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?

A streak that surely cannot continue

When it rains it pours, and when I write about a certain type of thing on this blog, it seems that’s all I can write about.

So yes, this is my third post this week about a streak, in a manner of speaking. This one is not a very long one, but I’m going to write about it now before it inevitably ends.

It’s not a very profound one, either, but my gut says to write about it, so why not?

And that is this:

I’ve seen five movies released in 2020, and each one I’ve liked more than the one before it.

So yeah, both not very profound and not very likely to continue very much longer.

You’d expect that kind of thing to happen early on in the year, as January is not the time of year you should expect really good movies to be released. But in each of the past few years, one of the earliest movies I saw was also one of my favorite. Fyre was the third movie I watched in 2019 and it ended up in my top 20 for the year.

This year, it’s going a bit more like you’d expect. I guess I thought five movies were statistically significant enough to write about.

I started out with a very low bar to clear, as Dolittle was the first movie I saw in 2020. I gave it one star on Letterboxd, but spared you a rant about it here. (Though if you’d like to check out my review, by all means.)

The current streak would have seemed unlikely when the second movie I watched, Tyler Perry’s A Fall From Grace, jumped all the way up to 3.5 stars. But I have an informal rule about those star ratings. If I think better of it, I can change the star rating, as long as I haven’t since logged another movie on Letterboxd. I thought better of it before the window elapsed, and downgraded it to only three stars. It probably really deserves 2.5, but what can I say, I have a soft spot for Perry movies.

The streak might’ve been dead right there because the next movie up was Birds of Prey (Long Title I Won’t Type Out Here). As a sequel/spinoff to the abysmal Suicide Squad, it stood a good chance of giving Dolittle company in the doldrums of my 2020 rankings. But I ended up liking Cathy Yan’s movie more than I expected to – the Cathy Yan part of it might have had something to do with that – and the movie nudged ahead of A Fall From Grace on my running list.

But the bar was not so high that my next movie, Color Out of Space, had a hard time clearing it. That’s a flawed movie too, but its three stars were slightly more favorable than the three stars of either Birds of Prey or Fall From Grace. I mean, it’s a new adaptation of a Lovecraft story I read only last year, so it had that going for it even if Crazy Nic Cage and some good body horror didn’t prop it up.

Now is a good time to write this post, though, because Emma has made things a lot trickier for its successor. At first I gave Emma only 3.5 stars, but upon further reflection – there’s that informal rule again – I decided that my enjoyment of this confection was a lot more appropriately described at the four-star level. I go on more about it in this review, just posted within the last couple hours.

Now, it’s possible that the next movie I see could surpass Emma without being a four-star movie. I have trouble explaining it, but my rankings are not simply a matter of mathematically ordering all the films I see in a given year according to their star rating. But it’s more likely to need to hit four stars than it would be later in the year, as enough time won’t likely have passed for me to realize I was too generous toward Emma.

I don’t actually know what that next movie will be at this moment, but there’s a pretty good chance it will either be The Call of the Wild or Sonic the Hedgehog, either of which could involve my kids.

And while there’s some chance one of those movies will be better than Emma, better write this now and just tick off another Thursday on this blog.