Pecking away at the Journal of Wordplay edits, so let’s get to it: what movies would you screen for palindrome-lovers? There are about 68 palindromic film titles in my database: the 17 I picked out for today and tomorrow’s updates are the most interesting of the lot.
The best film named Z is an anti-fascist classic from 1969, set in then-contemporary Greece. Z is a leftist rabble-rouser who dies early in the film; the rest of it traces the price others pay for telling the truth about his murder. It starts by announcing, “Any resemblance to real events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. It is DELIBERATE.” (There’s also a horror movie about an imaginary friend who turns out to be evil, but never mind that one.)
Dad is a sentimental comedy about three generations bonding for the first and sadly the last time, starring Jack Lemmon, Ted Danson, and Ethan Hawke.
#FBF is a smart teen comedy, with a likable lead character conducting a little light identity theft to get her parents back together. What could go wrong?
Sssssss is about the dangers of taking a summer job: you could end up working for a mad scientist who’s plotting to turn you into a snake. And end up sticking with it for too long just because his daughter’s kinda hot. Capitalism, am I right?
O is “what if high school were Shakespearean tragedy,” only instead of adapting one of the stories about young people like Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet, it just goes right straight to Othello, and honestly, I respect that choice.
Elle is probably the most controversial palindrome-film, a thriller centered on some unconventional reactions to assault. Those reactions resonated deeply with some viewers even as they struck others as inauthentic…and it’s the work of Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch provocateur known for over-the-top violence (RoboCop, Starship Troopers) and over-the-top sex (Basic Instinct, Showgirls). But for all that, the viewers it speaks to, it really speaks to.
π is the tale of a tortured genius who believes he can unlock mathematical truths that can predict the stock market and the future itself. He might be right, but he might also be going around the bend, and the powers-that-be who want him to succeed might be the ones who drive him into madness.
LOL is a hard one for me to parse. It’s the kind of gross-out teen comedy that tests my patience a lot. But like Elle, it has its passionate defenders. If nothing else, its depiction of the social-media-soaked lives of teenagers in 2012, which felt over-the-top at the time, was probably pretty accurate in retrospect. As the use of social media keeps changing (teens haven’t flocked to Facebook or Twitter in ages), this movie might attain the status of artifact.
Continued tomorrow!