Movies about the same thing should not have the same title

Every time I see a movie that has the same title as another movie, I cringe a little bit. 

I know there are a finite number of words in the English language and I know that there are some titles that are too good to belong solely to the movie that happened to use the title first. But I don't love it. Not only do I now have to use a year in parentheses any time I include the movie in one of my lists, but I have to go back and retroactively add parentheses to the other movie to distinguish it from the new one.

I get it, though, in instances where the movies have nothing to do with each other. If talking about the two different versions of Frozen, you aren't likely going to confuse the one about magical ice princesses and the one where two people are in danger of freezing to death on a ski lift, with hungry wolves circling below. (And though Disney's Frozen has obviously become the far better known film, it was not the first of these two -- and when I heard the title of Disney's movie, I did feel the aforementioned annoyance because I already had the ski lift movie in my lists.)

Remakes are another scenario where it's okay. To use a recent example, I wouldn't expect them to call the remake of Road House anything other than Road House. You will need the parentheses, but you can easily distinguish them in casual conversation by saying "the original" or "the remake." (Now, if they remake it multiple times, like A Star is Born, then you have to start saying things like "the Judy Garland version," but I still would not expect them to come up with a new title.)

The one that kind of gives me the shits is using the title Frida to refer to two movies about Frida Kahlo, the more recent of which is not a remake of the first -- even if both movies are quite good.

Last night I watched Carla Gutierrez' new documentary on Amazon Prime, which uses the words from Kahlo's diaries and interviews to narrate her life, and animation of her paintings as the stand-out gimmick to accompany old photos and film footage. It's one of my favorite movies of the young 2024.

But there was also a 2002 biopic of Kahlo called Frida, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. 

I get that Kahlo is not a good title for a movie. But since it is the painter in her own words, what about I, Frida? Or Yo, Frida? (I guess that last might sound like you were yelling at someone. "Yo! Frida!")

Also I know this is a little bit of a flawed distinction to be making about the relative difficulty of distinguishing between the movies. If you can say "the Frozen about the stranded skiers" or "the original Road House" you can certainly say "Frida the biopic" or "Frida the documentary."

And here's something interesting to note: When I added the movie to Letterboxd just now, movies named Frida from 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022 all also came up as options. I didn't check them to see if they were also movies about Frida Kahlo, but what else would they be? Whether this makes Gutierrez' reuse of the title more or less acceptable is, I suppose, a matter of perspective. 

I do hope a lot of us will be making this distinction, because not only is this already a contender for my top ten of 2024, but it also breathes some much-needed life into the documentary format, which has not been wowing me in recent years with a lot of outside-the-box examples. 

And having been reminded of the trajectory of Kahlo's life in a way that's in conversation with her art, Loving Vincent-style, I am now inclined to revisit Taymor's film as well. 

Potentially a lot of Frida's in my immediate past and near future. 

The latest example of my extra sensory perception

Sometimes I just know things.

The most dumbfounding example came when my wife and I were watching a TV show set in a hospital. It wasn't ER but I don't remember at this point what it was. In fact, I think it's more likely that most of the show was not set in the hospital, but there was a single scene taking place there because one of the characters had had a medical emergency. 

I do remember that they were trying to save this character's life, but in the style familiar to all of us from seeing hundreds of life-saving scenes in hospitals in movies and TV shows, it was about time to "call it."

So I spoke aloud these words:

"Time of death, 2:36 p.m."

About two seconds later, the doctor on screen spoke these exact same words. 

All the explanations like "I saw a clock over their shoulder" or "I had already seen the episode before" or "I'm lying right now as I tell you this" were ruled out. It was a gosh darn miracle, of sorts.

I'm not going to say that what happened last night as I was watching the Road House remake was in the same category as that, but it was at least enough to write about.

During a nicely staged scene where Ellie (Daniela Melchior) takes Dalton (Jake Gyllenhaal) out on her boat to a shallow sand barge in the middle of the water, where they can drink beers and sit in lawn chairs without drowning. Ellie asks Dalton where he's from, originally, because she knows it's not the Florida Keys.

Immediately this popped into my head: Montana.

After the sort of thoughtful pause that is common to Dalton, he says "Montana."

I suppose getting a character's place of origin right when I had a 1 in 50 shot is not as impressive as naming a character's exact time of death, which required not only a correct 1 in 1440 guess, but also the knowledge that they were about to say this line of dialogue in the exact correct phrasing. But I still thought it was pretty impressive, and in some way indicative of powers we don't fully understand. 

I did do my due diligence to make sure I had no reason to have Elwood Dalton's correct birthplace implanted in my head. 

I went back to the start of the movie to make sure there was no Montana license plate visible in any of the shots. You do actually get a side glance at Dalton's license plate, but you can't make out the state and I certainly don't know what a Montana license plate looks like off the top of my head. Besides, there is no indication that's even where the opening scene is set, and considering that Dalton has become a drifter of sorts, there's no reason to expect he'd be likely to have returned from whence he came.

Then I thought about whether the original Road House, which I only saw for the first time recently but it's still been more than six years, was set in Montana. Nope, Missouri.

Then I thought about whether Jake Gyllenhaal hails from Montana and this is some sort of nod to the actor's own personal history, which I might have known about subconsciously. No, he's an LA baby as his parents were in the industry before he and his sister were. (Just to be sure there was no distant Montana connection, I also searched his Wikipedia page for mentions of the state, but there were none.)

Finally I checked to make sure Brokeback Mountain wasn't set in Montana, not that this would especially give me more reason to guess that as the birthplace of a character from a different movie that is not in any way related to Brokeback Mountain. No, that's set in Wyoming.

So I guess it's just a miracle then.

As for the movie itself, what a fun time. I'll have a review out in a couple days if you want to check back on the links to the right. 

People used to get older younger

I’m turning 45 years old this year.

It’s not until October, but it’s hanging out there with an air of inevitability. It will no longer be possible to finesse the semantics in my favor and say that I’m in my “early 40s.” “Mid-40s” will now be the only accurate term for me, and soon enough, the semantics will easily be finessed in the opposite direction to characterize me as “in my late 40s.”

While this is dispiriting in some respects, watching Road House makes it feel a little less so.

There are two actors in Road House, which I saw for the first time last night, who also turned 45 in the year the movie was released, 1989. In fact, Sam Elliott is only four days older than Kevin Tighe, born on August 9^th and August 13^th, respectively, in 1944. They are both still going strong today at age 73. They were 44 at the time the movie was released on May 19, 1989, but they officially hit their mid-40s three months later.

And my God do I look younger than they do.

These guys were old versions of 45. Actually, they were old versions of 44 at the time the film was made, or maybe even 43, but probably not. Just check out the pictures below:

Those guys do not look the same age as I do.

I’m not going to share a picture of me so you can judge for yourself. Switching from an anonymous blogger handle to my own name a few years back was a big enough deal for me, and I still don’t mention the names of my wife or my kids on this blog. Some things need to remain private.

But trust me, I look a lot younger than these guys. Granted, people do say I have a baby face. But these guys look like they could be at least ten years older than I am, maybe more.

And there’s no judgment in that. I would switch faces with Sam Elliott any day of the week. (Kevin Tighe, maybe not so much.) It’s not that I think they look decrepit, because Elliott is downright hunky in this movie. Just look at the way he runs his hands through that mane of salt and pepper hair. But it’s the sexiness of an older man, not a spring chicken like myself.

I might not have noticed it as much if the movie didn’t go on and on about how old Elliott is supposed to be. He’s the mentor to Patrick Swayze’s character, Dalton, the guy with the first name that’s begging for a great last name but never gets one. Swayze himself is no baby in this movie at age 36 going on 37, but you don’t get the sense he’s only eight years younger than Elliott. That’s just crazy.

Anyway, there are a number of lines of dialogue about how Elliott’s character, Wade Garrett (who does get a last name), is getting to be past his prime in the “cooler” business. (A “cooler,” I guess, is like the supervisor of the bouncers, the guy who is in charge of cooling heads and escorting people off the premises with a minimum of ego and violence.) THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE CONTAINS SPOILERS. Later on, the character played by Ben Gazzarra, after dispatching Wade Garrett through one of his minions, talks about “putting an old man out of his misery.” (And Gazzarra was one to talk, pushing 60 in this movie – though to be fair, he does not look significantly older than either Elliott or Tighe.)

It makes me think about that thing where Tom Cruise was the same age in one of his recent Mission: Impossible movies as Wilford Brimley was at the time he appeared as a grandfather in Cocoon, and how there was a world of physical difference between the athletic, health-conscious Cruise and the more normal, portly gentleman with the walrus moustache. Now I’m not saying I’m Cruise to Sam Elliott’s Wilford Brimley – I’d not only take his face, but also his physique and that hair, to say nothing of his voice. But I do think I look like a boy in comparison to him.

Good, I guess? Yay, I’m not the oldest looking nearly 45-year-old out there. And despite my baby face, I’m doing the best to make myself look grizzled, as my sideburns are almost completely white, yet I keep them around.

I guess I’m probably somewhere between Tom Cruise and Wilford Brimley, which is probably the best I can hope for.