The "by design" part is that I'm trying not to "fatten up on buddy comedies." This is what, when explaining why I set a record in 2025 for rankings, I said I'd done with movies released early in 2025 in order to start building my list for the year. So even if I liked some of those 2025 buddy comedies -- especially the one that kicked off my whole viewing year, Back in Action -- I'm trying to give some of them a miss this year. The movie I have been purposefully avoiding, toward that end, is The Wrecking Crew on Amazon Prime, which stars Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista. Which is a shame, because I like both of those guys. Maybe I'll give in later in the year, but not now.
The "by circumstance" part is that the most significant new release of 2026 so far, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, hit theaters when I still had a week of 2025 viewings left to complete before my ranking deadline. With some rare exceptions, I don't usually jump ahead to the next year before I'm finished with the previous year, and so I will wait for video on this one.
But I did have to eventually break down and see my fourth 2026 movie, in part because I might try to get a review up of it before the weekend, which would be the only review on the site this week.
It's F Valentine's Day, or F*ck Valentine's Day, or F--- Valentine's Day, or Fuck Valentine's Day, though how I'm ultimately going to list it is the subject of this post.
For obvious reasons, you can't use the title that the cheeky people behind this movie, who fancy themselves disruptors, want you to use -- not in a publication designed for any sort of mixed readership, that is. But that's somebody else's problem. They'll call their movie this, and let someone else sort out how we'll refer to it.
The first area we see struggle with this is the distributor itself, which, like The Wrecking Crew, is Amazon Prime. You can see the struggle here:
It's like they can put a picture that makes the word unmistakeable, but the actual listing only includes the F.
But then the two most prominent places I look up movie information -- IMDB and Letterboxd -- have differing approaches.
Letterboxd favors greater discretion, using F Valentine's Day, as Amazon does. IMDB, though, is willing to be more explicit, going with what the Amazon poster above indicates, which is F*ck Valentine's Day.
When these two sources disagree, I have to go to tiebreakers, and also, precedent. And we have some very recent precedent.
Last year there was a movie I watched and ranked called F Marry Kill. That's how I listed it in my lists, pretty much without hesitation. The two sites are consistent with their approaches on this movie, with Letterboxd going with F Marry Kill and IMDB indicating the full word, but bleeping out more of the letters: F*** Marry Kill.
Precedents before that? You have to go way back.
The only other movie I've seen with "fuck" in the title, or any variation on the word, is the 2005 documentary Fuck, which is devoted entirely to the usage, meaning, and cultural history of the f-bomb in our society.
On this, Letterboxd and IMDB agree: They just go with Fuck. And I think that's because you can't call a movie "F."
In fact, IMDB has six movies of varying length called Fuck. What can you do. Some people just want to bend the rules.
As always when it comes to how to write a title -- and this is something I've considered on several occasions before (there's three separate links there) -- the best tiebreaker is really how it's printed on screen in the movie. And in ... um, this movie ... you get:
Hmm. Whelp.
That isn't the way it's printed anywhere. F- Valentine's Day. It's like you're saying it was such a bad Valentine's Day that it earned a grade of F minus.
But one thing's for sure ... there are no asterisks, and there's definitely no C-K.
So given the recent precedent of F Marry Kill, and my very quick adoption of that title without a post like this, I'm going with F Valentine's Day.
It'd be so much easier if they just didn't try to draw more attention to a forgettable movie in the the first place by putting an f-bomb in its title.
No comments:
Post a Comment