This title format that drives me bonkers - Big Little Lies etc.

Big Little Lies
Little Fires Everywhere
Tiny Pretty Things
Giant Little Ones (this film is actually pretty good, it's on Prime)

There's something so annoyingly precious/faux mysterious about it. How did it start?

when a daddy twee loves a mummy twee very much

the king of the format:

https://i.redd.it/939rdv2i3pc21.jpg

haha

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMWZmMGNjZGItNWJhNi00Y2U1LTk2YjItY2U2N2ZlODA0MmZiXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMTIwMzA3NDcx._V1_.jpg

Oh God yes I can't stand this formulation nor differentiate them

Little Big Women is an interesting one though as it works in a way that predates the current craze. Like, it could be both a pun on both Little Women and Little Big Man.

Did DIRTY PRETTY THINGS (2002) kick it off more recently?

Yeah thats what i thought of immediately

Pretty Little Liars

P.Y.T.

Pretty Little Thing is an online clothes retailer

Dirty Sexy Money

pretty tiny little fire things

Those are called matches, iirc.

yes it's a remake of the Little Match Girl

I suppose the blame might plausibly lie with Fleetwood Mac and their sweet little lies

P.Y.T.

― Vinnie, Monday, 11 January 2021 23:42 (yesterday)

Of course!

why are little and big so essential to this weird phenomenon?

Curb Your Enthusiasm Apathy

xp is it linked to :

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary

Big little lies is the worst of these, maybe the worst title for anything

does Very Bad Things (1998) count as one of these?

Not the same thing but related is the kind of stupid gibberish titles that bond films and oasis albums have like definitely maybe, don’t believe the truth, the forgetting of memory, if tomorrow was yesterday

Never Maybe Sometimes Always Things

I guess Bond titles like 'Live And Let Die' and 'You Only Live Twice' are the precursor to 70s detective show episode titles like 'Eat, Drink and Be Buried' (from the first series of Ironside) which have a similar precious/sinister thing as the 'pretty little X' stuff?

Like in force on the case, there was an ep called like “sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of murder”

wins is mainly thinking, I infer, about the post-Fleming Bond word salad titles imo: Tomorrow Never Dies*, The World Is Not Enough, Quantum Of Solace, No Time To Die

* even more Oasis-like because it came from someone misreading a fax: the unused Pulp theme was still released as Tomorrow Never Lies

btw we tried to watch Tiny Pretty Things last night and it was so poorly written and acted we turned it off after 15 minutes, and we never stop watching anything no matter how dumb it is.

when i was a little kid watching all those bond movies on cable i often wasnt familiar with the idioms and familiar phrases those titles were tweaking and just internalized them at face value - it wasnt until years later that really dawned on me how many of them are complete nonsense

Fine Young Cannibals?

LittleBigPlanet

Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy

Little Big League

I just remembered that's both a movie and a band.

littleBIGMAN

That hasn’t been posted yet?

Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy

John Crowley, Little, Big
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Little Big Town (band)
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

Oh great, HBO has a show coming just called "The Little Things". I'm going to boycott it.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always seems like a questionable title, but the scene where you find out what it refers to is the emotional high point of the film

Before I saw that movie I assumed the title referred to survey options.

I just came to post about my ambivalence to the second season of Big Little Lies and then I realized I’d forgotten the thread theme, so anyway.

Grateful Dead - Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

thanks Zing

https://offtheshelf.com/app/uploads/2016/09/A-Million-Little-Pieces.jpg

A Million Little Pieces

https://i.watch.cbc.ca/p/categoryThumbnails/8ff393e7-610d-4d42-b078-ff1049045e2d.jpg?impolicy=poster3x&imwidth=412

fuck sake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCs1rkAXZ9o

Working title was apparently "Lady Dicks," so this may be for the better.

http://celebmafia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/kathryn-newton-the-map-of-tiny-perfect-things-poster-2021-0.jpg

LMAO!

Wait what?

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/a-million-big-pretty-tiny-little-lies-everywhere

watched this a few months back, it was not my choice, some interesting ideas in there i guess

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjQ1MjM0OTE2Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMzgwMDY4NzM@._V1_.jpg

Bigby, The Littlest Big Dog in the World

https://www.reeloneent.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/47736-_1_PRETTY_LITTLE_VICTIM_KEY_ART_V4-scaled.jpg

I saw an article about the upcoming TV series Tiny Beautiful Things and was like, didn't they make a show called that a few years ago? No, that was Tiny Pretty Things

This trend started with Little Bighorn

https://www.applewoodbooks.com/Assets/ProductImages/9781557095916.jpg

https://www.applewoodbooks.com/Assets/ProductImages/9781557095916.jpg

See also--

The God of Small Things (perhaps the book that kicked this off?)
Small Great Things
Scrappy Little Nobody
Little Earthquakes
Ten Tiny Breaths
Shiny Broken Pieces
Tiny Dark Seeds
Each Tiny Spark
This Tiny Perfect World
The Association of Small Bombs
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
The Dazzling Truth
A Teeny Bit of Trouble
A Teeny Taste of Scandal

Big Lies in a Small Town
Bright Shiny Morning
The Queen of Bright and Shiny Things
Every Shiny Thing
Nine Shiny Objects
Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants

haha i was just thinking about this but i couldn't really articulate it, of course there's an ilx thread.

it is annoying.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Map_of_Tiny_Perfect_Things?wprov=sfla1

How many books have titles like this and the front cover is just large type white font with a background of interlaced CGI flowers

this title convention is like a mash-up of grown-up YA, multicult Chick Lit, McSweeney's sincere-core and cutesy crime fiction.

The God of Small Things (perhaps the book that kicked this off?)

Well, Thomas Berger published the western novel Little Big Man in 1964. It was a Dustin Hoffman film in 1970.

John Crowley published the fantasy novel Little, Big in 1981.

Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things came out in 1997.

So I get the annoyance with a twee cliché (tweeché?), but comic juxtaposition and cognitive dissonance are as old as literature. (Cf. Shakespeare, "Though she be but little, she is fierce.")

I don't know whom to blame but it seems unfair to blame Arundhati Roy.

Maybe giving atomic bombs cute names Fat Man and Little Boy was in poor taste.

of course there are antecedents but having worked in a bookstore from the late 90s to the late 00s there was a definite in titles like this in that era. The God of Small Things sounded kind of profound and cozy at the same time, which is the vibe I get from a lot of these.

One time when something bad failed to happen - like I dropped a glass and it didn't break - my girlfriend said "thank the thousand little gods."

I don't know where that came from but I found it charming and I married her.

Shit, maybe I'm the problem.

Also, Little Earthquakes rocks. Do not mess with 90s Tori.

Big Trouble in Little China?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClygZtp8mA

A little bit of Monica in my life
A little bit of Erica by my side

Just saw this tweet and came to revive. Glad to see we're already on top of it.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the seventh thing with this title to have been released in the past five years pic.twitter.com/4E3jYU7y7j

— Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevasse) April 5, 2023

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fb/13/be/fb13be08624cd5b136fa66951f715abb.jpg

Damn, guess I need to retitle my forthcoming novel A Heartbreaking Work of Diminuitive Shiny Objects. Maybe I will call it Small Items that Are Actually Big instead.

Bummer because Wes Anderson was set to direct and Michael Cera had expressed interest.

It's actually part of a trilogy that is tentatively called Large Yet Small: the Quiet Loud Saga

Extremely Big & Incredibly Tiny

Medium-Sized and Completely Reasonable

Sadly I got no traction in Hollywood for my script of Nothing Nowhere All at Different Times.

Extremely Tiny, Shockingly Big, and Things

Sounds like a good movie, unfortunately I will probably be unable to hear or see the title without thinking about this https://t.co/TCGT63Oicp pic.twitter.com/BVN5WDXBrD

— Jonathan (@jonathanmb32) February 15, 2024

The End We Start From is a 2023 British survival film directed by Mahalia Belo and starring Jodie Comer, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Katherine Waterston and Mark Strong.

Meant to find and bump this thread for Wicked Little Letters.

All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld review – bracing and brilliant essay collection https://t.co/JYIGT00JCW

— Observer New Review (@ObsNewReview) March 25, 2024

All Things Are Too Small serves as comment on the whole phenomenon

Sounds like an answer song to Blink 182

I thought the harpy was ok but I would never have picked it up if I knew the author had previously written something with a title as shit as “the end we start from”

"All the Light We Cannot See" is another egregious example of this. What about it????

Becca Rothfeld: ‘a philosopher, polemicist and wit’ - and author of an essay on Talking Heads , which cries out to be considered in "OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever"?

Talking Heads connection is making me wonder if you could trace a line between this old David Byrne quote and the bad title phenomenon:

I try to write about small things. Paper, animals, a house…love is kind of big. I have written a love song, though. In this film, I sing it to a lamp.

to all the lights ive loved before

All the Bruno we don't talk about

Little Creatures

he did an album with Eno in 2008 called 'Everything That Happens Will Happen Today' which feels in the same ballpark

Sounds like an answer song to Blink 182

A bold attempt to dethrone Blink-182 and Arundhati Roy in one book.

i run a queer book club in my neighborhood and last month we read the acclaimed 2022 novel all this could be different. book was even worse than its title

review- "pity it wasnt"

Current Indie Bookstore Bestsellers:

Incredibly Bright Creatures
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store

On the whole, is this phenomenon worse than the 'Salmon Fishing in the Yemen' 'Shitting Lemons in Sicily' nonsense from the 00s?

House of Blank and Blank is another format I hate

House of Earth and Blood
House of Sky and Breath
House of Sand and Fog
House of Flame and Shadow
House of Salt and Sorrows
House of Ash and Shadows
House of Roots and Ruin
House of Lies and Sorrow
House of Bane and Blood
House of Velvet and Glass
House of War and Bone
House of Ivy and Sorrow

there's a new show called Apple Never Falls

is it on Apple TV?

I thought half of those "House Of" titles were made up! But they all seem genuine.

House of Words and Rivers
House of Mist and Memories
House of Clocks and Eagles
House of Ice and Conjury

Could do this all day really.

I hate the name Everything Everywhere All At Once, fwiw, which also makes me think of the two JSF novel titles I also hate: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Everything Is Illuminated.

Oh I guess two of those were addressed above

it makes me think of Everything, All At Once, Forever, because I am a Indie

I can go to the amnesty bookshop at any given time & find like 5 random novels that do the flaubert’s parrot/wittgenstein’s mistress thing: Adorno’s dildo, Hitler’s cufflinks, Proust’s GameBoy &c

Remarkably Bright Creatures

haha just realized someone posted that one upthread but got the title was wrong, hence I didn't find it in ctrl f

https://images-us.bookshop.org/ingram/9780143127550.jpg?height=500&v=v2-a7d1aa0651c054931f75e188866634b8

and yet, and yet

Now playing at IFC Center:

Do Not Expect Much From The End Of The World
The Taste Of Things

Everywhere is a big one too

Little Altars Everywhere
Everywhere You Don't Belong
The Girl From Everywhere
Everywhere and Every Way
Everywhere I Look

I'm trying to put my finger on what it is that's so bad about these titles, it's like they have this profound genericness and forced ambiguity. The Thing of Objects. Everyone Watches When Nothing Happens. Sort of Raymond Carverish but with no emotion.

Everyone Worth Knowing
Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Everyone Who Can Forgive Me Is Dead
The Opposite of Everyone
Everyone I Kissed Since You Got Famous
Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town
Everyone But Myself
Everyone Knows You Go Home

SMALL WORDS IN BIG LETTERS

The tone is slightly childlike, full of wonderment and openness, could be about literally anything (or "Everything")

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4a/Everything_Must_Go_Poster.jpg (apparently based on a Raymond Carver story of a different name, Why Don't You Dance?)

Goodnight Nobody
Nobody is Ever Missing
If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things
Nobody, Somebody, Anybody
Nobody's Magic
Nobody Knows But You
The Nobodies Album
The Nobody People

All the Light We Cannot See
All the Bright Places
All the Dangerous Things
All the Stars and Teeth
All the Birds in the Sky
All the Lovers in the Night
All the Little Raindrops
All the Broken Places
All the Breaking Waves
All the Pretty Horses, Young Dudes, President's Men, King's Men etc.

If Wayne Coyne ever wrote a novel (assuming he hasn't) it would most likely have Everything in the title, also some reference to wildlife - possibly, if not probably, birds.

I'm trying to put my finger on what it is that's so bad about these titles, it's like they have this profound genericness and forced ambiguity. The Thing of Objects. Everyone Watches When Nothing Happens. Sort of Raymond Carverish but with no emotion.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, 25 March 2024 20:44 (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it's annoying because it's attempting to make a connection between the small/specific/everyday and the infinite/cosmic/transcendent in a way that supposed to be profound, but it just ends up sounding banal most of the time? A bit like the 'dancing plastic bag' stuff from American Beauty

otm

they are exactly the opposite of a title as great as the ipcress file, they do nothing and intrigue the least interesting ppl

It’s an instant no from me, when I think about someone presumably labouring for a long time to produce a work of art & then having to come up with a title for it that will make anyone ever at all in the big little world want to read it, & then what they come up with is essential “idk little everywheres all around or whatever”, I just think whoever makes that choice simply cannot have possibly written a good book

agreed

Nothing About It Is Interesting

Every Book I Never Read

Soref otm

I think they work by being vague but also familiar, so that you have the feeling that you've heard enough good things already to warrant the purchase. "Oh yeah, Pretty Liars Everywhere, I think I've heard of that."

All Things Are Too Small serves as comment on the whole phenomenon

― Alba, Monday, 25 March 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Hilarious that Rothfeld, who made her name writing about modernist masterworks, allowed her book to fall into this format lol

Small Lights Lie Everywhere

All the Little Live Things a really good, devastating 1960's novel by Wallace Stegner

pic.twitter.com/1QlU1wrhbd

— John Levenstein (@johnlevenstein) March 26, 2024

How did we make it this far without anyone mentioning Eat, Pray, Love

We should combine them
Eat all the big little lies I never told you, pray everywhere in the house of ivy and sorrow, love all at once

overly long ones are next, lets say fried green tomatoes at the whistlestop cafe as an exemplar

They combined the titles that’s crazy https://t.co/XhyCrw75qZ pic.twitter.com/tvvm7Px09o

— Nick Stellini (@StelliniTweets) March 26, 2024

All the

small wives

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1435452849i/90619.jpg

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61Vf2vo2IqL._SL1200_.jpg

Remember all the book covers that were just, like, shoes?

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/817iFfLhJ+L._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_FMwebp_.jpg

https://books.google.com/books/content?id=M86PhpoehBAC&pg=PP1&img=1&zoom=3&hl=en&sig=ACfU3U2B9KEeH3mVPMWU7HGtr5DdvQ0e8Q&w=1280

if James Herriot were writing today, his book would be called Little Big Animals

All Creatures are Small

Dirty Sexy Money (2007)

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387741079i/18079552.jpg

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311978825i/8789529.jpg

xp The ad for Dirty Sexy Money started with a bunch of random words on the screen, and they disappear one by one until only "dirty" "sexy" and "money" remain. Probably exactly the way creators and execs come up with these half-assed titles

I wonder if the title for Dirty Sexy Money was inspired by this British TV movie?

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTY5MjIxODk2MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNTgwOTgyMQ@@._V1_FMjpg_UX1000_.jpg

Tell me lies, tell me Sweet Little Filthy Sexy Tiny Big Lies

Lionsgate has acquired the rights to ‘SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE’ starring Cillian Murphy.

The film takes place over Christmas in 1985, when a devoted father (Murphy) discovers the startling secrets being kept by the convent in his town, and shocking truths about his own life too. pic.twitter.com/0SqxR3FW2T

— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) June 5, 2024

startling secrets AND shocking truths? I'm in.

https://www.nurseriesandschools.org/listing/little-big-steps-private-day-nursery-and-pre-school-knowle-the-park-centre-bs4-1dq

My kid's Christmas show is called Big Little Nativity

BBC has suggested that I might want to watch either "A Very Modern Tudor" or "A Very Royal Crisis," along with "A Very British Scandal" a screen or two later.

Luv ya Beebs, but this is getting to be "A Very Tired Formula" and "A Very Twee Title Format."

Let me see if anybody is streaming "A Very Brady Christmas."