This will either be unanimous or contentious and I just don’t know! There might also be some real winners/losers I don’t know about from the non-Hindi industries, feel free to throw them into the mix!
War
A great movie, with a TERRIBLE title. First, it’s way too general and impossible to use in a search. Second, it is just a hard word to say. Okay, my adorable speech impediment makes me say it “waw”, but even non-cute people have to struggle with the two soft consonants and the vowel. And third, it doesn’t convey the story of the film at all, “Love” would have been a better title. Horrible people!
Judgementall Hai Kya
First it was “Mental Hai Kya” which kind of made sense, and then there was a to-do over that so they changed to “Judgemental Hai Kya” which doesn’t really make sense. And then they threw in an extra “l” for no reason at all. Horrible people!
Good Newwz
See, it’s not a bad title to begin with! It accurately conveys the story and mood of the film and all that. And then they added the extra “w”. Not even a “z” which you could kind of pronounce, but a “w” which is impossible. Horrible people!
Jjuddggmmennttall Hai Kya for sure. IDK what possessed Rajkummar to do it, but I’m upset he screwed me out of a movie with him because I am never seeing that.
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Well, at the time he signed the film, it looked really good! Konika Dhillon (who might be my new favorite scriptwriter) script, good production company, and a catchy sensible title “Mental Hai Kya”. And then the script got taken over by the Kangana Show, the production house lost their minds in order to please her, and the title became dumb.
On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 3:00 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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IDK how much he owed them, but at that point I’d back out. That said, it’s not like it’s going to damage his career now so I guess he doesn’t care.
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I have the winner, let’s see if you can beat this – a court drama about raped woman and they called it Chicken Curry Law.
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That is pretty bad!
On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 3:11 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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I’m a former English as a second language teacher, though I am not as particular about English as many of my former bookstore co-workers (I really don’t care if people call the Sierra the Sierras; Sierra isn’t even English and I don’t think diagraming sentences is a necessary skill that all English speakers must know), but I confess I do often find myself pausing when I read Indian English. I tell myself it is its own language and it isn’t my job to critic another language even if I taught it because well, people are allowed to make things their own. And English spelling sucks. My own children are in Spanish bi-lingual education and Spanish makes SO MUCH MORE SENSE. If English was spelled the way it sounds you could have Good Newwz. While speaking you elongate the w sound and end in z – you will be understood and the word is spelled the way it sounds. The Judgementall is harder to justify. I’ve never heard anyone speak the word where the TAL is emphasized or elongated. In fact in California most people say it juejmentel with the emphasis on the first syllable. Thus Judgementall is my winner for worst title.
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Excellent logic, straight through, I like it. Although I strongly suspect the thinking of the Good Newwz makers was less about phonetic spelling and more about some wacky numerology thing.
On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 5:31 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Usually the numerology spellings don’t really matter much to me but Good Newwz being spelled like that was so annoying.
By the way did you hear about what happened to Valmiki. It was the Telugu remake of Jigarthanda starring Varun Tej and it was titled Valmiki. There were protests by some group and it looked like they might not let the movie might not come out on the release date so the team changed the name of the movie to Gaddalakonda Ganesh the day before the release date. I just thought it sucked for them
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I hate that! The title is no small thing, you do all this work to promote the film and then people can’t find it because the name changed.
On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 5:10 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
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Exactly! I felt really bad for them since they didn’t have enough time to market with the new name.
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