Thursday, December 31, 2020

Movies named like infinity stones, movies named like hurricanes

Unless something changes, Time will have been the last movie I watched in 2020. (I watched it last night, and thought the title itself was rather appropriate for the transition between years.)

Unless something changes, Soul will be the first movie I watch in 2021. (We're planning to watch it the night of January 1st for my son's birthday.)

Realizing this, I wondered, what other 2020 movies were named after the stones in Thanos' infinity gauntlet?

None as perfectly as that. However, there were films called Project Power and Color out of Space, so I think that's pretty good. Most years would probably not have films that had either of those bolded words in their titles. You probably almost never get a movie with the word "Reality" in its title, so that was never going to happen. "Mind" would have a chance, but there are only eight in the list of all the movies I've seen, so not a great one. (There's only one "Reality," that being Reality Bites of course.)

So I figure, the year after Thanos was finally dissolved from existence, his infinity stones were up for grabs?

While we're at it, I thought this was a good time to jam in another observation about 2020 films.

Have you noticed how many films released this year have had a woman's name as their title? Like, just the first name?

In other words, have you noticed how many films have been named like hurricanes?

I was planning to write this post when I finally see Shirley, which will be sometime before January 12th, but since my infinity stone observation was so brief, I decided just to piggyback on it with this one.

In addition to Shirley, we have the following this year, which either actually did come out, were scheduled to come out but were pushed back, or which (in one case) I saw at a (virtual) film festival.

In alphabetical order:

Annette
Becky
Clementine
Ema
Emma
Mulan
Rebecca
Wendy
Zola

And then there are two movies named after nicknames for female characters:

Babyteeth
Beanpole

And if you want to get into near misses -- or "missies," as the case may be -- you can consider also the following, which either consist of a woman's full name, or have a woman's name somewhere in the title:

Black Widow
Enola Holmes
The Glorias
Gretel & Hansel
Judy & Punch
Saint Frances
Selah and the Spades
Vitalina Varela
Wonder Woman 1984
The Wrong Missy

Incidentally, "Gloria" was the name of an actual powerful hurricane I experienced as a child. Hurricane Gloria whipped through New England in late September of 1985, according to Wikipedia, which also tells me it was the first significant tropical cyclone to hit the northeast of the United States since Hurricane Agnes in 1972. We all prepared for the worst and I can clearly remember the way it rained and the way the trees were blowing. We didn't evacuate and the only property damage we sustained was that a tree fell in our backyard, knocking down our "space trolley," which was kind of like the kiddie version of a zipline.

I guess I'd have to look at surrounding years to figure out if this is actually a significant number of movies named after female characters, but I can tell you that at one point, I looked down my Letterboxd Watchlist, and every other movie was one of these. 

Circumstantial evidence for the increased focus on women at the movies, maybe?

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