Loh Keng Fatt
News Editor, Sunday Times
Put a smile on your lips
September 16, 2009 Wednesday, 06:14 PM
Loh Keng Fatt thinks some movie taglines show a very clever use of English.
REST In Pieces. Clever. A killer (literally) tagline. You can find it on posters promoting the horror-thriller movie The Final Destination.
I am a movie-buff — but of a different sort.
While I do not stump out a lot of money to catch many films — my last two were Murderer and Orphan — I do keep up with cinematic developments.
I am a particularly big fan of advertisements and posters placed in newspapers and cinema lobbies.
It’s not the fancy artwork or other gimmicky visual elements on them that grab me but the taglines.
Perhaps my job as a journalist makes me monitor how creative or zany the marketers are in using the English language to plug a movie.
In my book, whoever they are, the people who can craft tantalising lines in posters are also stars in their own right, and are even deserving of an Oscar.
Within a sentence, or just three words — in the case of the tagline for The Final Destination — they give an instant summary of the movie and its thrills and spills.
Rest In Pieces — a nice play on the phrase Rest In Peace when a person dies — is one such example, promising that the victims on screen will never go quietly in the night.
What else has put a smile on my lips?
How about "Here Comes The Bribe" from romantic comedy The Proposal? Here, a female boss needs a marriage favour from a male subordinate to avoid being deported back to her homeland.
Or how about "Meet Your Ancestors" from the comedy Year One? You know that you are going to have a great time rooting for Jack Black playing an anti-hero caveman.
What about "Houston, We Have A Problem" from Apollo 13, about an ill-fated space mission?
Local film-makers have also come up with some great taglines. Kelvin Tong's supernatural thriller Rule #1 dares you to believe in this blurb — Rule #1: There Are No Ghosts.
But I have not come across any taglines for Jack Neo movies. He really should try them, instead of slapping ridiculous come-ons like "hor-medy" on the posters of his current Where Got Ghost? movie.
Hor-medy? That's a frighteningly bad use of English.
Tags:
comedy,
movies,
singapore,
taglines
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don't native english speakers speak bad english too? some have bad grammar, some inappropriate choice of words, some have accents so thick they may as well be speaking a different language, and some have no clue of pragmatics.
what's wrong with (speaking) singlish? no one would dare claim the standards applicable to a different language (variety) are precisely what make that language (variety) bad.
like any language (variety), singlish can be and is often witty too - to whosoever is good at it. hormedy cannot be inexplicable to singlish speakers. and if others don't understand it - native english speakers notwithstanding (so what?) - are they too dumbed to learn if they will?
Hor-medy is not even english. Maybe Jack Neo wants to attract only our Singlish speaking population? Native english speakers can never really comprehend our use of their english anyway. This so-called problem of Singaporean's not speaking good english is not because we don't understand english, but rather we speak english around our own native tongues. Singlish should be treasured, both the accent as well as the rearrangement of words. It may be the final thread that still links us back to our mother tongue as the world increasingly gets influenced by western culture.
Quite nice blog.
I agree - movie taglines can give you (if right applied) a good "pre-view" of the movie which you're maybe about to see.
But not always the tagline gives you a hint of the content but just something which appears in the movie. I am referring to the SAW movies. On the newest poster for SAW VI released by Lionsgate the tagline is "He helped me" or on SAW V it was "It's a trap".. well, aren't there always traps in the SAW-Franchise?
However, good choosen taglines can sound pretty cool. Enjoy watching movies!