Point of Style

I just spent about 40 minutes creating a new page on this blog, which compiles all of the movie reviews I've written over the past four-ish years (all of the movie review posts that I tagged with the label "movie," anyway). There are 129 in total, although some of the reviews cover two or three films; there are a few other posts where my review of a movie is so brief that I decided it wasn't worth including. Interestingly, the number of reviews per year isn't correlated with the total number of posts, so last year, where I posted 160 times, had the same number of movie reviews (29) as 2008, where I wrote three times as many blog posts. This year looks set to be a bumper year for reviews on this blog, as I've already written 26 and there are still over five months to go. Movies is, of course, my most common tag with 201 posts, beating even the vacuous life tag.

But I digress. When I was compiling my list of reviewed movies, for foreign-language films, I included both the original title and the English title, which presented me a subediting dilemma. The Bexquisite house style is to put movie titles (as well as other titles) into title case: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, for example. IMDb does the same. But the original title of this film is listed on IMDb as Le scaphandre et le papillon, which just uses an initial cap. Presumably because the first time I wrote a review of a French film, I took the French title from IMDb, I do the same. Although in my mind, initial-caps titles seems like a particularly French style, I try to do the same for other foreign-language titles when they come up, although I see a lot more French films than other languages.

No one cares about this apart from me, but I felt the need to explain the apparent grammatical inconsistency. That is all.