Taking a stand on Still

When a movie title appears differently in different places, I always think a good rule of thumb in determining what is "correct" is: How does it actually appear on screen in the movie?

There's little doubt, by that standard, that Davis Guggenheim's new film about Michael J. Fox is called Still. The title appears during the opening and closing credits, possibly twice in the closing credits, and in each instance appears as exactly that one five-letter word.

However, AppleTV+ wants to call the movie Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie. And IMDB and Letterbox'd have followed suit, Letterbox'd even capitalizing all the letters in STILL for some unknown reason. (See this post.)

Way to take a profound and thought-provoking title and render it clumsy, busy and needlessly explanatory.

See, Still doesn't just refer to the condition for which Fox is always striving, to keep the tremors of his Parkinson's at bay. It has a secondary meaning of him "still" being here, a reminder that he's alive, and sort of well, and with a loving family, even after being mostly out of the public eye for the past 25 years.

With the subtitle, it's just a display of marketing insecurity. Will people know this is a movie about Michael J. Fox if we don't put it in the title?

Yeah, if you include his picture with all the promotional materials, they will. 

In this case -- at least for now -- I'm going with the shorter and more poetic Still. I'm sure it's what Davis Guggenheim and Michael J. Fox wanted the movie to be called. Just look at the way they listed the title in their finished film.

Which is a really good one. It's not so different from the similar Val Kilmer film Val a few years ago, but I think I might like Guggenheim's choices even more here, telling the story of Fox's life using relevant bits of footage from his films and TV shows. It makes for a really lively document, one with a lot of forward momentum. Plus there's the fact that Fox plays a larger role in my personal cinematic history than Kilmer does, starring as he does in my second favorite film of all time, Back to the Future.

If the condition of stillness is elusive for Fox, the least we can do is allow him to achieve it in the title of the film about him.