A streak that surely cannot continue

When it rains it pours, and when I write about a certain type of thing on this blog, it seems that’s all I can write about.

So yes, this is my third post this week about a streak, in a manner of speaking. This one is not a very long one, but I’m going to write about it now before it inevitably ends.

It’s not a very profound one, either, but my gut says to write about it, so why not?

And that is this:

I’ve seen five movies released in 2020, and each one I’ve liked more than the one before it.

So yeah, both not very profound and not very likely to continue very much longer.

You’d expect that kind of thing to happen early on in the year, as January is not the time of year you should expect really good movies to be released. But in each of the past few years, one of the earliest movies I saw was also one of my favorite. Fyre was the third movie I watched in 2019 and it ended up in my top 20 for the year.

This year, it’s going a bit more like you’d expect. I guess I thought five movies were statistically significant enough to write about.

I started out with a very low bar to clear, as Dolittle was the first movie I saw in 2020. I gave it one star on Letterboxd, but spared you a rant about it here. (Though if you’d like to check out my review, by all means.)

The current streak would have seemed unlikely when the second movie I watched, Tyler Perry’s A Fall From Grace, jumped all the way up to 3.5 stars. But I have an informal rule about those star ratings. If I think better of it, I can change the star rating, as long as I haven’t since logged another movie on Letterboxd. I thought better of it before the window elapsed, and downgraded it to only three stars. It probably really deserves 2.5, but what can I say, I have a soft spot for Perry movies.

The streak might’ve been dead right there because the next movie up was Birds of Prey (Long Title I Won’t Type Out Here). As a sequel/spinoff to the abysmal Suicide Squad, it stood a good chance of giving Dolittle company in the doldrums of my 2020 rankings. But I ended up liking Cathy Yan’s movie more than I expected to – the Cathy Yan part of it might have had something to do with that – and the movie nudged ahead of A Fall From Grace on my running list.

But the bar was not so high that my next movie, Color Out of Space, had a hard time clearing it. That’s a flawed movie too, but its three stars were slightly more favorable than the three stars of either Birds of Prey or Fall From Grace. I mean, it’s a new adaptation of a Lovecraft story I read only last year, so it had that going for it even if Crazy Nic Cage and some good body horror didn’t prop it up.

Now is a good time to write this post, though, because Emma has made things a lot trickier for its successor. At first I gave Emma only 3.5 stars, but upon further reflection – there’s that informal rule again – I decided that my enjoyment of this confection was a lot more appropriately described at the four-star level. I go on more about it in this review, just posted within the last couple hours.

Now, it’s possible that the next movie I see could surpass Emma without being a four-star movie. I have trouble explaining it, but my rankings are not simply a matter of mathematically ordering all the films I see in a given year according to their star rating. But it’s more likely to need to hit four stars than it would be later in the year, as enough time won’t likely have passed for me to realize I was too generous toward Emma.

I don’t actually know what that next movie will be at this moment, but there’s a pretty good chance it will either be The Call of the Wild or Sonic the Hedgehog, either of which could involve my kids.

And while there’s some chance one of those movies will be better than Emma, better write this now and just tick off another Thursday on this blog.

The best and worst annoyingly long movie titles

You’d think that there would not be any good “annoyingly long movie titles.” The very name discounts the possibility of them being good.

But I think it’s possible for something to be annoyingly long and still good, or at least, still funny.

Today I hope to throw some words at the topic of annoyingly long movie titles, inspired by the upcoming release of Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, which is decidedly an example of the latter. As in, the worst.

Come on, it’s just Birds of Prey, screw all that other noise. And most movie marquees around the country and the world will, indeed, be screwing all that other noise. You will not see the full title of this movie on any movie marquee in the world. But you will see it on every poster for the movie, albeit in significantly smaller type, which means some idiot in the marketing department at the studio is still trying to make And the Fantabulous Emancipation (breath) of One Harley Quinn happen.

But not every annoyingly long title is And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn. Maybe it’s only because I really liked the movie, naming it my #1 movie of 2014 and one of the top 25 of the last decade, but this new title reminds me most of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), a title for which I developed a limited fondness. As they are both, broadly, superhero movies, I even feel like Harley Quinn (I’m not writing that damn thing out again) is borrowing inspiration from Birdman. Both also seem to have pretentious ambitions, which again, I accept because the movie really worked for me in Birdman’s case.

Of course, probably the best example of the annoyingly long movie title is the one that does so specifically for the purposes of humor. Well, you might argue that most annoyingly long movie titles are done for humor, as otherwise you’d just switch to something more palatable. But there are certainly degrees to which the humor does or does not work.

Take, for example, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat’s broken, some might say strangled, English was one of the biggest jokes about the character, so a title that is grammatically awkward, unduly worshipful of the man’s home country, and also gets at an obsession with America and its pop culture, is like killing three birds with one stone. I’ve made it a point of pride that I can roll off this title without any errors, when asked. (Because that particular scenario arrives just about every day.)

But long character-based titles don’t work just because it’s a somewhat beloved character. Sometimes they just try our patience. A couple years ago, the movie with the longest title on my whole movie list came out. It was called Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond – Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. So Tony Clifton may not be beloved, but Jim Carrey and Andy Kaufman may both be, to varying degrees. But this title pretty much just made me smack my forehead. Suffice it to say that I definitely had to look up the correct wording just now.

The movie whose title is long just to make fun of the idea of long titles is also usually a bust. The first movie I’m discussing today that I haven’t seen is a prime example of that. That would be Don’t be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood. Now that I’ve written it out, I think the title is not trying to make fun of the idea of long titles so much as it is being silly by trying to literally string together about four different titles. At least it’s better than Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13^th. There’s one more of these titles that is like twice this length but I’m having trouble tracking it down.

My favorite purely innocent long title is The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain. I suppose there is something cheeky about this – they could have figured out a simpler title if they’d wanted to – but the title does do an admirable job of describing what the movie is about, as it is about a provincial debate in the Welsh countryside about whether a local elevated surface is better described as a hill or a mountain. For a while, this was my favorite movie title to bring up in joke circumstances, when I was looking for something awkward to encapsulate a small, idiosyncratic non-blockbuster.

Supplanting The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain as my go-to random long title was Jeanne Dielmann, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which is not an easy choice as I always have to look up the exact wording, but is fun anyway. As this is an arthouse film with a very serious demeanor, this title exists to capture the everyday humdrum quality of a person’s life by naming the movie after her street address, not to be whimsical in any way, shape or form.

It’s probably worth including a subsection in this post about earnest documentaries with long subtitles, like Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief or If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front or Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place, but I don’t know that their length is “annoying.” Or if it is, it’s only annoying because it sounds more like the name of a graduate thesis than a movie.

I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of movies whose titles test our patience and don’t always reward us, but I can’t end this discussion without mentioning probably the actual best movie to be guilty of a thing like this, which is Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. If Stanley Kubrick did it, there has to be some merit there, right?

As for this new movie coming out, I think the main things that annoy me about the title are that it a) makes up a word, b) uses the word “one” as though pretending we don’t know who Harley Quinn is, and c) suggests that the movie is entirely about the fact that she has been “emancipated” from her relationship with the Joker, or at least so it would appear.

I think I’ve had enough references to the Joker for a couple years, thank you very much.