I Guess It's Called Evolution
The poster above is self explanatory I suppose, although this particular version is the French rather than English or American advertisement for John Travolta's latest film. What brought the film to my attention is the fact that every bus stop in the area has the English (obviously) poster displayed and they all have the tag line "Travolta Kicks Ass." It's those three words that attract your attention as you drive by and it got me thinking about how easily some phrases slip into the lexicon without any warning and seemingly little reaction.
The history of cinema is littered with some famous tag lines, Badlands the 1973 directorial debut by Terence Malik that starred a young Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek had the great line: " "In 1959 a lot of people were killing time. Kit and Holly were killing people," which I suppose was the equivalent of today's 'kick ass' line but without resorting to use of the vernacular. There are of course those tags that are used to promote films which become classic in their own right and the line enters the language and takes on a life of their own, think Alien "In Space no one can hear you scream," Star Wars ""A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," which I borrowed from last week, "The First Casualty of War is Innocence," from Platoon and the one which I hear more often than not comes from the 1986 remake of the Vincent Price classic "The Fly," it's "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid."
Occasionally the whole tag line genre is sent up, the sublime, "Makes Ben Hur look like an epic," which was used for Monty Python and The Holy Grail and " "It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory," used for Woody Allen's Play It Again Sam (you might have to sing that one to get it).
And of course the way my mind works it's only a short bus ride from tag lines to titles that have been misappropriated by the Porn industry and have taken on a whole new meaning. The list isn't endless, what list is, but it is nevertheless just a little longer than the career of Ron Jeremy. My personal favourites include: On Golden Blonde, Riding Miss Daisy, Shaving Ryan's Privates and, as we began with John Travolta it's only appropriate we should end with a Travolta connection, Saturday Night Beaver.
3 comments:
Great last paragraph! By sheer coincidence I saw the Travolta movie today and enjoyed it immensely (in a brain-dead, eye entertainment, action soaked kind of way).
In the (Atlanta audience) there were cheers and whoops during several scenes including a mighty mother-fucking insult to the french in the first JT scene (thats Travolta not Terry) and no, I'm not kidding...[hand on forehead].
Ah, yes, misappropriated film titles and tag lines. I am given to understand that there was a sci-fi porn film which had the tag line "In space no-one can hear you cream". I like this one because it involves removing just one letter from the original.
I have heard worse but there are limits, even on the internet.
I like audience participation at the cinema if it fits in with the general atmosphere. I was in a cinema when Midnight Express came out and the back row of one section was Turkish who stood-up, watched their 'leader' insult the Americans, and left en masse.
Of course these days the popcorn is so expensive you wouldn't want to leave.
That's a great line Shy, I also liked Sperms of Endearment which had two porn actors playing the Nicholson/MacLaine roles.
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