Simliar titles, 2013

By about this point in the weekend I've usually mapped out which movie I'm going to see on discount Monday at Cinema Nova. Tomorrow, it'll be The Spectacular Now (possibly in a double feature with 20 Feet From Stardom, if I have time and the screening times match up).

Determining this made me realize that The Spectacular Now has a similar title to the movie I saw last Monday, How I Live Now.

If you don't think sharing the word "Now" is noteworthy enough to mention, consider that I've seen only five other films altogether that have the word "Now" in their title (Apocalypse Now, Don't Look Now, Go Now, Now You See Me and Paradise Now). That's out of 3,859 total films I've seen. One of those five -- Now You See Me -- also hails from the year 2013.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that 2013 has been a year that's seen many similar titles. Let's consider some others:

What in the world? In a World ..., The World's End, World War Z

The most dangerous game. Ender's Game, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

In the end. Ender's Game, John Dies at the End, This is the End, The World's End

Someone the so-and-so. Jack the Giant Slayer, Oz the Great and Powerful

Fortysomething. 42, Movie 43

Achieving greatness. The Great Gatsby, Oz the Great and Powerful

Gotta get away. Escape from Planet Earth, Escape from Tomorrow, Escape Plan

Sound advice. Berberian Sound Studio, Sound City

One year too late. Short Term 12, 12 Years a Slave

Getting dark in here. Dark Skies, A Dark Truth, Star Trek Into Darkness, Thor: The Dark World

Best men. Best Man Down, The Best Man Holiday

Down and out. Best Man Down, Dead Man Down, Officer Down, White House Down

I don't want to be naive and suggest that you couldn't sit down and do this in many years, and certainly, there are some common words that recur in movie titles regularly over time.

However, I did enjoy sitting down and looking at some of the similarities in this particular year. Let me know of any I may have missed.

England under duress

Thanks to How I Live Now, which I saw Monday, I am aware of a new subgenre of movies:

"England Under Duress" movies.

Movies set in a post-apocalyptic Britain have a certain feel to them, don't they? A certain look of popping grubbiness. Together they form a loose fraternity of thematic compatriots.

How I Live Now is just the most recent, though as soon as I became aware of this subgenre, two others immediately popped into my mind: Children of Men and 28 Days Later. Never Let Me Go is in similar territory, by being in a dystopian future set in the past.

I like EUD movies. I like them a lot. In fact, if the examples I've come up with mean anything, I am very favorably predisposed toward anything that even gives off a whiff of this kind of movie.

How I Live Now is the adaptation of a YA novel about an American girl (the brilliant British teenage actress Saoirse Ronan) who is shipped to England just in time to become embroiled in a 21st century World War III, although one that doesn't have quite the catastrophic toll we've come to expect from movies that dramatize World War III. The toll is pretty traumatizing for a teen readership, though, I must say. The movie "goes there" from time to time. It's unafraid to tear our hearts out on occasion.

And England sure does look good as a fallen society.

I suspect it is mostly in the cinematography, but there's also something about England itself that makes it a good setting for this type of movie -- other than just being home to one of the world's top film industries. I suspect the country has that permanently moist look of just having been rained upon, and rain is pretty much the predominant mode of post apocalypse. That said, I don't believe it rains once in How I Live Now, so it's not quite as simple as that, either.

I think I'm trying to fumble my way to a more significant point when there may not be one waiting for me, but I'll carry on for a few more paragraphs anyway. The roots of this may go back a couple decades at least, to movies like A Clockwork Orange and Sid and Nancy, which are obviously both informed by the punk rock movement. Neither of those films is explicitly post-apocalyptic, but there is an apocalyptic mentality at work in both -- a sense that the world even as it is constructed in our lives today is on the verge of apocalypse.

I think England also has the advantage of its grim determination in making the bleakness more, I don't know, quotidian. Children of Men specifically addresses the notion of England soldiering on while the rest of the world goes to pieces. So maybe England is where one can find a functional post-apocalyptic environment, like the one seen in Children. It's the everyday, lived-in quality of a society in ruins that distinguishes these England Under Duress movies.

I'm sure there are other examples of this phenomenon, but as it is almost midnight and I started writing this post yesterday morning, I think I will leave off for now.