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!

Directors so often resemble themselves

I was going to call this post Things We Lost in the Fire: The Logging Years, but I thought the headline I chose would get more eyeballs.

The reason I was going to call it that was because Susanne Bier, the Danish director who directed the Halle Berry movie Things We Lost in the Fire, also directed the movie I watched on Monday night, Serena.

The movies are superficially dissimilar, but both deal with a main female character who is in some ways recovering from the trauma of losing family members in a fire. They are, in fact, the only two movies I've seen that Bier has directed, although her 2010 film In a Better World won the best foreign language film Oscar.

Perhaps if I had seen any of Bier's other films, I would not have been inclined to write this post. But from such meager seeds grew a much larger idea in my brain: The realization (not for the first time) that directors are perhaps one of the most prominent artists to get rewarded for essentially repeating themselves throughout their career.

This is no slight at Ms. Bier, to be sure. Even if these two films have similar themes, their settings and time periods are entirely different. Other far more acclaimed directors can get accused of similar things, whether it's the approach to set design of someone like Wes Anderson or the reliance on involving characters in bizarre sexual play-acting of someone like Yorgos Lanthimos. (Who is on my mind as I just saw the third of his five features on Friday night, and it's remarkable how interested he continues to be in exploring the same themes.)

In fact, this should probably be no slight on directors, either. Creative individuals the world over seem inclined to repeat themselves, whether in the themes themselves or in the actual content of their art. I think of the joke about AC/DC, whom no one has ever accused of being more than the purveyors of fun rock music. Whether this really happened or not is unclear to me, but the joke has it that an interviewer once asked a member of AC/DC how he addressed the criticism that they have ten albums and they all sound exactly the same. "That's ridiculous," he responded. "We have 11 albums."

Yet because I am a film fan first and foremost, I tend to notice repetition more in filmmakers than I do in authors or painters or musicians. I notice when the same themes of sexual perversion, death and punishment of women tend to follow around Lars von Trier, or when Woody Allen continues trying to explore the dynamic of an older male character and a younger female one.

On the whole, however, we don't condemn directors for continuing to explore what becomes an obsessive life-long pursuit of one particular kind of emotional truth. Why is Martin Scorsese interested in gangsters? Why is Noah Baumbach interested in hipsters? They just are, and we love that they are trying to continue to discover the final word on what makes people like that tick. Because in some way, they are trying to discover what makes themselves tick.

However, I'm generally more impressed with filmmakers who have something to say through their approach to storytelling, not so much in needing to explore one particular thing that interests them. This is why I'm so floored when I discover that Tom Tykwer can make both Run Lola Run and Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which don't have a single thing in common in their look or themes. This is why the career of Ang Lee fascinates me so much, because no two films in an impressive filmography have seemed to bear any relationship to one another. This is why I'm trying to get my hands on A Most Violent Year as soon as I can, because after Margin Call and All is Lost, I have the sense that J.C. Chandor can do literally anything he wants.

It makes me wonder if being surprised is as much a key to loving the movies I love as anything else. If, for example, that's the reason I held Birdman in as much esteem as I did, because it felt like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu showing us a side of himself that all previous evidence had indicated was not there.

So at this point in these musings, I must admit to you that Susanne Bier made a particularly poor news peg for this post indeed. Looking into the plot of Things We Lost in the Fire on wikipedia, I am reminded that Berry's husband in that film was not actually killed in a fire. He was killed while trying heroically to defend a woman who was being beaten by her husband. The fire referenced in the title is either metaphorical, or an event that happened years before and may have only involved property damage.

So Bier may be more like Tykwer or Lee than she is like Scorsese or Anderson. And even Scorsese and Anderson may not be like Scorsese and Anderson -- Scorsese with tell you indignantly that he made Hugo, and Anderson is known to bristle at the suggestion that all his films are the same.

Anyway, as with any of the famously stream-of-consciousness discussions film fans have with each other -- and sometimes with themselves -- you don't always end up where you think you are going to end up when you started. And sometimes you realize your original thesis was totally wrong, or at least, incompletely considered.

The thing is, all the directors I've mentioned in this post make far more good films than bad ones, and I'm always interested in seeing what they're going to do next. Tell the same story, tell a different story ... just tell it well and you've got my attention.