Six Films With Terrific Live-Action Openings

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Mar. 31, 2009

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Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson square off in Duplicity.

The Knack ... and How to Get It (1965): Title sequences tend to be editing room tricks. Few of them feature actors, even scenes. In this category, it’s hard to top the boisterous opening to Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night. But almost as good is the start of Lester’s The Knack, in which Michael Crawford is so jealous of tenant Ray Brooks’ ladykilling he imagines girls lined up outside his bedroom filling out a guestbook.

Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): Not unlike the words that emerge from a stripping Jane Fonda’s clothes in Barbarella, Sergio Leone’s first post-Clint spaghetti Western features titles that adorably pop up. But they still take a back seat to the action, or lack thereof: Stretched over 14 amazingly sustained minutes, they provide comic counterpoint to three assassins waiting, silently and with no Ennio Morricone score, for Charles Bronson.

 

Do the Right Thing (1989): Rosie Perez shadowboxes to Public Enemy. It’s that easy.

The Man on the Moon (1999): Fears of a paint-by-numbers biopic seemed, at first, dashed with the opening of this Andy Kaufman film, which features Jim Carrey as “foreign man” telling us the movie’s no good. Then the end credits run. In their entirety. How brilliantly Kaufmanesque. Alas, he wasn’t kidding.

 

JCVD (2008): Jean-Claude Van Damme’s seven-minute monologue got most of the press, but the real highlight of this meta-comedy finds the 48-year-old letting a dense, single-take action scene gradually get away from him.

 

Duplicity (2009): How to establish that CEOs Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti are heated rivals? Show them kicking ass. In extreme slo-mo.

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