i realize the all-lower-case is nonstandard, but isn't that part of the film-maker's prerogative? If IMDb is going to take it on itself to fix the capitalization, why not also fix the 'misspelled' title Jacknife (1989), or the unusual punctuation in M*A*S*H*? Somebody, show the powers that be a volume of e e cummings' poetry -- they can have a field day.
shareyes, you have a good point.
personally, i always spell it sex, lies and videotape. the american thing of having the extra comma always annoys me. no offence. i just wouldn't use that punctuation just as i wouldn't deliberately call it a "movie" instead of a film. the term "movie" might slip out, though.
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Nicebat and I had to party.
No offense, nor any offence, taken.
I wrote a longish post recently http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064116/board/nest/70269739?d=72929762#72929762 on the different nuances of the words 'movie' and 'film'.
film instead of a movie? heh
sophisticated brat
the american thing of having the extra comma always annoys me
Yes, it is definitely an American thing. I knew a girl who went to an American school in the USSR, and she said she used to get away with mistakes by claiming, "We punctuate it/spell it differently in Britain".
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Nicebat: party animal.
[deleted]
Punctuation isn't just about rules of grammar. These marks are intended to reflect the manner after which the composer intends his words to be organized and understood; especially difficult is punctuating when trying to bring another’s spoken words to print. A comma means that 'a pause' should be taken, with the intention to separate what otherwise might be taken together. In the case of “sex, lies(,) and videotape”, the insertion of the "extra comma" breaks the title into three distinct nouns, where otherwise it might be understood to be one noun plus a pair of nouns; the one noun being sex, the other pair being "lies and videotape". But today, I wonder how much these distinctions bear fruit in the consciousness of readers who generally are (for a variety of reasons) either unaware or perhaps disinterested in them. How much effort and/or concern does the average person really display when it comes to really understand what anyone else is saying. Before the other has even finished their statement, opinions and rebuttals are formed and launched. Thinking, and really trying to understand the other are hardly exercised. On the other hand, why waste the effort to use these traditional punctuation forms in order to understand what has been written when no effort goes into using them by the composer. This all seems to reflect a general disinterest in anything but egoistic exertion of a personal opinion. It seems as though people have become so self-centered that they don’t even care whether their highly personalized opinion is even understood. I mean, when all is said and done, if everyone else is just some idiotic jerk, what difference does it make if they understand what I am saying or not?
(PRN) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id-bFpYQzXE
We in the UK find it quite easy to understand a list where there is no comma before the "and". Eg "peas, beans, rice, pasta and lentils". An American would just put an extra comma after pasta because that is the rule there. No big deal. In the UK, we would put a comma before "and" if we needed to emphasise a point. I cannot think of an example, so I will go away and think of one.
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Nicebat and I had to party.
The 'extra' comma is interesting, but a side issue. (I was an American third-grade teacher, and I taught my students that the extra comma was a matter of taste.) I was commenting on the lack of capitalization in this particular title, which I think should be reflected on IMDb, even though it is nonstandard on both sides of the Atlantic. It simply seems to me that a film's title on IMDb should match what its opening credits say.
shareI would go along with imdb listing it according to the opening titles.
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Nicebat and I had to party.
I wonder what John Donne would have to say about all that.
(PRN) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id-bFpYQzXE
It's interesting you call it an "American thing." The comma used before the and is called an "Oxford comma."
shareSo? The US is full of place names borrowed from English place names ... I don't know about Oxford but the Americans decided to name a place after Cambridge. Nearby Boston is another English placename, borrowed.
Sweet - yet bent on global domination!
New England, New London, New York, New Jersey. A lot of people who started their lives anew came from England and wanted to show their origin yet their distinction. If the expression chosen to identify a particular usage of a comma was intended to imply an Americanization or American preference, the expression would probably be, "the NEW Oxford Comma" to denote a separate and distinct usage. That point in itself doesn’t prove a whole lot, but does apply to the previous post. By calling it an Oxford comma, an attempt was made by somebody to associate the comma and it’s use with Oxford England and probably a formal usage.
(PRN) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id-bFpYQzXE
i'd never actually thought of it that way. i've been a big hater of the comma-before-and for quite some time (and i'm american), just felt it was redundant, but reading what you wrote i can see how it could be useful (and may need to reconsider my way of writing).
shareI don't think there should be a comma before the "and" and I think it should be lowercase. They'd have a field day with "Finnegans Wake" too.
Anyway, I guess the punctuation and case doesn't really matter in this case.
-Who do you think you're trying to fool?-
Here's the answer to your question: http://www.theslot.com/caps.html
"sex, lies, and videotape" was the logo used in the film, not the name of the film.
By that reasoning, imdb wouldn't list titles such as Se7en and "Numb3rs". What about intentionally misspelled titles like "Pet Sematary", or cases of nonstandard punctuation like "M*A*S*H*" "Oliver!" -- are you for "correcting" those, too?
It seems to me that the rule should be, and generally is here, that the title of a film should be whatever the filmmaker intentionally put ON THE FILM, and that any "corrections" be made as "alternate titles".
Then there would be thousands of movie titles that should be in all capitals.
You could make the case that "Numb3rs" and "Se7en" should be written "Numbers" and "Seven". It depends on whether that's their proper titles or not. I see that Numb3rs also used "Num3ers" as a promotional title, which would indicate that both variations are just logo variations on the actual title. But if in fact "Numb3rs" and "Se7en" are the proper titles, they should be written as such. They are all valid letters and numbers, so it's not the same as capitalization or punctuation.
Same goes for "Pet Sematary" of course.
"Oliver" should be written as such, so should probably "MASH". I don't think the creators of the show intentionally thought, "let's change the name from the movie." Quite contrary they wanted people to link the show to the movie, so they wanted to use the same name. They just thought of "M*A*S*H" as the same name as "MASH". The use of asterisks was just a variation used in the logo.
Point taken on the film titles that are presented in all uppercase. There are surely thousands of these, and it would be ridiculously Mandarin of me to insist that a show's proper title had to be given, say, as "ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS". On the other hand, even you implicitly concede that the film's title is "MASH", as opposed to the clearly incorrect "Mash".
It comes down to trying to divine the artist's intention. I would say that if Don Marquis published a book of poems titled "archy and mehitabel" in 1927, then it's not our business to 'fix' his incorrect capitalization, but rather our job to respect his wishes. Soderbergh's decision, consistently applied in all of the film's promotional material as well as the film itself, was to present the title, for whatever reason, in all lower case. I think this had to have been a conscious decision, not an oversight, and it deserves similar respect.
There is no real question of a "logo" here. Alfred Hitchcock's stylized profile may be a logo, so perhaps is the run-together STAR WARS in its title font. Certainly "IBM" with lines drawn through it is a logo. So is the Mercedes-Benz symbol. But a title's English spelling, punctuation and capitalization can be rendered in any general-purpose font. The whole "logo" business is not really relevant to the discussion, in my opinion.
The idea that a title may only consist of "valid" letters and numbers (and spaces, of course, but no punctuation marks) is I think insupportable. What is the set of "valid" alphanumeric characters? Is "8½" a valid 2-character title? What about the Greek character pi?
That a title may properly include punctuation marks is solidly entrenched practice here on imdb (or rather, IMDb). Just from Best Picture Oscar-winners, "Oliver!" includes the exclamation point, and "Ben-Hur" includes the hyphen. The Pearl Harbor film is "Tora! Tora! Tora!", not "Tora Tora Tora". Just from the Top 250, there are currently at least two titles that end with what I would consider a nonstandard period: "Snatch." and "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari." (I'm not sure about "Umberto D.") IMDb even lists the 1971 warren Beatty/Goldie Hawn film by it's given title, "$".
Other punctuation marks are more common still. "How Green was My Valley" is properly not a question but an exclamation, and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" is again not a question but an imperative, so neither title ends with a question mark. On the other hand, "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" are questions, and so they do take question marks. Of course many, many films have apostrophes in their titles, including the two "Who's" titles I just mentioned. And it's quite common for film titles to include commas (e.g., "sex, lies, and videotape"), colons (all the Star Wars and LOTR movies), and abbreviations with periods ("Mrs. Miniver", the aforementioned "Dr. Caligari", "L.A. Confidential", "Sunset Blvd.")
I notice that more than half of the promotional material for Spencer Tracy's final film gives the title in all lower-case: "guess who's coming to dinner". Nevertheless, I don't think it was ever capitalized that way in contemporary reviews.
On the other hand, many contemporary reviews of the film in question here, including the one in Newsweek, did refer to it as "sex, lies, and videotape", and metacritic.com agrees http://www.metacritic.com/video/titles/sexliesandvideotape. Roger Ebert's review in the Chicago Sun-Times gets the case right, but incorrectly omits the second comma: he has it as "sex, lies and videotape". http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19890801/REV IEWS/908010301/1023 (It is true, The New York Times did "fix" the title, reviewing it as "Sex, Lies, and Videotape". But then again, The New York Times is a notoriously stodgy gray-haired old lady.)
Perhaps most relevantly, Amazon.com refers to the film in lower case, with two commas: "sex, lies, and videotape". http://www.amazon.com/sex-lies-videotape-James-Spader/dp/0767812158 As Amazon.com is the parent company of IMDb, shouldn't IMDb follow suit here?
probably one of the most lucid and intelligent comments i've seen on IMDb, donrogers42 - though i still hate the second comma. but that's a personal thing.
shareWell, Amazon bought IMDb, but they're still pretty separate, and Amazon's information is pretty messy compared to IMDb's, so that's not really a valid argument.
If you actually read the piece by Bill Walsh on www.theslot.com, you'll see his argument that we have to draw the line somewhere (and you'll also see the point about all capital letters). If we always allow "the artist's intention" to prevail, it would just become ridiculous. There's no need for me to repeat his examples here.
When it comes to punctuation, I don't know where you got the idea that I think all punctuation is bad. Seems lik a strawman argument to me. The problem is of course non-standard punctuation. Nobody would argue against hyphens, commas and apostrophes in their proper place. Also question marks after genuine questions, and periods for abbrevations. You yourself make the argument that a question mark is valid, or more valid, if it's a genuine question, so apparently it's also a point to you whether the punctuation and grammer is correct. Ending a title in a period is especially troublesome, because any sentence refering to it would pretty much be "broken". I saw Snatch. yesterday. Have you seen Snatch.? I haven't seen Snatch.. All, or almost all, writers refering to this movie have just ignored the period, and I don't blame them.
But I'll give in one regard. All titles, unlike names of people, products and companies, can be written in quotation marks. As such any valid letter, number OR punctuation mark can appear between the quotation marks, even if the spelling and punctuation are non-standard, without causing confusion. So I'll concede that it's not wrong, maybe even more right, to include it in a reference like IMDb, in all the names you mentioned. But I also think it's preferable, when not using quotes, to refer to them as Snatch, Tora Tora Tora or Oliver. On the other hand, we have of course Sunset Blvd., Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and 8½ - although the question mark could be omitted from the second one. The point is that these phrases follow the standard punctuation they would have in a sentence even of they weren't titles. He drove down Sunset Blvd. yesterday. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? he wondered. He had 8½ days to live. (But: Yesterday I went to the movies and saw Sunset Blvd. We wouldn't use a second period, because the title follows proper punctuation, so we write it the way it would naturally be written, although that would mean that the title's period be "absorbed" in the sentence's period. How we would do this with a title like "Snatch." is anybody's guess.)
I've actually realized that capitalization is wholly different from punctuation. First of all, this is very much a question of logos. All uppercasing of titles is a logo choice. So is probably the use of the asterisks in "M*A*S*H". So as I said in my previous post, the question is always, what's the proper title and what's just a stylistic choice used in promotional material or in the film? MASH is of course an acronym, so would never be written in lower case. As you said "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was SOMETIMES written in lower case in promo material, a clear indication that it was just a logo variation. And actually, "Snatch." with a period isn't really the title either, as can plainly be seen from this poster: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Snatch_Movie_Poster.jpg If it were, it would be on every piece of promo material.
The interchangeability of lower and upper case letters is the key here. The word starting this sentence is unquestionably the same word as the second one from the end. Although it says "STAR WARS" on-screen, nobody would claim that it's a different title from "Star Wars". Varying punctuation on the other hand would warrant that claim. The use of all upper case in promo material and on-screen is so common that it's just seen as a variation of the title, while the title should be written according to standards in normal circumstances. Even if the title "Man of the Year" were written in all upper case in everything released from the studio, everybody would refer to it as "Man of the Year", following the standards of capitalization in English titles. Even if it were written "Man Of The Year", I'm sure everybody would "correct" it to "Man of the Year", deeming the uppercasing of "of" and "the" as logo variations or something similar. But since the opposite is uncommon, lowercasing the whole title, some people feel like they must respect this way of writing it, when in fact it's no different.
By the way, Wikipedia refers to both "Sex, Lies, and Videotape" and "Thirtysomething" as written. IMDb should clean up though, because they write "Sex, Lies, and Videotape", but "thirtysomething". At least they should pick one way of doing it.
If you're not going to recognize Amazon.com as authoritative because its information is too messy, that's fine; but then I don't think you can reasonably turn around and cite Wikipedia. Anyway, Wikipedia itself is inconsistent: the "Steven Soderbergh" article has the film's title the way I remember it: "sex, lies, and videotape".
That a title may contain or end with an exclamation point or a question mark, or even when appropriate a period, I regard as a long-settled issue. (Further examples: "Oklahoma!", "Moulin Rouge!", "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret", which I would argue is actually still UNDER-punctuated, but would certainly be harder to decipher without the question mark. Also "D.O.A.", and "Magnum, P.I.") Yes, that occasionally makes punctuating the end of a sentence a bit trickier. Life goes on.
Actually, the ending period in the title "Snatch." bugs me too. In the first place, why put a period on a one-word (is it a noun or a verb?) title, when it is customarily omitted from even complete-sentence titles like "It Happened One Night" and "It's a Wonderful Life"? (Capra seems to have liked that kind of title: "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town", "Meet John Doe", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", "You Can't Take It with You".)
Second, I don't see this phantom period on ANY of the film's promotional materials. In such a case, I am strongly tempted to treat the period, which I assume must be on the celluloid film itself, as a mistake. If consistency "on every piece of promo material" is the issue, as you seem to suggest, I agree that criterion should count strongly against "Snatch." (but equally strongly in favor of "sex, lies and videotape").
On the other hand, the title IS consistently rendered in all lower-case: "snatch", but I don't see that anyone has decided to respect its all-lower-case-ness. The same goes for the Tom Hanks movie that is universally known as "Big", even though it is ironically "big" on all its posters.
I guess I'm inclined to agree that, especially with a punchy one-word title like "Snatch" or "Big", that the decision to show the title in all lower-case may be treated almost like a font choice -- just a design decision, no more or less significant than the decision to show another title in all upper-case. Similarly, I would say the title of the recent Michael Moore documentary is simply "Sicko", not the aggressively nonstandard mixed-case "SiCKO" of its advertisements.
However, I would still hold out for "sex, lies, and videotape" (and "thirtysomething", and "M*A*S*H", and "k. d. lang", and "Alien³", and "XxX", and "McQ", and even "McDonald's", for that matter). To my mind, those are simply the names by which those entities are most commonly known. Yes, those names all to some degree defy ordinary title conventions. In most cases that is part of the point, I would submit.
Well, we seem to have reach a point where we largely agree about a lot of things, just not the issue at hand, "Sex, Lies, and Videotape". :)
Just a few clarifications. There's no need for you to site "D.O.A." or "Magnum, P.I." with regards to the ending period. These are abbrevations, and so standard, and would not present any problems when punctuating the end of a sentence; a point I already made.
I don't agree that "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" is under-punctuated. It's standard in headlines, headings and titles to not use an ending period, even if the headline consists of several sentences. You then punctuate the ending of every sentence but the last.
Also, of course I don't disagree about McQ or McDonald's, these are completely standard.
Anyway, you now seem to favour the spellings (or capitalizations) which the names and titles are commonly known under, regardless of whether they would be the proper titles. I don't agree with this reasoning (although I see that in many cases the names would seem right to a greater amount of readers), but I guess we'll just leave it at that.
I would have added a comma after the word 'There', not a period at the end (which I quite agree would be nonstandard and unnecessary), making the Judy Blume title "Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret".
You seemed to object to internal (as well as ending) exclamation points in titles (e.g. "Tora Tora Tora"). My point was that if you extended that policy to internal question marks, you'd arrive at the needlessly confusing and ambiguous "Are You There, God It's Me, Margaret".
As I said, I don't think the ending period in "Snatch." belongs there either, but I guess in theory I don't see what makes it more problematic at the end of a sentence than the period at the end of "D.O.A."
Question: In that last bolded sentence, did I need another period after the last double-quote?
Look, it's largely about legibility. As I said, when you put the title in quotes, you can include all the punctuation. A title that's a whole sentence and which is also a question should properly end in a question mark. When referencing such a title in a sentence, when not using quotes, you could include the question mark I'd say, but one could also make the case that it would be a better sentence without it. I saw Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf yesterday.
The same goes for exclamation points. When it's a sentence that's a command, like for example "Go To Hell!", I'd say you could include the exclamation point when referencing it without using quotes. Like I said before, it would be like quoting someone: Go to Hell! he shouted at me. Standard English. But when referencing a title like this, it would probably be better to drop the exclamation point.
But in both cases, the best option would probably be to just use quotation marks and include all punctuation.
Titles like "Tora! Tora! Tora!" aren't even whole sentences, so I would definitely drop the exclamation marks there, again, when not using quotes.
When it comes to "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret", which is TWO sentences, there's no question that you should always use quotes. As you say, you couldn't drop the ending punctuation to the first sentence, so it would not be very legible at all to NOT use quotes. You could of course use italics or boldface, but I still think you should use quotes if you're going to include all punctuation (which you have to when it comes to "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret"). But other reasonable people could disagree.
You don't see the difference between "Snatch." and "D.O.A."? Then you really haven't been paying attention.
Your last question. I'm not enough of an expert in punctuation in English to know whether you should or shouldn't use a period after a quote that includes a period. If the quote were a whole sentence, the answer would of course be "no," but as it is I don't know. I don't see the relevance though. The problem I was talking about was without the use of quotes.
Who's not paying attention? I agreed with you, at least twice, about the periods at the end of both "Snatch." (bad!) and "D.O.A." (perfectly fine).
I think "Tora!" is as much a sentence as "Oklahoma!", or even "Help!" "Tora Tora Tora" looks to me like some fictional triplicate neighbor of "Bora Bora".
As far as correctly punctuating a sentence that includes a title that itself includes punctuation, but where the title is not set off by quotation marks, I do see your problem:
* I was stunned by the ending of D.O.A.!
* I liked What's Up, Doc?.
* I really loved What's Up, Tiger Lily?!
* How do you feel about How the Grinch Stole Christmas!?
* I agree with you about Snatch. being a mis-punctuated title.
* Help! My VCR ate my copy of Help!!
* My God! I thought Oh, God! was way better than Oh, God! You Devil. You didn't?
The answer, it seems to me, is not to jettison a title's punctuation when it becomes inconvenient, but rather to add quotation marks as needed for clarification.
I guess I'd agree with you that the best thing in almost all these cases is to include quotes.
It seems there's some minor misunderstanding about the "Snatch."/"D.O.A." thing. You wrote:
As I said, I don't think the ending period in "Snatch." belongs there either, but I guess in theory I don't see what makes it more problematic at the end of a sentence than the period at the end of "D.O.A."
This is all very interesting, but I am so tired of people having run out of things to say about the film itself. Please, please could one of you think of something really clever to say about the film. Pretty please?
Have you ever carved a naked woman out of MDF before?
I believe the film itself uses all caps, like this: SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE
Therefore, the proper title, as it appears in the film, without all caps, is Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
If a movie's title is in all caps, IMDb writes it with the first letter of the words capitalized. If the film's title is in the film in all lowercase letters, though, IMDb does it that way.
For another example, look at Die Hard 2 - the promotional material, VHS and DVD releases say 'Die Hard 2: Die Harder.' But the film itself says 'Die Hard 2' - therefore, IMDb lists it as 'Die Hard 2.' Same thing here, but with capitalization.
and i believe the film uses all small letters for its name and the names of the lead actors.
MAYBE BY THE TIME THEY GET TO THE CREW, EG SPADER'S WIFE (SET DECOR) IT IS CAPITALS.
my vcr is playing up so i cannot check.
Rose has issues!
You are correct, sir. Having watched it earlier today, I can confirm that the title is, in fact, in all lowercase letters.
So IMDb is wrong, as was I.