New duplicates

There's a lot I could say about Michael Shanks' Together, which has jumped up near the top of my 2025 rankings, but some of what I would say is deep into spoiler territory, as well as my own alternate reading of the film, which didn't occur to me until its very last shot.

But, I'm sick.

So I'll just set aside the really interesting stuff today and write my second straight post about movie titles.

July was an interesting month in that I added four titles to my big movie list that were already on it.

How is that possible, you ask? How can you add a movie to a list when it is already on the list?

I didn't say the movie was on the list. I said the title.

It's not so profound as my succession of short paragraphs makes it sound. I mean, it isn't a hugely surprising thing to see a movie that has the same title as another movie you've already seen.

It is, I would argue, somewhat unusual to see so many within a short period of time. 

As you recall from this post, in April I did a mini project of ranking movies by their titles. The project entailed me finding movies with the same title that were not remakes of or sequels to each other, and determining which shared titles represented the best collective quality between all the movies that shared that title, all the way down to the worst. Yes, I have too much spare time on my hands, apparently.

That project produced only 47 titles that qualified during my whole history of watching movies. So yes, it's unusual that I would have added four to that list in only a single month this year.

The first of those is Thirst, a 1979 Australian vampire film directed by Rod Hardy that I quite liked, which I watched on July 3rd. That made it a duplicate of Park Chan-wook's 2009 film Thirst, which I also quite liked, and is also a vampire film, but not a remake of the 1979 film -- believe me, I checked. Thirst is just a good title for a movie about creatures who desire blood.

Moving forward a little more than a week, on July 11th I watched The Avengers, Jeremiah S. Chechik's 1998 film that I watched on the plane when I could not watch any more 2025 films that I had to give my full attention. This was also the film that, when Joss Whedon's The Avengers was released in 2012, made me think "We already had a movie called The Avengers." Little did I know what kind of behemoth would be launched by Whedon's film.

The final two have come within the past week. Last Sunday night I watched Brick, a 2025 German language film directed by Philip Koch, which was sold to me by Netflix as in the same vein as Cube and The Platform. It is, sort of, but it is not as good as those movies. That made this a duplicate of Rian Johnson's 2005 film Brick, which is certainly technically a better film than Johnson's, but which I probably don't like as much because I had a pretty negative reaction to it when I first saw it, and a second viewing only improved my impression somewhat. 

Finally we have Together, the movie about a couple in a rut who start to get physically stuck to one another (and so much more), watched on the final day of the month. This shares a title with Lukas Moodysson's 2000 film Together, which I wrote about lovingly here, about Swedes living on a commune.

So what?

Yeah except I like to write posts like this. Hang with me. It's been an issue in my life a little bit lately, for reasons I'll explain.

I actually don't like watching movies with the same titles. I grumble and think that the second film should have tried harder to think of something distinctive. There are an unlimited number of possible combinations of words out there -- just think of a different one to describe the events that happen in your movie. Yes many repeated titles are the generic rather than the specific ones, and a generic title can be preferable because it can be easier to remember. But you know, then I have to include the year in parentheses after the title when I update a list that includes both movies, just to distinguish them from one another, when you could have done that yourself by just thinking about it for another 15 minutes and coming up with something else.

But you know what? I am actually taking the opposite position in a scenario I'm very tangentially involved in, in my real life.

I won't go into too many particulars to protect her privacy, but my wife is actually producing a film for a director trying to make his first feature film, whose short she produced about eight years ago. The title of this film is a woman's name. Or was. Or actually still is, but now it's a different woman's name.

See, the original title has been dropped because it shares the name of another film. This other film is not even a film I've heard of, though the director is well known. The sales agent argued, quite unfoundedly I think, that they can't use the original name because it would cause too much confusion with this other film -- this other film that I, a person who has seen 7,033 films, has never heard of. I'm not sure that my wife or the director were compelled to take this advice, but they'd have to have a fairly convincing reason not to, so they've taken it.

Now the original name, exotic but familiar enough to remember, has been replaced by a name that's very exotic and very hard to remember, because it's not a name I've ever even heard before.

I tried to convince my wife not to take the advice of the sales agent. That's how I'm tangentially involved. But there was never very much of a chance my opinion would provide them a perspective that they hadn't already considered themselves, and indeed, they are going forward with the new name for the main character and the movie proposed by the sales agent.

My point in telling you this is: I'm inconsistent as hell.

But in terms of movies I'm actually watching, I won't let a movie having the same title as another movie prevent me from seeing it. I even intentionally complicated things for myself by watching two different movies called Swan Song that were both released in 2021, meaning I had to include the director's name in parentheses when I listed them in my year-end rankings that I published for you to read. I guess that was preferable to seeing only one of the two movies, and leaving you, the educated viewer who knows all the movies released in any given year, to wonder which of two movies of approximately equal prominence I was actually ranking. 

In terms of the month of July, both the best movie I saw that month (Together) and the worst (The Avengers) were new duplicates. 

I promise I won't hunt out more new duplicates in August just so I can write another post like this a month from now.