Handling f-bombs in movie titles

I've had a slower start to my 2026 movie ranking season, in part by design and in part by circumstance.

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. 

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.

Unfortunate literal translations

You can always tell when you're watching a movie whose title has been translated literally from another language. 

This has no bearing on the quality of the film, I should stipulate. But it's something you notice, and I suppose in that sense it mildly detracts from the experience.

One such example was the movie I saw on Tuesday night, made by the very good French director Francois Ozon, director of such films as Swimming Pool, In the House and Young & Beautiful.

None of those titles I just mentioned suffer badly from the literal translations, though because I have just enough of a Francophile in me, I obviously think the originals sound nicer: Dans la Maison and Jeune et Jolie for the last two. Interestingly, Wikipedia does not list an original French title for Swimming Pool, though because I took eight years of French, I know it would be La Piscine. 

I'm not as sanguine about the English title of Quand Vient L'Automne, Ozon's newest film that I am reviewing for ReelGood: When Fall is Coming.

Awkward, right?

It is for sure a literal translation of the French title, but maybe in this case we needed something more. Maybe not an entirely new title -- though I've definitely seen that with French films before, as when the 2005 film Tout Pour Plair (Trick to Please) was changed to Thirtyfive Something for its release in the English-speaking world, for reasons that seem obvious when you see the literal translation -- but at least a slightly more natural version of the sentiment being expressed by that title.

When Fall Comes is not really right. Plus, I think you want to avoid using the word "comes" in the title of a movie if you can help it. "Is coming" is not quite such a reminder of sexual double entendres, to continue to use the French.

When Fall Arrives? That might be better, but it's still not quite right. Plus both of these titles lack the nuance that this is a looming arrival, not one that is quite there yet. 

Autumnal Equinox? Ha, I sort of like it but it maybe makes you think of a different sort of movie. 

Though I do think "fall" is an interesting choice, because "autumn" is the more commonly used term in places like the UK and Australia, and in fact, they likely only know what "fall" means because of American culture. Plus "autumn" is a more literal translation of that title.

Which actually brings me to another interesting point. It might also be a problematic choice. 

When you use the word "fall," you are obviously playing on another double entendre. Of course it is being used as a synonym for "autumn," but the far more common association with the word "fall" is as used in the phrase "fall from grace," metaphorically, or "fall off your bike," literally, both of which would have thematic applications to this particular film. 

The thing is, I'm not sure if there's that double meaning in the French title at all. Which means you are sort of changing the meaning of the title, and in a way, trifling with the artistic intentions, or lack thereof, of the writer and director.

In French, "to fall" is "tomber." Which as far as I'm aware, has no relationship whatsoever to the word "automne," beyond sharing the "tom" sound. (I checked with my wife, who is fluent, and she confirms it's not the same root for these two words.)

I doubt they'd produce an English title for his film without getting Ozon's approval of that title, and maybe he enjoyed the cheeky double meaning that he never originally intended. 

Regardless of what you call this film, it's pretty good and I recommend seeing it, though I'll caution you that it might share something in common with other French films you've seen, in that you'll get to the end and wonder if there was some key moment in the third act that failed to land the film's themes in a satisfying manner. What can you say, the French are known for that sort of thing. 

Ranking the best movies with the same titles

I've finally finished my project of adding all the 600-some movies that I hadn't added in real time to my big movie Excel spreadsheet.

I talked about that here if you want a fuller discussion. That's a pretty long post, and only part of it is about that. The short version: I was keeping up this spreadsheet of all the movies I'd seen, to accompany the Word document I have of the same, but I fell off in early 2022. I started catching up earlier this year, periodically when I had a few free moments, and now I'm finally all caught up.

So I thought I would celebrate with a little blogging project. We have Good Friday off, so I've got the time for it.

As I was adding these movies, I had to remind myself what convention I used for alphabetizing movies with the same titles. The question is the same as in the Word document, though I handle it a bit differently there. In the Word document, if two movies have the same title, I put the year after them in parenthesis, listing the older one first. So the logic is the same in Excel, except I don't need to use the parenthesis because the year gets its own column in the spreadsheet. 

This short conversation I had with myself in my head, though, prompted an idea. It was an idea I could have done from the Word document, but it works better here, because this Excel spreadsheet also reminds me whether I liked the movie or not, as exemplified in a column with either the word "Up" or the word "Down." (The thumb is implied.)

So I thought: Why not look at all the films I've seen with the same title, and decide which title, itself, provides me the best value?

It's actually an idea I had for the first time a while ago, and this was the kick in the pants I needed to finally do it. 

When I went through the list, I found 47 qualifying instances. That's not too many to rank, if you have a few (or 15) minutes. I'll keep my comments on each short. 

So let me explain the rules here. First, exclusions. 

1) No sequels or remakes or adaptations of the same material. I'm excluding any films that have the same title because they are interpretations of the same subject matter. It might be interesting to see which movies have the best remakes, but that's a difference exercise. 

2) No movies that are clearly in conversation with another movie, even if they don't have the same plot. This rules out movies like Nate Parker's Birth of a Nation, Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty and Ladj Ly's Les Miserables. Those titles would not have been chosen for those movies if they didn't intend to invoke some other source material for thematic purposes, which each of these movies does. 

3) Possessives matter. Disney chose to call their movie Disney's The Kid, at least as far as I've seen it listed most commonly, so that can't be the same title as Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. 

4) Subtitles matter. People may refer to Luc Besson's Joan of Arc film as The Messenger, but its full title is The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, meaning it can't team up with Oren Moverman's The Messenger. (Weirdly, I just checked on IMDB and they are currently calling Besson's movie Joan of Arc. Huh?)

5) Spelling matters. Even though Twentynine Palms and 29 Palms would clearly rank last on this list -- I discussed their awfulness in this post -- for the purposes of this exercise I am not considering these to be the same title. That's possibly arbitrary but it's what I'm going with. I gave the two movies their own separate labels when I wrote about them in that post, which tells you all you need to know. This rule also knocks out Nine and 9. 

6) Punctuation matters. I would love Darren Aronofsky's mother! to help strengthen the case of the two other movies I've seen called Mother, but it's not the same title. Nor is After.Life the same title as After Life, even though the period does create a space of sorts between the two words.

7) Articles matter. The Apostle is not the same title as Apostle. Same with A Hero and Hero. 

Okay, now the rules for how I will rank them:

1) Each movie will be listed with the title, the year and director of each one I've seen, and whether I gave them an Up or Down. 

2) Every title that has all Up will come in before any title that has at least one Down. Even if the other movie paired with the Down is one of my favorites of all time, the Down collectively drags them, um, down. 

3) Quantity matters. Any scenario where I've seen three movies with that title, and they are all Up, will have to be ranked ahead of any movie with only two Ups, even if I may like the movies in the second pair much better than any of the movies in the first trio. A bit arbitrary but it's what I'm going with. There are only a few instances of seeing three different movies with the same title and no instances of seeing four.

Okay, since I'm already on the verge of losing you, let's gets this started. Because this is not a situation involving building up the anticipation toward a big reveal, I'll rank them from best to worst.

1) The Silence 

Movies: 1963, Ingemar Bergman (Up); 2010, Baran bo Odar (Up); 2019, John R. Leonetti (Up)
Comment: There were two trios of movies where all three were a thumbs up, and to help me decide which I preferred, I consulted my Letterboxd ratings for them. These three had a combined 11.5 stars whereas the next trio I'll discuss had a combined 11, so this gets the #1 slot -- even if I suspect the 2019 A Quiet Place ripoff probably did not deserve 3.5 stars. Incidentally, I will not continue to use this tiebreak method for the most part. Bergman's is one of my favorite of his films and Odar's is a moody murder mystery. Incidentally, Odar's gets the poster for this post because I have already written about each of the other two Silences and used their posters in those posts. 

2) Lamb

Movies: 2015, Yared Zeleke (Up); 2016, Ross Partridge (Up); 2021, Vladimar Johannsson (Up)
Comments: The first two of these both got ranked in the same year, so that was confusing. The stories of an African boy and his lamb, an unusual relationship between a man and a girl who is not his daughter, and an Icelandic couple with a strange offspring could not be more different, but they are all good.

3) Swan Song

Movies: 2021, Benjamin Cleary (Up); 2021, Todd Stephens (Up)
Comment: Speaking of movies ranked in the same year, these movies were my #6 and #20 of 2021. It may be recency bias that places these two ahead of all the double Ups, but I was profoundly moved by both the story of a terminally ill man considering whether to give over his life to a healthy clone, without telling his family, and a gay man in a nursing home trying to have a last hurrah from his old life.

4) Birds of Passage 

Movies: 2015, Olivier Ringier (Up); 2018, Cristina Gallego & Ciro Guerra (Up)
Comment: My intense appreciation for the five-star look at an indigenous family and its role in the South American drug trade elevates the very sweet coming of age story that I watched while selecting movies for the Human Rights and Arts Film Festival.

5) The Harder They Fall 

Movies: 1956, Mark Robson (Up); 2021, Jeymes Samuel (Up)
Comment: I watched these movies in the same night, as you may remember from this post. (You don't remember it. I'm fooling myself.) I went surprisingly hard for the Humphrey Bogart boxing movie as part of a conclusion of my Knowing Noir monthly series in 2021, and then was enthralled by the style of the western that followed.

6) Mother 

Movies: 1996, Albert Brooks (Up); 2009, Bong Joon-ho (Up)
Comment: This title does quite well with or without the help of mother! It'd be higher if I only liked the Brooks movie a bit more, but Bong's is probably my second favorite of his, behind only Parasite. (Actually it's higher on my Flickchart than Parasite, but I suspect if they came up in a duel I would choose Parasite.) 

7) The Girl Next Door 

Movies: 2004, Luke Greenfield (Up); 2007, Gregory Wilson (Up)
Comment: This might be higher just on the strength of the personal favorite, better-than-a-guilty-pleasure story of a high school kid and his relationship with his new porn star neighbor, but the 2007 Girl Next Door is a rough sit. This is the one about the kids who rape and torture their neighbor in the basement for weeks on end, with the knowledge and support of their mother, based on a true story. It's good but yikes. 

8) The Interview 

Movies: 1998, Craig Monahan (Up); 2014, Evan Goldberg & Seth Rogen (Up)
Comment: My wife and I were some of the biggest supporters of the otherwise generally dismissed movie in which a pair of journalists try to kill the supreme leader of North Korea, but it's the Australian film with a pre-Matrix Hugo Weaving that is the key here, moody and sinister. 

9) Proof 

Movies: 1991, Jocelyn Moorhouse (Up); 2005, John Madden (Up)
Comment: And we have our second straight pairing involving a young, even younger this time, Hugo Weaving. He plays a blind man in Moorhouse's very good film, but I was a big sucker for the Madden version starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins -- though I have not revisited it as I suspect it might not hold up. 

10) Life Itself 

Movies: 2014, Steve James (Up); 2018, Dan Fogelman (Up)
Comment: James' documentary about Roger Ebert got five stars from me, so obviously I loved it. I actually quite liked Fogelman's film too, a "hyperlink" melodrama starring Oscar Isaac and Olivia Wilde, but I was in the minority on that one. The guilt keeps me from ranking this pair higher. 

11) Monster 

Movies: 2003, Patty Jenkins (Up); 2023, Hirokazu Kore-eda (Up)
Comment: Kore-eda is one of my favorite directors and this coming-of-age story is a top three of his films. Despite the Oscar-winning performance from Charlize Theron, though, I would say I respect Jenkins' film more than I love it. 

12) Look Both Ways 

Movies: 2005, Sarah Watt (Up); 2022, Wanuri Kahiu (Up)
Comment: This pairing might be lower except I was sucked in deep by Kahiu's Netflix movie that was surely designed to hook in women and not give us much else, but it did give us a lot else, including wonderful work from Lili Reinhart. Watt's film is really strong, too, and my wife knows the sister of the director, who sadly passed. (The director, not the sister.)

13) Thelma

Movies: 2017, Joachim Trier (Up); 2024, Josh Margolin (Up)
Comment: Trier's artistically accomplished look at a girl with telekinesis is more a curiosity I respect than a film I love, but I was quite charmed by last year's film about the vengeful senior citizen going after the man who scammed her.

14) Last Night 

Movies: 1998, Don McKellar (Up); 2011, Massy Tadjedin (Up)
Comment: Both of these movies are mid-strong. The first is a quiet -- well, quiet by the standards of this sort of genre -- Canadian movie about how people are spending what they know is the last night on earth before some unseen apocalypse that is otherwise not visible to anyone. Sandra Oh is in it. The second is a mature movie about potential adultery with really good performances by Keira Knightly and Sam Worthington. 

15) Joy Ride 

Movies: 2001, John Dahl (Up); 2023, Adele Lim (Up)
Comment: Lim's buddy comedy among Asian women was just pretty good, not great, but I was a big fan back in the day of Dahl's movie about three young people being stalked by a malicious trucker, though I didn't like it quite as much on a recent revisit.

16) Frozen 

Movies: 2010, Adam Green (Up); 2013, Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee (Up)
Comment: Perhaps because of the very short window between the release of these two movies, I remember the release of the Disney movie really making me think about the phenomenon of reusing a title that was already out there rather than going with something distinctive. Of course, the movie about skiers trapped on a lift above hungry wolves would not stake very much of a claim to the title in light of the through-the-roof Disney phenomenon, which I don't like as much as most people do. (See other discussions on this blog about its rivalry with my beloved Tangled.)

17) Passengers

Movies: 2008, Rodrigo Garcia (Up); 2016, Morten Tyldum (Up)
Comment: Now we're getting into the zone where one of the Up movies has something fairly problematic about it. I really vibed with Garcia's film about survivors of a plane crash in grief counseling, but the troublesome aspects of the Chris Pratt-Jennifer Lawrence vehicle about awakened passengers on a hundred-year space journey have been well documented. (I still liked it overall though.)

18) The Square

Movies: 2008, Nash Edgerton (Up); 2017, Ruben Ostlund (Up)
Comment: There are people who like Ostlund's film a lot more than I do. I was expecting a bit more given my affection for Force Majeure, though the uncomfortable seats in the theater where I watched it probably made it more of a tough sit (literally) than it would have otherwise been. Edgerton's Australian crime drama is fine but a bit forgettable. 

19) Awake 

Movies: 2007, Joby Herald (Up); 2021, Mark Raso (Up)
Comment: Here are two genre films that are just three-star efforts for me, just on the right side of a recommendation; one a story of a woman who awakens during surgery where she's supposed to be asleep, and one of a world where human beings have lost the ability to sleep and trying to find a cure before they all die.

20) The Killer 

Movies: 1989, John Woo (Up); 2023, David Fincher (Up)
Comment: The Woo movie I remember more by reputation of the people who love it, and on that basis, it should drag The Killer ahead of Awake. However, I am fairly down on Fincher's movie the further I get from it, which drags the pair down. If I were giving out an assessment anew, I might go thumbs down on Fincher's movie. 

21) It 

Movies: 1925, Clarence Badger (Up); 1990, Tommy Lee Wallace (Down); 2017, Andy Muschietti (Up)
Comment: Here we get our first asterisk of this exercise; a couple asterisks, actually. The two more recent versions of It are both adaptations of Stephen King's novel, and the one from 1990 is actually a TV miniseries, though it has gotten grandfathered in to my list for reasons I won't bother to explain right now. However, obviously the 1925 It, starring Clara Bow, is not the same subject matter, so it should be included in this exercise. Because I believe I liked the Bow movie (it's a little hazy in my memory) and I know I liked Muschietti's It adaptation, I've included it at this pivot point where we're starting to include films I didn't care for -- especially since if I excluded the 1990 miniseries entirely, this would just be two films called It about different things.

22) Hero 

Movies: 1992, Stephen Frears (Down); 2004, Zhang Yimou (Up)
Comment: In trying to figure out how to choose which title to rank first out of the pairs where I liked one and didn't like the other, I looked to which of the films that I liked, I liked best. Assuming, that is, the other was not completely terrible. That describes Zhang's beautiful, painterly wuxia film and Frears' curious misfire about journalism and stolen valor. 

23) The Hunt

Movies: 2012, Thomas Vinterberg (Up); 2020, Craig Zobel (Down)
Comment: I believe I like Vinterberg's The Hunt more than I like Zhang's Hero, just barely, but I have a more negative appraisal of Zobel's The Hunt than Frears' Hero. The heartbreaking look at a teacher falsely accused of molestation by one of his students, which has a great Mads Mikkelsen performance at its center, is a minor masterpiece. The Most Dangerous Game-inspired movie about hunting humans is not.

24) Greed

Movies: 1925, Erich von Stroheim (Up); 2020, Michael Winterbottom (Down)
Comment: The gulf in quality between the two movies continues to widen with the two Greeds. Von Stroheim's is one of the great silent films of all time, in my top 100 on Flickchart, while I was really put off by Winterbottom's acidic look at a bastard played by Steve Coogan.

25) Kicking and/& Screaming

Movies: 1995, Noah Baumbach (Up); 2005, Jesse Dylan (Down)
Comment: About at this same level of difference in quality are my favorite Noah Baumbach film -- yes, I know that's a bold statement -- and just about my least favorite Will Ferrell film (although this year's You're Cordially Invited gives this one a run for its money). I suppose this requires another asterisk of sorts. I say punctuation matters in whether a title is the same or not, but I don't think that extends to the fairly arbitrary difference between an "and" and an ampersand. 

26) The Illusionist 

Movies: 2006, Neil Burger (Down); 2010, Sylvain Chomet (Up)
Comment: Back closer in quality, inspiring less of an extreme feeling from me, is this pair. Each can be compared to another film like it to color my impression. Although Burger's film was not a major misfire, it suffered majorly in comparison to the other contemporaneous magic movie, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. And although Chomet's is undoubtedly a delight in his unique style, I don't remember nearly as much about it as I remember about his The Triplets of Belleville. 

27) Possession

Movies: 1981, Andrzej Zulawski (Up); 2002, Neil Labute (Down)
Comment: As awesome as Zulawskis' film is in its batshit craziness, Labute's film is that indistinct. I remember that Gwyneth Paltrow is in it and that I did not care for it, but little else. 

28) White Noise

Movies: 2005, Geoffrey Sax (Down); 2022, Noah Baumbach (Up)
Comment: It took my a little while to get on the wavelength of Baumbach's apocalyptic adaptation of a Don DeLillo period piece novel, but once I did, I was really on it. The thing I remember most about the 2005 Michael Keaton thriller is that it was a contender for my first date with my wife. Thankfully, we saw The Aviator instead. 

29) The Nest

Movies: 1987, Terence H. Winkless (Down); 2020, Sean Durkin (Up)
Comment: Durkin's movie about Jude Law and Carrie Coon trying to make a new life for themselves in a British castle in the late 1980s is a very good examination of domestic discord in an era of wealth acquisition. Winkless' movie is about killer insects.

30) Under the Shadow 

Movies: 2013, Fiona Lloyd-Davies (Down); 2016, Babak Anvari (Up)
Comment: I remember very little about Lloyd-Davies' movie, which, like with Birds of Passage, I was tasked with watching for HRAFF. Only enough to say that I didn't care for it. Anvari's Iran-set horror movie that turns elements of Islam into horror iconography, though, was quite memorable. 

31) Talk to Me

Movies: 2007, Kasi Lemmons (Up); 2023, Danny & Michael Philippou (Down)
Comment: I found Lemmons' look at DJ Petey Greene (Don Cheadle) compelling and engrossing, and the pair would have been higher had I not been completely out of sync with popular opinion on the recent horror film from a pair of Australian directing brothers, which I basically hated.

32) Joy 

Movies: 2015, David O. Russell (Down); 2024, Ben Taylor (Up)
Comment: I wasn't expecting to be quite as taken as I was with the story about the scientists and doctors who developed in vitro fertilization, but Russell's movie about Jennifer Lawrence is confused. When Russell misses, he misses big. 

33) Robots 

Movies: 2005, Chris Wedge & Carlos Saldanha (Down); 2023, Casper Christensen & Anthony Hines (Up)
Comment: Here is a very mild thumbs down and a very mild thumbs up. In fact, I was surprised to see that I had given a thumbs down to the animated movie starring the voice of Robin Williams, though I knew any affection I had for it was marginal. It might be a better movie than the recent story of Shailene Woodley and Jack Whitehall playing both people and their robot doppelgangers, but I enjoyed watching the latter better. 

34) The Freshman 

Movies: 1925, Fred Newmeyer & Sam Taylor (Up); 1990, Andrew Bergman (Down)
Comment: All I really remember about the vehicle for Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick is that I saw it and that my spreadsheet says I liked it little enough to not give it a recommendation. I saw the Harold Lloyd movie during my silent movie series No Audio Audient about six years ago and thought it was pretty good. 

35) The Stranger

Movies: 1946, Orson Welles (Down); 2022, Thomas M. Wright (Up)
Comment: You'd be forgiven for thinking I mixed up which one of these was up and which one was down, but I was surprised at how disappointed I was by the Welles film. The Wright film about Australian drifters, starring Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris, works better.  

36) Smile

Movies: 2005, Jeffrey Kramer (Down); 2022, Parker Finn (Up)
Comment: I appreciated, but did not love, the horror movie with the people and their maniac smiles from a couple years ago, which got a sequel last year that I still haven't seen. The one from 2005, though, is a really unfortunate movie about a person with a cleft palette, which has such a better message than its ability to present it. 

37) Damsel 

Movies: 2018, Nathan & David Zellner (Down); 2024, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (Up)
Comment: My affection for Millie Bobby Brown is undoubtedly driving my positive feelings toward Fresnadillo's film, which most people dismissed and which I likely would have also dismissed if not for Brown. Most would prefer the Zellner western, but it left me unsatisfied and scratching my head.

38) Hush

Movies: 1998, Jonathan Darby (Up); 2016, Mike Flanagan (Down)
Comment: I'm similarly in the minority in having any positive feelings about Darby's film, another one that stars Gwyneth Paltrow, but it was one of the first movies I reviewed when I was doing my first reviewing gig at the weekly newspaper in Rhode Island, and I kind of got into its groove (even though it famously had to come back for reshoots, which I apparently did not notice at the time). However, it's really dragged down by Flanagan's film about the home invasion of the deaf woman's home, a big miss for me even though I like most of Flanagan's other horrors.

39) Christine 

Movies: 1983, John Carpenter (Down); 2016, Antonio Campos (Up)
Comment: I barely remember Carpenter's King adaptation, though the fact that it was Carpenter makes me wonder if I'd appreciate it more if I saw it today. I vastly prefer Kate Plays Christine as a movie about Christine Chubbuck, but liked this one just enough to give it a recommendation. However, it's telling that I couldn't remember, until I checked just now, which one was thumbs up and which one was thumbs down. 

40) Scoop 

Movies: 2006, Woody Allen (Down); 2024, Philip Martin (Up)
Comment: Last year's Prince Andrew movie essentially went in one ear and out the other for me, and not just because I saw it on a plane. I did give it a thumbs up though. I remember Allen's movie better, but found it terminally frivolous and not worth the time, even with the presence of Scarlett Johansson.

41) Fly Me to the Moon

Movies: 2008, Ben Stassen (Up); 2024, Greg Berlanti (Down)
Comment: The movie from the third-rate animation studio about flies who hitch a ride on an Apollo mission to the moon was mildly diverting, but it's not something that would make the cut for me to watch today. Last year's similarly themed movie, only with humans, just didn't really work for me -- again, even with the presence of Scarlett Johansson. 

42) Rage

Movies: 2014, Paco Cabezas (Down); 2021, John Balazs (Up)
Comment: And here we get to what I believe is our final asterisk. Cabezas' disposable Nicolas Cage vehicle was actually called Tokarev in some markets, and Rage in others. I recorded it as Rage for reasons discussed in this post (it's the American title, and I follow all things American when it comes to movies). Anyway, it's not good. Balazs is a filmmaker who contacted me directly to review his film for ReelGood. I did end up liking it, though I thought it had the not-quite-ready-for-primetime quality of a film made by a person who directly contacts critics to review his films. 

43) Crash

Movies: 1996, David Cronenberg (Down); 2005, Paul Haggis (Down)
Comment: It's hard to believe there are only five titles where I didn't like either of the movies I saw. This one ranks at the top because I think there are arguments to be made that I did like both of these movies, or would if I saw them today. With the Cronenberg, I think I was too new of a cinephile to appreciate what was going on there, though I have to say, his movies are hit and miss with me to this day. With the Haggis (remember when he was a thing?), I famously remember telling my then girlfriend/now wife, at the time we saw it, that it was probably the best movie I'd seen that year. How quickly that curdled into the total backlash state that has been its enduring legacy.

44) The Gift

Movies: 2000, Sam Raimi (Down); 2015, Joel Edgerton (Down)
Comment: These are both genre movies that are mild failures; both thrillers, if memory serves. Memory does not serve very well on the Raimi film, though. I just remember it not clicking for me. Edgerton's film is fresher in my memory and probably misses by about the same margin. Both Edgerton brothers have a film on this list (The Square for Nash).

45) Brothers 

Movies: 2009, Jim Sheridan (Down); 2024, Max Barbakow (Down)
Comment: Speaking of brothers. Now we are getting into the quite bad. I can't remember why Sheridan's remake of a Danish film I haven't seen, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman, was such a whiff, but I do remember my strongly negative feelings toward it. The strongly negative feelings are a lot more recent for last year's movie that many people thought was supposed to be a remake of Twins, with Josh Brolin and Peter Dinklage.

46) Employee of the Month 

Movies: 2004, Mitch Rouse (Down); 2006, Gregory Coolidge (Down)
Comment: For movies whose titles celebrate superlative performances -- even though I believe it's supposed to be ironic in both cases -- these movies are entirely lacking in superlatives. One stars Matt Dillon. One stars Dane Cook. Both are awful.

47) Serenity 

Movies: 2005, Joss Whedon (Down); 2019, Steven Knight (Down)
Comment: And lucky last goes to perhaps Lloyd Braun's favorite pair of movies, or would they cause him to scream out "Serenity now!"? I famously can't stand the Firefly movie, which we thought was so horrid that my wife and I used to quote from it for its terrible dialogue. Our favorite one was: "Everyone on this planet is dead for no reason." Maybe we just didn't get it. Then you have Knight's truly bizarre Matthew McCaughney starrer, whose absurdity I can't even get into without going into spoilers, though I've also blocked most of it out.

If you are still here, congratulations. That was a long and tedious exercise.

But at least it's done now.

How the hell do you punctuate this film?

I saw a film with the words "mother" and "couch" in the title last night, but almost everything else about the title seems to be up to the interpretation of wherever it's printed.

On iTunes this movie was called Mother, Couch when I purchased it for rental. It was renting at only $1.99, which was a minor miracle as I rarely pay less than $5.99 for a current year iTunes rental these days, $4.99 if I'm lucky, or $3.99 if it's a movie from the past. Mother, Couch seems to be the most common way to list the title around the internet. 

There are two possible semantic meanings to the title when listed this way. I prefer the one that suggests they are being introduced to each other, like "Mother, Couch. Couch, Mother." I include the second half of the introduction just to illustrate exactly what I mean. I like this one because indeed, the story revolves around an 82-year-old woman (Ellen Burstyn is actually turning 92 in three weeks) who sits down on a couch in a furniture store and then refuses to leave.

Or there is the simpler "This is a movie about two things, and the two things are listed with a comma so you know they are not part of the same thing. One is a mother. The other is a couch."

In the movie itself, though, the title appears as Mother, Couch! in the opening credits. I thought it might have been Mother Couch!, but I went back this morning and saw that indeed the comma was present. Which I was glad to see, because otherwise that would mean someone made up a comma out of whole cloth. 

The possible semantic meaning of this is less clear. It could be the same as meaning 1 above, only it indicates the excitement of this introduction, particular on behalf of the mother. (We have to assume that the couch, as an inanimate object, is indifferent to the introduction.) Or it could be that the mother is ordinary, but the couch is extraordinary, which is certainly her impression of it. Though that is not spoken in so many words, nor is it clear this particular couch has any particular value to her other than as a symbol of arriving at a moment in time where she is not going to budge anymore, and this happens to be where he was physically located at the time she passed this point of no return in her head.

But then on IMDB it is just listed as Mother Couch, with an acknowledgement of the original title Mother, Couch -- which is still not accurate from the film itself. Mother Couch offers a new possible interpretation in terms of meaning, which is similar to "mother country." Like, this is the couch from which all the characters -- who include three grown children -- originate. Or more literally -- but then I suppose more figuratively -- she is the mother in a family of couches, and they are all baby couches, albeit grown baby couches.

So then I started to think about other possible punctuations that would give us other meanings.

The one I like best here is mother! Couch. And the reason for starting it in lower case is that it evokes Darren Aronofsky's mother!, another film with an exclamation point that befuddled people. It's appropriate because as this film goes along, it leaves behind some of the shackles of realism to provide us with material that is more chaotic and symbolic, or just projections of what the characters may be seeing in their minds, which is akin to the most common mode of mother! Then there's the connection that the last time I saw Burstyn as anguished as this on screen was when she was in Aronofsky's classic Requiem for a Dream.

Not that mother! Couch makes much sense considering our ordinary grammatical rules, but even less sense would be Mother Couch,. Yes, that would be ending the title with a comma. There I suppose the comma would serve sort of the same function as an ellipses, which suggest there is more to say on this topic -- and in watching the film, you would know for sure that there is. 

So how about going outside the punctuation marks already provided?

Mother? Couch. - This would be asking the question if this character is a mother, and then returning the answer that no, this character is a couch.

Mother Couch? - This would be questioning whether this is indeed the couch from which all the younger couches emerged, or do we have a case of mistaken identity.

Mother? Couch? - This would be where both the mother and the couch got lost in the woods, and as the kids are searching for them, they are calling out their names to see if they will answer.

(Side note: I always think it's funny when people are searching for other people in the movies and they have to individually call the names of each person they are searching for. Let's say there are four lost children. You have to rotate through calling each of the names, as though a lost child hearing this call would not respond unless their own name had been called. Maybe the parents just don't want to have to explain, after the fact, why one of the kids did not have their name called. Do the parents love that kid less than the other kids?)

Mother; Couch - The couch gives us additional understanding of the mother, but the two concepts don't have a close enough literal connection to be separated by something so simple as a comma.

Mother > Couch - It is better to have a mother than it is to have a couch.

Mother "Couch" - It is only a symbolic couch, and this is its mother.

¿Mother Couch? - The same movie, but dubbed into Spanish.

On my blog and in all my lists, I have decided I will refer to this movie as Mother, Couch!, with the last comma only for the structure of this sentence, and only the first comma and exclamation point as part of the title. That's how it appears in the movie.

However, when I put the label in on my blog, I will have to go with mother couch! -- which I do not see as the actual listed title anywhere -- because Blogger interprets the comma as a separation of two different labels, not part of a single label that happens to contain ambiguous punctuation. 

When space is at a premium

I was looking through my work notebook today and I saw some notes I scribbled while on the plane to Singapore last month, reminding me that I never actually wrote the post I intended to write from those notes.

So let's pretend it's still three weeks ago -- a much more innocent, simpler time -- and we'll go from there. 

When I was scrolling through the movies available on the plane, I noticed something funny. They didn't allocate enough space to fit in the full movie title for titles that were more than about four words long, which I get. It's some of the abbreviations themselves that I didn't get, since many of them were lacking the most important word, the word that really orients you and provides you the most relevant information about whether this is something you really want to watch -- namely, the franchise title.

And so it is that the following options appeared on the plane for my viewing pleasure:

The Chamber of Secrets
Let There Be Carnage
Here We Go Again!
The Meaning of Life
Order of the Phoenix
Prisoner of Azkaban
Return of the King
The Two Towers
The Half-Blood Prince

Of course, you know what franchises these movies are a part of, because you're a cinephile. But your average punter (to use the Australian term), who only watches movies when they're on a plane? Imagine their surprise when they click into the movie with the incredibly cool title Let There Be Carnage and find out that it's just another dumb superhero movie. 

If I'm this airline -- and it was nearly a month ago so I'm not even sure I remember which airline it was -- oh yeah it was JetStar -- I feel like I'm better off, on a limited word count, going with something like Harry Potter: The Chamber or Mamma Mia: Here We. The name of the franchise is actually what you really care about, not which of the many sequels it is. And if you then do care about which sequel it is, at least you have a couple unique words in the subtitle to help distinguish it from other sequels.

The funny thing about this was that they did not do this for the Spider-Man movies.

Each of the three Spider-Man movies available contained their full title, likely because each subtitle (No Way Home, Far From Home, Homecoming) contained just few enough additional characters to meet the space limitations. It seemed like an exception for this franchise, but it was more like a coincidence driven by the shorter and snappier Spider-Man titles. By contrast, titular brevity has not been the strong suit for the Harry Potter series. 

Werewolves not swearwolves -- nor cookies

When I first heard the title of the werewolf movie Ginger Snaps, I thought it was a play on the name of that old cookie -- and then seeing that the title character had red hair just gave it another layer of meaning. (The "swearwolves" reference in the title is just a quick and loving nod to What We Do in the Shadows, which will make no further appearances in this post.)

But as I was watching, I realized there is a third meaning, and it comes if you say the title as a sentence.

This is a movie about a character snapping -- and boy does she ever.

She doesn't snap the way the title character of Carrie snaps, where she's taken as much abuse as she can take and then she starts fucking shit up. But Ginger does get bitten by a werewolf, which means she becomes a werewolf, which means she has indeed "snapped" and taken leave of what tethers her to her sanity/reality.

I wasn't sure if I was enjoying this movie's low budge vibe at the start, but I did get into it and ended up liking it quite a bit by the end.

What role my third interpretation of the title played in that enjoyment, I cannot say for sure. 

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. 

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. 

To quote or not to quote

I watched 6,329 movies prior to watching the Robert Downey Sr. documentary last night, and not one of them has a quotation mark in the title.

The question is, does this one?

The poster for Sr. -- let's just call it Sr. until we get the issue of the quotation marks settled -- seems to indicate for sure that you are meant to include the quotation marks. It's a choice supported by Letterboxd and Wikipedia in listing this movie on their respective sites.

However, IMDB -- which some consider the be-all and end-all, definitive one-stop shop for movie information -- isn't having any of it. The title appears as just the two letters and the period.

Now, this could have a technical explanation. Since quotation marks in the titles of movies or other works of entertainment are extremely uncommon, it's possible that the use of quotation marks in IMDB allows for a more specific title search, an indication to look for only these two key words and not titles that are similar. 

However, after testing this theory with a few searches bracketed by these punctuation marks, I've determined that IMDB appears to just ignore them as though they weren't even there.

Lower on the movie's IMDB page, it lists that it is also known as "Sr.," and in the featured user review, the quotation marks are also used.

While I am tempted to go with IMDB's implicit suggestion -- that it is stupid to have quotation marks in your title, even if that's how it appears in the film itself and in all promotional materials -- I may end up including the quotation marks in my own listing of the movie on my various lists.

Reason?

The title is otherwise so short and abrupt that it looks kind of like someone stopped halfway through typing it. 

The quotation marks serve the function of saying "Yes, this is the full title, you aren't reading it wrong."

So I guess I will go with "Sr.," much as it offends me on some level. (And we're seeing one of the ways it offends me in this very sentence, where I am forced to include a comma that isn't part of the title within the rest of the title, in order to adhere to other basic grammatical rules, like the fact that you always put the comma to the left of the second quotation mark.)

While I've got you, I wanted to talk for a second about what it means to have "Sr." as part of your name.

With Robert Downey Sr., it made sense since the son went on to far outshine the father's accomplishments. While some lovers of independent cinema would certainly consider the father to be the more interesting contributor to the history of cinema, it's hard to argue that the man who earned worldwide recognition as Iron Man -- in fact, the actor probably most responsible for making the MCU what it is today -- is, in any meaningful way, the lesser Downey.

I checked on the internet and could not find an answer to when he actually took the "Sr." on as part of his name. It stands to reason, though, that it was not simply upon the birth of his son. His son had to gain enough renown, and he himself had to be confused for his son often enough, that the change was required. 

But that's not the case with Travis Lakins Sr.

Travis Lakins Sr. is a baseball player. He's only 28 years old, so there is little chance that Travis Lakins Jr. has amounted to anything of note so far. Even with the most aggressive schedule for starting a family, and even assuming that Travis Jr. is the oldest of his three children (the internet is unclear on this), he could be no more than ten years old, and considering that he's not a child actor that I'm aware of it, it's unlikely anyone is talking about him outside of his relationship to his father, and possibly the fact that his existence prompted his father to add a clarifying suffix to his name.

Clearly most people who choose to name their children the same as them are not expecting to add this suffix to their name unless it's absolutely necessary for the sake of clarity. It indicates a certain pride in your offspring, which is sweet -- you are now defining yourself in relation to another person, rather than just them in relation to you. I'm not going to say it takes narcissism to give your son the same name as you -- I have friends who have done this and I don't consider them narcissistic at all -- but in some respects it does suggest you are making a miniature copy of yourself, which is something of a narcissistic impulse. Changing your own name to reflect the naming decision you've made for your child turns that possible narcissism on its head.

I do think it's interesting, though, that while the title "Jr." implies exactly one older person with that name on the family tree, "Sr." is not nearly so precise. Let's say that Robert Downey Jr. had named his son Robert Downey III. (He didn't; he named him Exton Elias Downey, a much more typically eccentric Hollywood child name.) Would Robert Downey Sr. still be a Sr. if there were a third Robert Downey, or would he just go back to being Robert Downey? I suppose at that point the "Sr." is a fixed part of his identity, which is kind of the point of naming this documentary the way it's been named.

What is it with famous Downeys naming their children after them, anyway? I was probably learning about Morton Downey Jr., the notorious television talk show host, around the same time I was first learning about Robert Downey Jr., and I'm sure I thought they were related. In fact, Morton Downey Jr. (son of the singer, Morton Downey) was only four years older than Robert Downey Sr., so he could have easily been Robert Downey Jr.'s father -- and I think at some point, I thought he was. According to the logic of the maybe 13-year-old me, "Downey Jr." was a complete last name. The father's first name was Morton while the son's first name was Robert. 

The funny thing about this whole thing is that Robert Downey Sr. was actually a junior himself. His own father was born Robert Elias, and Downey Sr. was for a time Robert Elias Jr., until the father changed the whole family name as an easier way of getting into the military, if I'm remembering correctly what the film told me. (Something about the name Elias sounding too Jewish.) But wait then why wasn't he himself Robert Downey Jr.? I must be missing something here. 

So at least Robert Downey Jr.'s son was named as a way of honoring the heritage of the family, if only as a middle name. (Which, incidentally, is how we handled it in my family, with both of my children having their mother's last name as a middle name.)

And I think that's about enough discussion of that. 

Note: By using "sr." as a label on this post, I've manipulated Blogger into moving it to the top of my alphabetical list of labels, one ahead of the label for the movie (untitled).

In Scream, no one can see your Roman numerals

Flush with confidence after last year's Scream reboot was considered a success, the studio is already back with another Scream movie this March.

The title is right there in that poster, but I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't notice it. 

See Paramount Pictures didn't go the extremely confusing route that Rob Zombie's Halloween reboot series went, where not only was the reboot also named Halloween, just like the original, but the sequel was also named Halloween 2, just like the original sequel.

They did manage to confuse things a bit though.

Instead of doing what the more recent Halloween reboot series did, calling the movies things like Scream Kills or Scream Rises or Scream Goes to the Bathroom, the Scream movies have picked up with the original numbering of the series -- even though there was never a Scream 5.

Scream VI is a direct sequel to last year's Scream reboot, which was effectively if not actually Scream 5, and it is indeed the sixth movie in the series, but keeping everything else straight may be a tall task.

And for young people who haven't seen a lot of movies that use to a Roman numeral to denote the sequel number, they might not even see the bloody VI in this poster.

So there's at least a chance that some people will think that the sequel to Scream is also called Scream.

I kind of think the only reason they chose this title was because someone had the brainwave that they could fit a Roman numeral six into the letter M. That's pretty flimsy if you ask me.

Oh and the Alien reference in the subject of this post isn't just random. I got a promotional email about the release of Scream VI in which they use a tagline "In a city of millions, no one hears you scream." (See it's set in New York. Okay, something new at least.)

This is pretty lame -- either they fucked up the reference by using "no one hears" rather than "no one can hear," or they deliberately avoided it to steer clear of a lawsuit, in which case, they should have just gone with something else entirely.

I was one of those who thought the Scream reboot was pretty good, so I guess I'll probably see Scream VI as well. Ghostface chasing a victim to the top of the Statue of Liberty's torch is going to be epic. 

Two swans a-singing

This holiday season, would you rather see Swan Song or Swan Song?

Yes.

When I saw a poster for a movie starring Udo Kier called Swan Song at the cinema the other night, I thought to myself "Didn't I see a trailer for that, and didn't Mahershala Ali star in it? And didn't it look totally different?"

Yes.

As happens sometimes -- as with the two versions of Lamb that came out in 2015 (never mind the one that came out this year) -- there are two identically named movies called Swan Song opening within the next few weeks in Australia. Having them come out in the same year is weird enough; having them come out in the same week is far weirder.

Benjamin Cleary's Swan Song is the one with Ali, which is a science fiction film about human cloning. It debuts on AppleTV+ on December 17th.

Todd Stephens' Swan Song is the one with Kier, which is about a hairdresser styling his client's hair for a funeral. It opens at Melbourne's Cinema Nova on Christmas Day.

Although I do love me some Udo Kier, the one with Ali has more of a natural appeal to me in terms of subject matter. It's also more readily available without a specific excursion to the cinema, which is tricky at this time of year, especially with the theaters about to burst forth with juicy films (a subject for another post). 

But lo and behold! Kier's Swan Song is already available for rental from U.S. iTunes, meaning the coincidence of their release dates is only an Australian thing.

I feel a Swan Song double feature coming on.

Except it's comical to imagine getting through even one movie in a night these days, let alone two. Last night I ended up finishing the movie I was watching between 2:15 and 2:45 after sleeping on the couch for a good three hours. And it was only one hour and forty minutes. And I only had one egg nog spiked with brandy. 

This time of year -- especially when you factor in moving houses -- is exhausting.

Unanticipated title competition

According to IMDB, there are exactly two feature-length films in history with the title Val.

Both of them came out in 2021.

(There's arguably a third that came out in 2008, but Val is only the a.k.a. title. The more common title is The Wave.)

How annoying must that be for Val Kilmer?

I watched Kilmer's Val, directed by Ting Poo and Leo Scott, on Tuesday night, as the seventh in my informal series of watching a documentary every alternate Tuesday. It's "informal" in that I don't write about most of them here on the blog, but otherwise it's quite forma, as in, I have not yet missed an alternate Tuesday since I resolved to do this back on August 3rd. (Three days before Val was released to Amazon Prime, in fact.)

I really liked the film. I had been worried it might be a vanity project for Kilmer, an actor who came of age on screen during my own years as a budding movie fan, and would rightly be considered as one of my generation's cherished icons. I never felt any particular affection for the guy -- I think I always felt there was something a little doofy about him. That analysis made me roll my eyes a bit when I heard there was a collection of Kilmer's videos over the years that had been compiled into a documentary feature.

What I didn't realize, or forgot if I had known it, is that Val Kilmer's current state is entirely free from vanity. His last six years have been marked by a struggle with and recovery from throat cancer, which resulted in two tracheotomies and an inability to speak except by plugging the hole in his neck and releasing that robotic sound in which the words can scarcely be recognized. If you listen closely you can hear what he's saying, but the film helpfully provides subtitles to make that much easier. According to Wikipedia, his voice has apparently been recreated this year using AI based on archival samples of his voice, but that has not yet happened in the timeline of Val.

In fact, the Val of Val is quite a figure of pity. Having gained and lost fortunes over the years, he had been on his way out as an actor even before he lost his voice, and one suspects he's not likely to go in front of a camera for a paying gig any time soon. Val shows him signing autographs at Comic-Con and living a lifestyle significantly reduced from what he had been accustomed to.

I think I gained a new appreciation of Kilmer in this film. The four decades of footage he had shot at various stages of his life is a really colorful way of assembling that life and giving us a clearer picture of it. However much I personally may have enjoyed him -- and to be sure, I periodically did -- he had an extremely diverse and interesting career in which he played multiple major icons, from Jim Morrison to Doc Holliday to Batman. And off screen, as I learned, he also played Mark Twain in a one-man stage show that the film characterizes as the realization of a career-long desire. It was also the last role he was playing before he got sick.

And so I now also have additional sympathy for Kilmer, learning that there is another film released in 2021 called Val.

This Val is directed by Aaron Fradkin and stars Misha Reeves, with the logline "A criminal on the run breaks into the home of a high-class escort, only to realize nothing is as it seems." It only dropped earlier this month, as IMDB says it had a "theatrical" release on October 1st, though that seems doubtful to me. October 5th is listed as the next release date, with a November 9th BluRay premiere.

Assuming you don't have an extremely specific title like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there's a decent chance your movie title has been used by someone else in the past or will be used by someone else in the future. Because the commercial appeal of the title is usually of paramount importance -- your Eternal Sunshines notwithstanding -- you're willing to make the sacrifice, knowing that the year in parentheses after the title will differentiate yours from others who went the same route.

That's not possible with Val, both of which will have the release year 2021. This may actually be more annoying for Fradkin and Reeves than it is for Kilmer. By having the far more prominent Val, Kilmer will probably know that his title does not require clarification, and that his collection of home movies will be the first thing most people think of when hearing the title. But it's got to be really annoying for the makers of the smaller film, who will have to keep saying "No, not the one about Val Kilmer."

Maybe it couldn't have been avoided. Kilmer's Val wasn't one of those movies delayed by the pandemic, at least as far as I can tell. IMDB shows it having a premiere at Cannes in July, at which point Fradkin's Val would have basically been done and dusted. I mean, maybe there's a way to cross-check films in production to figure out if your title is in use, but I kind of doubt it. A forehead slap was probably their only available reaction at the time.

The coincidences don't end there.

When two movies have the same title in the same year, IMDB differentiates them by a roman numeral after the title, as in Val (I) (2021). In fact, roman numerals come in quite handy on IMDB for people with the same name, and given the millions of names in the database, the roman numerals can sometimes rise up into the twenties. (Much higher than that, actually. When I looked up the name John Smith just now, one of the most prominent matches had the number CCLXXII after it. I had to google it to be sure, but that translates to 272.)

While Kilmer's Val does get the roman number I, Fradkin's Val does not get II. Actually there are three movies named Val in 2021, including this one with roman number II:

Fortunately, Ursula Monteiro's Val is a short, meaning hopefully both Kilmer and Fradkin can rest easy ... even if Fradkin may get a serious case of roman numeral envy.

Movies named like soft drinks

Sometimes you notice stupid little themes in the names of new movies coming out and you just have to write a blog post about them. 

If you're me, anyway. Which you aren't, so, you do you.

Me, I'll do me and write this post, even if it ends up being thirsty work. 

You'll see what I mean in a minute. 

When the Netflix movie Moxie, directed by and co-starring Amy Poehler, came out earlier this year, I mentioned in my review that Moxie is also the name of a soft drink that used to be available when I was growing up, and may still be in certain New England novelty stores. It looks like this:

What does it taste like?

Dirt.

Sorry, correction. It tastes like a cross between root beer and dirt.

But I once drank it semi-regularly because some friends of mine liked it and we thought it made us very eccentric.

Just to be completist, this is what the poster looks like:

Now, a new movie is out on Amazon that I've just reviewed called Jolt. And guess what Jolt also is?

A soft drink.

It looks like this:

What does it taste like?

I have no idea. I don't think I've ever had one. But probably not great if I had to guess.

What does the movie taste like?

Dirt.

Sorry, correction. It tastes like a cross between shit and dirt.

Yeah, I didn't much like Moxie -- good try, sort of, Amy Poehler -- but it is a masterpiece compared to Tanya Wexler's obnoxious misfire.

Now I just need them to release a movie called Squirt and the trifecta will be complete. 

There was also a movie that came out this year called Cherry -- on yet a third streaming service, Apple TV+ -- and there's such a thing as cherry soda. But I'm not going to stretch it.

Hard as it may be to believe, I do have my standards. 

Is Wonder Woman 1984 even called Wonder Woman 1984?

I have finally caught up with Wonder Woman 1984. In the end, I really could have just gone by myself at the small town theater in Mansfield last week, since I didn't end up seeing it with either my wife or my kids. 

My wife ultimately determined it was too grown up for the seven-year-old, which ended up not being the case. He's seen Captain Marvel and Ant-Man, and this was really no worse than those -- possibly better, in terms of potentially disturbing content. A guy gets transformed into a tiny green globule and wiped up and thrown in the toilet in Ant-Man. Nothing like that happens here. 

Plus he's been watching The Mandalorian, where no fewer than 60 stormtroopers are slaughtered in every episode. A friend and I were discussing it and we don't think there was actually a single death in all of Wonder Woman 1984. 

Anyway, what happened happened. I said I was over not going to see it in Mansfield, and truly, I am. 

So, eager to review it, I went by myself on Monday night, which did have the benefit of allowing me to see it on the largest possible screen with the boomingest possible sound. Whether that helped or not is something you can find out in my review, which I will link to the right if it is not already there at the time of this posting.

So I won't talk too much about my thoughts on the movie in this post. I will talk about how this movie challenges my ideas of how to write a movie's title when I write about it.

We all know of this movie as Wonder Woman 1984, but the movie doesn't know itself that way. Both times the title appears on screen -- at the beginning and at the end -- it appears as WW84. Almost like a political slogan. Almost like a sequel to WWI and WWII, though you'd have to tell me what happened in the 82 other world wars because I wasn't paying attention. 

It's really just a shorthand for us, since we know the movie is called Wonder Woman 1984. Abbreviations are cool. Acronyms are cool. Other examples exist in cinema. We've been doing this since T2, though in that case, the full title did appear on screen. 

It also gets at the DCEU's hesitation about actually referring to the character as Wonder Woman. If I'm not mistaken, this is now the fourth movie Diana Prince has appeared in without ever once being referred to as Wonder Woman. It's like the change to calling it KFC because they were so darn worried people would realize the chicken is fried. 

But the most problematic aspect of WW84 for me right now is that according to my own logic on movie titles, WW84 is actually the title of this movie.

Take my recent (nearly four years ago) post on Se7en, which you can find here. I only write it as Se7en because that's the only way the movie refers to itself within its own runtime. It never once, in the same two instances of appearing at the beginning and at the end, appears as "Seven." So Se7en is not just some cheeky way they advertised it, it's the actual title. 

If we consider Wonder Woman 1984 -- the film itself -- as the only available evidence to determine its title, we have to reach the same conclusion. If we just handed the film over to an alien life form studying earth culture, and asked them to use what they know of earth culture to tell us the title of the film, they would called it WW84.

But that's not the only available evidence we have. We have the poster above, which lists the abbreviation in bigger letters but also includes the full title below that. We have interviews with cast and crew. We have its IMDB page, which, granted, is only trying to use the available evidence to reach the same conclusions I'm trying to reach here. For what it's worth, WW84 is not even listed as an alternate title on IMDB. 

As with many of my discussions on The Audient, this one is pretty academic. We instinctively know the difference between a real title of a film and a more Twitter-friendly abbreviation of it. 

I still wonder, though -- pun not intended -- when they will finally commit to calling this character Wonder Woman. Sure, it's a kind of silly name that's left over from pulp comic books, a relic from another era. But I'm sure if either Superman or Batman were being named today, their creators would come up with something slightly less on the nose and slightly more "rad." That doesn't prevent those characters from being constantly referred to by those names, even with a certain fetishism when it comes to Batman. You don't hear those characters constantly referred to as Clark and Bruce, do you?

I'm wondering if we'll ever get the chance. I don't really know the future of DCEU movies -- I've been flocking to comic book movie headlines even less than usual lately -- so I don't even know if another Wonder Woman movie is planned, especially since this movie, whether it's Wonder Woman 1984 or WW84, is not nearly so beloved as the original. (Though it has a higher Metacritic score, 60, than I thought it might.) Also, they are running out of possible years in which to set such a sequel, if you want to set it significantly before the present day setting of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. Wonder Woman 1997 might work, but then again it might not.

Maybe WW97 would work better.