Music first

A childhood friend of mine wrote the music for the very good documentary The Greatest Night in Pop. Which is kind of a funny thing to do, since most of the music we hear in the movie is snippets of "We Are the World."

But he did have a very good song that accompanied the opening credits, and for that he got the "music by" credit. A richly deserved credit for a really good musician and a really good guy.

When he posted about it on social media, though, perhaps the most interesting thing about the credit was revealed: it was the first one in the movie.

Considering that his contribution was "only" that bit of music we hear for about a minute over the opening credits, it's a strange position of prominence for his credit. (Please note the quotation marks around "only." It's a great honor, he performed it well, and it's a lot more than I could do.)

After watching Frida the other day, I've determined that this appears to be a thing.

I wasn't looking for the contributions of Victor Hernandez Stumpfhauser -- that's some name -- the way I was with my friend Goh Nakamura, but I did notice that Mr. Hernandez Stumpfhauser was also listed as the first credit in Frida. 

It's not something you would ever see in a feature film, so I'm trying to figure out what it is about a documentary that's different.

For one, there are no actors in a documentary. (Or in most documentaries, anyway.) The feature films that do still have opening credits are likely to lead with the names of the actors, adhering to a universal convention that no one questions. (Well, perhaps other people who worked on the film would dispute that they are the most important people in the film, but everyone else accepted it long ago.)

So if we aren't going to open the documentary credits with the music, I guess we need to figure out what other credits could potentially supersede that. And for that I will check both of these movies, because they both are still accessible to me on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

After the music credit, the credits in Pop go:

Music Supervisor, Director of Photography, Editor, Archive Producer, Executive Producer, Executive Producer of USA for Africa, Co-Producers, Producers (three times), Produced by, Director. (Let's not even get started on how producer credits are doled out and the distinctions between them that are only understood by people in the industry.)

After the music credit, the credits in Frida go:

Animation by, Editor, Supervising Editor, Executive Producers (three times), Produced by (three times), Director.

In Frida, if you were trying to showcase a truly distinctive role on this film, you could have gone with the animation first. I'm not saying the music was not distinctive, I'm just saying the thing about this movie is that it animates Frida Kahlo's paintings. You are going to remember that a lot more than you are going to remember the music, even if it's great.

If we were to look at the most similar role in The Greatest Night in Pop -- as in, a visual component about the film that was memorable -- it would probably the archive producer you would honor, because the priceless archives of America's greatest musicians rubbing elbows in one room are the thing you talk about after watching Pop.

Since executive producer positions are often given out as honoraria -- the joke in the industry is that if you want to kiss up to/placate someone, you offer them an executive producer credit -- they could have intensified the butt-kissing my promoting them to the top of the credits. But maybe even a cynical producer knows the executive producer does not deserve that sort of prominence.

Because you typically backload the "most important" roles -- producer and director, as well as writer in a fiction film -- those are not options. Editor? Although editor was third in Frida after music and animation, that job is usually closer to the big three listed at the start of this paragraph in terms of coming closer to the end of the credits than the beginning.

Music it is, then, I guess.

And hey, I have no problem with it. Don't misconstrue my examination of it here. A memorable musical score does wonders for a good movie. It can even elevate a not-so-good movie.

I had just never noticed this before, and then I noticed it twice in two months. (A newspaper editor would tell you that three of something makes a trend. I guess I'm going with two.)

I will keep my eye open for it going forward.

Movies about the same thing should not have the same title

Every time I see a movie that has the same title as another movie, I cringe a little bit. 

I know there are a finite number of words in the English language and I know that there are some titles that are too good to belong solely to the movie that happened to use the title first. But I don't love it. Not only do I now have to use a year in parentheses any time I include the movie in one of my lists, but I have to go back and retroactively add parentheses to the other movie to distinguish it from the new one.

I get it, though, in instances where the movies have nothing to do with each other. If talking about the two different versions of Frozen, you aren't likely going to confuse the one about magical ice princesses and the one where two people are in danger of freezing to death on a ski lift, with hungry wolves circling below. (And though Disney's Frozen has obviously become the far better known film, it was not the first of these two -- and when I heard the title of Disney's movie, I did feel the aforementioned annoyance because I already had the ski lift movie in my lists.)

Remakes are another scenario where it's okay. To use a recent example, I wouldn't expect them to call the remake of Road House anything other than Road House. You will need the parentheses, but you can easily distinguish them in casual conversation by saying "the original" or "the remake." (Now, if they remake it multiple times, like A Star is Born, then you have to start saying things like "the Judy Garland version," but I still would not expect them to come up with a new title.)

The one that kind of gives me the shits is using the title Frida to refer to two movies about Frida Kahlo, the more recent of which is not a remake of the first -- even if both movies are quite good.

Last night I watched Carla Gutierrez' new documentary on Amazon Prime, which uses the words from Kahlo's diaries and interviews to narrate her life, and animation of her paintings as the stand-out gimmick to accompany old photos and film footage. It's one of my favorite movies of the young 2024.

But there was also a 2002 biopic of Kahlo called Frida, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. 

I get that Kahlo is not a good title for a movie. But since it is the painter in her own words, what about I, Frida? Or Yo, Frida? (I guess that last might sound like you were yelling at someone. "Yo! Frida!")

Also I know this is a little bit of a flawed distinction to be making about the relative difficulty of distinguishing between the movies. If you can say "the Frozen about the stranded skiers" or "the original Road House" you can certainly say "Frida the biopic" or "Frida the documentary."

And here's something interesting to note: When I added the movie to Letterboxd just now, movies named Frida from 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 all also came up as options. I didn't check them to see if they were also movies about Frida Kahlo, but what else would they be? Whether this makes Gutierrez' reuse of the title more or less acceptable is, I suppose, a matter of perspective. 

I do hope a lot of us will be making this distinction, because not only is this already a contender for my top ten of 2024, but it also breathes some much-needed life into the documentary format, which has not been wowing me in recent years with a lot of outside-the-box examples. 

And having been reminded of the trajectory of Kahlo's life in a way that's in conversation with her art, Loving Vincent-style, I am now inclined to revisit Taymor's film as well. 

Potentially a lot of Frida's in my immediate past and near future.