Saturday, March 2, 2024

We're all talking in complete sentences

Horror director Jane Schoenbrun is well acquainted with subjects, predicates and objects.

Two years after her squirmy little horror movie We're All Going to the World's Fair, Schoenbrun has been given some name actors to work with, including star of Jurassic World and Pokemon movies Justice Smith, in I Saw the TV Glow.

Realizing I had heard her name before and seeing that this also involved looking at screens, I didn't take long after hearing about I Saw the TV Glow to conclude it was from the same person who made We're All Going to the World's Fair

But really, it was the similar structures of the titles that clinched it.

No real comment here, except that we do tend to notice when movie titles are a grammatically complete thought. It's a somewhat irregular occurrence. I don't have a way to test this against the titles I've seen that wouldn't take forever, and if I look only at movies starting with "I," I'll get a sort of reverse confirmation bias because most of those will in fact probably be sentences. (Quick glance: The only ones that aren't are those that start with I and a comma -- such as I, Tonya -- and one other that just doesn't really mean anything: I Origins.)

This is a pretty flimsy premise for a post because Schoenbrun has one other feature as a director, when she was Dan instead of Jane: 2018's A Self-Induced Hallucination. So that breaks that particular titling convention.

But this is Jane Schoenbrun, and Jane, in two features, has been consistent in her approach.

The movie doesn't open until a couple months from now, but the advanced buzz seems to be good. And consider me unusually primed both after World's Fair (which was quite chilling until it petered out into a limp ending) and Skinamarink (which, as I have discussed ad nauseum, was the first horror movie to top my chart last year).

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