The year movies were named like hurricanes

Have you noticed how many 2015 movies have just a woman's first name as their title?

Joy became the fifth on my list for this year, and there are two more prominent ones I'm planning to see over the next ten days. And Joy isn't even the only one starring Jennifer Lawrence. (Nor is it the only 2015 movie with a prominent character named Joy, thanks to Inside Out.)

Forthwith, we'll look at the candidates and their worthiness of being named after the main character, starting with ...

Joy
Directed by: David O. Russell
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Joy has a lot going on, to put it mildly, but it does mostly focus on this one character and her mop-inventing aspirations. It's also, I suppose, about her search for happiness, so yeah, she joins a storied cinematic tradition of characters with names that also function as intangible nouns. (If I see another movie character named Grace, I may have to kill myself -- and lookee here, there's a movie called Looking for Grace that came out two months ago.)

Serena
Directed by: Susanne Bier
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate
Thoughts: The other film starring Jennifer Lawrence actually bears a 2014 release year in IMDB, but didn't get released theatrically in the U.S. until February, and I'm firmly counting it with my 2015 movies. Like Joy, this also co-stars Bradley Cooper (we just can't separate these two -- they've been in at least four movies together, three of them directed by David O. Russell). It's about a Depression era North Carolina timber baron who marries a headstrong woman named Serena. However, it does not seem very essential that the movie was named after her, even if his fortunes do turn on his relationship with the character.

Cinderella
Directed by: Kenneth Branagh
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: I mean, it's the name of the story. Who are we to argue with that? However, as discussed in this post, I would have liked the movie better if the character had actually felt like the center of her own story, and not just a bystander letting fate buffet her around like a sailboat on a stormy ocean.

Maggie
Directed by: Henry Hobson
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: Wake up, Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you. You've been bitten by a zombie, and I don't think you're ever going BACK to school. Indeed, this is the story of Arnold Schwarzenegger's emotional struggle to save his daughter from the inevitable: death at the hands of a zombie bite. Her name is Maggie. Seems like as good a reason as any to choose this as the name of the movie -- it works a bit in the same capacity as We Need to Talk About Kevin, because yeah, when you've got a bitten daughter, you do need to talk about that shit.

Victoria
Directed by: Sebastian Schipper
Worthiness of being named after the main character: High
Thoughts: As the single character who is basically on the screen for the entire length of this daring single-take movie -- "basically," because during one scene where she could afford to get away for a moment, she supposedly excused herself to answer a desperate need to use the bathroom -- Laia Costa's Victoria does earn having a movie named after her. She's the sole constant in this two-plus hours of one late night in Berlin that goes from banal to crazy, in a believable if sometimes tedious fashion.

And the ones I haven't yet seen, and can only truly speculate about ...

Amy
Directed by: Asif Kapadia
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Moderate to high
Thoughts: I understand this to be a stripped-bare look into Amy Winehouse's life, and the title certainly works to convey that type of intimacy. My question is, is the single name Amy distinctive enough to indicate that the movie is about Amy Winehouse without any other knowledge of the film? I'd say no. Not like the future documentaries Beyonce and Rihanna will be, anyway.

Carol
Directed by: Todd Haynes
Worthiness of being named after the main character: Dubious
Thoughts: I say "dubious" only because I know this is a two-hander, meaning it is mostly about the two characters with (as I understand it) somewhat minimal acting contributions from others. If that's the case, naming the movie after only one of them seems to throw off the apparent balance. But I look forward to finding out for myself when this becomes one of the final films I watch before closing off my 2015 list next Thursday.

Other movies I've seen that would have fit well in 2015:

Amelie
Chloe
Coraline
Diana
Domino
Elizabeth
Emma
Evita
Frida
Gigi
Grace
Guinevere
Hanna
Ida 
Juno
Lucy 
Mallory
Margaret
Maryam
Miral
Mulan
Nell
Nena
Oleanna
Paprika
Selena
Tammy
Tess
Woo

That's only 29 other titles among all the 4,400+ movies I've ever seen. Makes the seven titles I will see in 2015 seem even more like a conglomeration.

A trend! I've identified it!

Revisionist backlash

What better movie to watch on New Year's Day than one where the clock striking midnight figures prominently into the plot?

Actually, that had no bearing on my decision to rent Cinderella along with Spy when I ran out on New Year's Eve to restock our refrigerator. Neither did the fact that we could watch it with my older son while the younger one was napping, making it a two-birds-with-one-stone affair -- though he ultimately tuned out after about 45 minutes. The real motivations were that a) I could keep the movies for an extra night because of the holiday, and b) I'd been pressing my wife to see it for about a month now, because I'd heard everyone talk about how good it was.

After seeing it, my only conclusion about the strength of the praise is that it's revisionist backlash.

Oh, this is an okay movie. More than okay, maybe. But John Waters' second favorite movie of the year? What?

It seems like people are sick of seeing Disney make its movies overly politically correct, and are happy just to see revisionism kicked to the curb for a change. And Waters has certainly never been a fan of political correctness.

To be sure, I'd heard that this was an old-fashioned, straightforward telling of this familiar fairy tale. However, I didn't expect it to be quite so ... boring. Apparently, this is what people liked about it.

Disney's recent movies have tended to be ... not so boring. Or at least, not so straightforward in their approach to the storytelling. Hits like the much-discussed Tangled and the uber-phenomenon Frozen both show Disney bending over backwards to make sure that the female characters have their own agency, that they do as much prince-saving as being saved by princes, and ultimately that they don't need no man. While those movies are not outright revisionism, you can find an example of outright revisionism only last year, when Disney told Sleeping Beauty from the perspective of its villain, Maleficent. And despite some flaws in the presentation, Maleficent the movie ultimately did some interesting things with its choice to view the title character sympathetically, to make her the victim of male hatred. (At the very least, it was giving us mature stuff that probably went over the heads of its youngest viewers.)

Cinderella is not like that at all. Cinderella is straighter than an arrow. It gives us pretty much exactly the story as we're accustomed to hearing it. Except for the fact that Kenneth Branagh's 2015 version is 27 minutes longer than the 1950 animated version, I would not even be surprised to hear that the story beats are apportioned out at exactly the same time intervals over the course of the narrative.

And this movie was a hit, especially relative to Maleficent, which had a much more tepid critical response (Cinderella's 67 on Metacritic puts it firmly in the green of "generally favorable reviews," while Maleficent's 56 leaves it in the murky orange of "mixed or average reviews").

So is this the artistic equivalent of a politician "getting back to straight talk?" Are audiences so frustrated with all this "liberal mumbo jumbo" that they just want someone who "tells it like it is?" And does "telling it like it is" entail female characters who, while not lacking entirely in agency, are happy enough just to be demure?

Another benefit I noted to the approaches of these other movies, particularly Tangled -- they're a lot more fun. A piece of wisdom I gleaned about Cinderella while seeing it through my son's eyes is just how damn sad the story is. First Ella's mother dies, which I had to explain to him and see how it impacted him. Then after another five minutes or so, her father dies, as another separate, elongated episode. Frozen at least had the decency to kill off both parents in one quick scene, showing nothing more than a ship sinking in the distance. Then of course Ella is subjected to a series of indignities at the hands of her wicked stepsisters and stepmother. By 30 minutes in you wonder if anything happy will ever happen in this movie, and that was about the time when my son said "Daddy, you know I don't like movies where things that happen are sad."

It caused me to think about Tangled, where no characters actually die until the very end, and then it's just the bad guy. That story gets its melancholy from a girl being kidnapped and her parents thinking she's dead, but the whole time we know she's alive and (basically) well inside a tower. Sure, that's kind of the exception as most Disney movies feature at least one dead parent, though usually only one. But the way Cinderella drags these things out and forces kids to focus on them is just kind of perverse.

I said my son checked out around 45 minutes, which was especially interesting because that's just when the magical stuff started to really happen -- the pumpkin turning into a carriage and whatnot. Well, when he came back to the movie later, it was when the prince's father this time was in bed, dying. So if you're keeping track at home, that's three dead parents of characters we like. No wonder my son quickly checked out again.

If your revisionism makes for a more fun movie and also gives the women a little bit of additional responsibility for the outcome of their own lives, by all means, revise these stories all you want.

And go sell your straight talk to somebody else.

Sleeping all these years

I keep a running list of all the movies I've ever seen.

This you know. I've told you before.

What I may not have told you is that there's almost no way it's complete. I like to think of it as complete, but the truth is, it was initially compiled out of a comprehensive guide available at the local video store in my hometown, over 20 years ago. I've made it as close to complete as possible over the years by adding any titles I think of that are missing, and I've been successful to the extent that I go years between realizing certain titles aren't on there.

But it still happens. As in last night, when I finally realized that Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty was not on my list of movies seen.

And all it took was seeing an updated softcore erotica version of the story for me to make the connection.

Actually, Julia Leigh's 2011 film Sleeping Beauty really only borrows the title of the Disney film/fairytale, as it involves a "beauty" (Emily Browning) who willfully consumes a drug that will put her into a deep sleep for several hours, during which time clients at a brothel can do anything they want to her, short of actual intercourse. So, don't take your kids to this one.

But as I was going to list it in my lists, I made a mental note to add the year 2011 in parenthesis after the movie to distinguish it from the 1959 Disney version. Oops. Nope, not on there.

So then I had to ask myself: "Did I actually see the original Sleeping Beauty?"

I had to think about it. I've long had a system for distinguishing the three animated movies from the early years of Disney that involved princesses. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the classic; Sleeping Beauty is okay but sort of forgettable (which is why I can never remember if I've seen it); and Cinderella is the one I haven't seen.

Oops. Cinderella actually appears on my lists.

Okay, so it looks like at some key moment in the history of compiling this list, I confused Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. It's probably because I know Cinderella is more classic and I'm a lot more familiar with the story, even if I haven't seen the Disney version. So I feel like I should have seen it over Sleeping Beauty. I haven't seen it ... right?

There's an easy way to correct this, and it's the same correction method I used last year when I wasn't sure I'd seen Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries: Just see the movie again. But do I really want to waste a viewing of Cinderella now, when I could wait two or three years and watch it with my son? I've actually been stockpiling a list of animated movies I haven't seen, intending to delay my first viewing until I can watch them with my son. If he then wants to watch that same movie another 30 times, that'll be one fewer total viewing for me to get sick of it.

So maybe the Cinderella issue will go unresolved for now, but after deliberating about it, I can now say pretty certainly that I did see Sleeping Beauty. It was during one of the theatrical re-releases that were common when I was a child, where I also saw the likes of Pinocchio, Snow White, Dumbo and Bambi. I'd venture to say that I saw those four before I saw Sleeping Beauty, and perhaps that's why I now remember for sure that I saw it -- I remember thinking that Beauty was "lesser Disney." Yep, there I was, an eight-year-old kid, contemplating the greaters and the lessers in Disney's catalogue.

As for this new Sleeping Beauty, well, it's not titillating, if that's what you were hoping for. It has some interesting moments, some shocking moments, but overall it's too opaque to make as much of an impression as it clearly wants to. The three things it does have going for it are the beautiful photography, uninterrupted takes that usually run the length of the whole scene, and a performance by Browning that must have been really difficult to pull off.

And unlike its predecessor, there's no chance I'll forget whether or not I saw it.