Since late October, @avary has been tweeting regularly about prison life, referring to himself as #34 and regaling his followers with tales that will probably turn into a mindfuck prison thriller screenplay someday, because some people are so irrepressibly hip that even imprisonment for a tragic crime turns all cool and A Clockwork Orange-y in their hands.

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Milian wrote about the wayward Pulp Fiction and Beowulf scribe's stream-of-consciousness Twitter early last week.

But then: Plot twist! Milian's blog post led authorities to realize that Roger Avary wasn't in prison at all. Rather, he had somehow ended up on a work furlough program, which allowed him to hold a day job and merely bunk up at night with fellow furloughees. This is both not the hardscrabble prison life everyone thought @avary was describing, nor the prison sentence Roger Avary was supposed to be serving. So guy got nabbed and they sent him to real prison, prompting @avary to tweet:

LAT is preoccupied with how Avary ended up in furlough instead of jail, but what I want to know is, (1) Was @avary faking his prison badassery, since he was never in prison in the first place? (2) If so, was it a ploy to make us think he is irrepressibly hip and A Clockwork Orange-y? Because that would be pretty lame. (3) Alternately: Is the jailhouse equivalent of a work-study program actually as disgusting and terrifying as I always imagined real prison to be? Meaning @avary wasn't trying to deceive, it's just that we soft-bottomed media folks foolishly assumed that his scary tweets were from the belly of the beast, when in fact they represent a relatively pleasant penal existence, and when @avary gets to real prison it's going to get really crazy.

[LAT] [LAT] [LAT]

One of the most notorious examples of a missed opportunity because of an ill-chosen title was The Shawshank Redemption, the 1994 prison drama starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. The film was lauded by critics but landed with a thud at the box office. More recently, the Russell Crowe boxing saga Cinderella Man and the futuristic thriller Children of Men also failed to capitalize on strong reviews, in part because of titles widely seen as turn-offs. ...

The best titles, such as Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Pulp Fiction, are "sonorous," [consultant Seth] Lockhart says. "They just sound right — appealing to your emotions and your senses." Although an awkwardly named movie usually won't reach its box-office potential, Lockhart points to exceptions such as the Hugh Grant comedy Love, Actually, a hit despite a title he calls stilted.

For our money, no film was titled better than the Beastie Boys' Earth-shattering 2006 concert opus Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That (the first title in history to engage a semicolon), and we have yet to find any film with a worse title than Emily Hubley's recent festival darling The Toe Tactic. Awful. And of course, none of this takes into consideration anything in Ira Isaacs' fine scat-fetish oeuvre. Anyway, you can persuade us on either front — what is in a name, anyway?

• Some movies are entitled to do well [LAT]