The 1930s-era film that David O. Russell has been shooting since early this year and which stars Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington (and costars Rami Malek, Zoe Saldana, Robert De Niro, Mike Myers, Timothy Olyphant, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy. Andrea Riseborough, Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola) allegedly has a firm title — Canterbury Glass.
I don’t believe it — a $250 million period ensemble piece (“a doctor and a lawyer form an unlikely partnership”) with a title that sounds like a high-toned PBS historical drama or documentary?
In their man-on-the-street geography quiz interviews Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel have shown that average Millennials and Zoomers are cretins when it comes to identifying continents and countries, much less regions and cities, and that maybe 1 out 500 might know that the title refers to the medieval stained glass windows (between 800 and 900 years old) in Canterbury Cathedral, and that the allusion is to something aged, fragile and extremely valuable.
With a notoriously uneducated and incurious populace, presenting a super-expensive caper film titled Canterbury Glass is like saying “we know you guys don’t know or care what the title means and we don’t care if you do or don’t…we’re calling it this in order to goad and confound you, and to make sure you understand that the people who made this film live in their own aesthetic and cultural membrane, and that they’d rather please themselves than reach out to you with a title that adds up in a way you might understand or relate to.”
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