anti-piracy thing, which – thanks to hairy genius Adam Buxton – now has lyrics and is finally bearable:



Star Trek – Thankfully only two ads, but both for awful films, GI Joe: Rise Of The Cobra and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen (known to normal human beings as GI Joe and Transformers 2), the latter of which features Shia LaBeouf uttering the open goal: “Megatron wants what’s in my mind!”

The worst offender, however, is WALL•E, which relentlessly beats you – and, crucially, your children - around the head with so many adspasms it’s a wonder any of you can stand up. Before you can even get close to the menu there’s a generic Disney promo; a short and very rubbish teaser for Up; another futile Blu-Ray con; a trailer for Pinocchio, and last but by all means least, an ad for the unspeakably awful-looking and badly dubbed The Secret Of The Magic Gourd. Yes, really. And no, I’ve no idea what a gourd is, but on the evidence presented in this trailer it’s a walking, talking turd.



Now you might like to counter my argument by suggesting that you can skip all this shizzle and just go straight to the main menu, and you’d be right. But that’s not the point. I don’t know what the point is, but that’s not it. If anyone knows what the point is, please send it to me along with several commercials for other points I may be interested in.

To comment on this post, click here

9

9 is a new film about a bunch of old socks in a post-apocalyptic alternate universe fighting a machine which appears to have fallen out of The Matrix. It’s completely rubbish.

I can’t even bring myself to explain why it’s so bad. The writers couldn’t be arsed to provide an interesting and coherent story so I don’t see why I should go to any effort telling you what it is that makes it so crushingly awful. It would have been more appropriate to call it 4, because that’s what it would get out of 10, and most of that would be for the animation which, irritatingly, is jeffing marvellous.

 9 is the third animated film I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks, each of which uses voice ‘talent’ in a different way:

• Up – Uses unknown actors to provide perfectly appropriate voices for a grumpy old codger and an excitable schoolboy. 
• Fantastic Mr Fox – Uses ludicrously expensive A-listers to provide perfectly inappropriate voices for foxes.
• 9 – Uses the equivalent of Tesco Value (but still expensive) stars like Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly to provide bland voices for sentient rag dolls, which you don’t even realise were voiced by famous actors until the credits roll, prompting you to think that maybe they should have just dragged some homeless people in off the street to do the voices, which would not only have been cheaper but would also have had some humanitarian benefit, I mean, apparently Martin Landau was in it but I didn’t recognise his voice and I couldn’t work out which one he was so what’s the point of that, he was in North By Northwest for Alfred’s sake!

One of these methods works very well. The other two don’t. Can you tell which is which?

To comment on this post, click here

Up

This week’s Top 10 greatest Pixar films, like, ever:
(Last week’s positions in brackets)

1. (1) The Incredibles
2. (2) Toy Story 2
3. (3) Toy Story
4. (4) Monsters, Inc.
5. (New Entry) Up
6. (5) Finding Nemo
7. (6) Ratatouille
8. (7) WALL•E
9. (8) A Bug’s Life
10. (9) Cars

I couldn't write a review of Up because I was too busy crying like a baby, so here's a pictographic appraisal from our guest reviewer:

I did, however, have to endure this exchange with the chap at the box office (which took place at about 5.30pm):

The Incredible Suit: “Can I have two tickets for Up at 8.40, please”

The Chap At The Box Office: (incomprehensible mumbling) “…We only have tickets for 6.40 or 9.10”

The Incredible Suit: “Really? Has it sold out already?”

The Chap At The Box Office: (slowly, as if talking to an imbecile) “Nnooo, we just… don’t have a showing at 8.40”

The Incredible Suit: (slowly, as if talking to an imbecile) “This is Up we’re talking about, yeah?”

The Chap At The Box Office: (pauses, as if world has been turned inside out) “You said District 9”

The Incredible Suit: (slowly, because definitely talking to an imbecile) “Nnooo, I said ‘two tickets for Up at 8.40’”

There then followed a lengthy pause in which The Chap At The Box Office stared at me very hard while he tried to work out if I was taking the piss or if there had been some kind of ripple in the space-time continuum. He then grudgingly gave me my tickets for Up and went, presumably, to get the popcorn removed from his ears.

Say it out loud to yourself. Up. District 9. Up. District 9. Up. District 9. Is there even the most microscopic phonetic similarity in those two film titles that could cause one to be mistaken for the other? Of course not. This is why God invented online booking.

To comment on this post, click here

Nipple-Twistingly Insane Camera Moves

Watch this. It’s brilliant.

Good news, everyone! Martin Scorsese is making an unashamedly audience-friendly popcorn thriller. I’m excited about that even though the last time he did it the result was The Departed, which deserved its Oscars about as much as The Incredible Suit deserves to be awarded ‘Best Russian Dumpling Recipe of the Year’.

Much has been made over Marty’s inability to win an Oscar until The Departed, which made that win a clangingly hollow one, as it was startlingly average. If I was him I would have shoved the award firmly up the Academy’s collective poopchute and asked that it only be returned when the words “Whoops, in 1991 we meant GoodFellas, not Dances With Wolves, silly us!” had been engraved on it. And it had been thoroughly cleaned and sterilised.

In actual fact it has been scientifically proven in a poll carried out exclusively for The Incredible Suit, by The Incredible Suit, of The Incredible Suit, that Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese hasn’t actually made a great film since GoodFellas, so each new one carries the weight of expectation around its shoulders like a rucksack full of photocopiers.

Anyway, Shutter Island looks like it might be a cracking psychological / supernatural nuttyfest, even though it does star Leonardo DiCaprio and his big, constipated face. Somebody get that man a laxative mint before he bursts! At the very least it’ll look lovely and have some nipple-twistingly insane camera moves, which Marty does so well.

The infuriating thing about Shutter Island is that it was supposed to be released this week, but has been unceremoniously booted back to February because, according to Paramount CEO Brad Bigbucks: “Our 2009 slate was greenlit in a very different economic climate and as a result we must remain flexible and willing to recalibrate and adapt to a changing environment.”

I haven’t got the faintest idea what that means but I’m remaining philosophical because Up and Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee (the irony!) are both released this week, and if I’d had to squeeze Shutter Island in as well I would have had to move in to the cinema and they don’t like it when I do that. Something about how going to the bathroom before I get dressed upsets the customers.

To comment on this post, click here