Now, in 2017 a lot of good things happened in movies. Horror has never received more prestige. Get Out is going to be nominated for Best Picture. You can't call that movie a "thriller" or "psychological drama" like people did with Silence of the Lambs or Black Swan. Get Out is a dirty horror movie and nothing else. Critics used to be ashamed of horror and that time has passed. Meanwhile people highlight Wonder Woman as this huge progressive moment against the Harvey Weinsteins of the world. But all it showed me is that women can star in movies as bland and pointless as the boys. Yet there were intense, truly unique stories that were written with female protagonists (and often made by female directors) that actually make use of that diversity. Forget Wonder Woman, try The Beguiled or The Shape of Water or Ingrid Goes West or Raw or mother! or Lady Bird. Women have a voice in this industry and it doesn't need to be packaged to appeal to male nerds.
Every year I think I get closer and closer to the pretentious art critic I mocked back in the early years of this blog. The problem isn't that I love artsy movies. As a matter of fact I have a severe upper-limit to how much artsy I can take, thus why I refuse to see A Ghost Story. I like low-brow trashy shit. It's just that the traditional blockbuster has become so stale and repetitive. There was a new Spider-Man this year! Hasn't there been enough fucking Spider-Man already? People complain about too many sequels and lack of ideas in Hollywood, then give mother! an F on Cinemascore. This year, I hope I didn't just talk the talk, I walked the walk. If your movie wasn't special in some way, I couldn't be bothered. So I don't want to see The Post or The Darkest Hour, more boilerplate Oscarbait just as I don't want to see The Mummy or Ghost in the Shell, more bad wanna-be cinematic universes. I didn't see any of those. I saw better movies.
Here are fifteen movies that actually were special in some way:
15. The Void
The Void took a delicious buffet of Eighties horror movies threw them all into a blender. Directors Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie lifted imagery from Halloween II, The Thing, The Beyond, Hellraiser, and then throw in a dash of Prince of Darkness. Imagine a Beyond the Black Rainbow that isn't godawful. In this film, a run-down hospital on its last week of operation is suddenly beset by horrors of all kinds. Can the few remaining staff and patients survive the night?
The Void is a love letter to a stickier, gooier time in movies. But it isn't lost up its own ass in referential recursion. It never gets cute with call-backs to older media like Stranger Things (which I only watch due to social obligation). You could see The Void today, having never seen any of those older films, and appreciate the Lovecraftian nightmare of it all. This is a movie set in unrelenting darkness where things keep going from bad to worse. And usually that worse is mutating out of a person's head and covering the walls in practical effect gore. Kostanski and Gillespie aren't just elbowing the audience with "hey, remember Carpenter, huh, huh?" They went out and made their own John Carpenter movie, complete with haunting imagery and unpleasant twists.
The Void has a plot that is way-overstuffed with evil cultists, body horror, violent rednecks, and doorways to dimensions beyond all comprehension. But The Void is overstuffed in a good way. You never know what is coming next. Anything could be coming from outside or from within the nurses or from those creepy noises coming the basement. ...And this hospital doesn't even have a basement.
14. Colossal
What do you get when you mix mumblecore with kaijus? That is a question that nobody has ever asked before but still is a question Nacho Vigalondo decided he needed to answer with Colossal, an odd comedy from last spring. Colossal is a tale of Gloria (Anne Hathaway), a thirty-something alcoholic whose burnt her last bridge in New York City. She stumbles drunkenly back to her home town to pick up the pieces. Along the way she repeatedly fails to sleep comfortably in her empty childhood home, reconnects with an old friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), and discovers that she is controlling a gargantuan reptilian creature in Seoul, South Korea.
The hook of Colossal would seemingly be the comic premise of a group of loser adults playing around with giant monster powers and generally fucking around. I could imagine a very stupid stoner version of this movie starring Seth Rogen and James Franco. ("Look, the monster is smoking a giant blunt and jerking off! Hahaha!") But the core of this movie has a lot more to say. The relationships here start out very friendly and turn out to be something worse, manipulation. Gloria finds herself trapped between a passive-aggressive jerk in New York and a straight-up aggressive piece of shit in her small town.
Not to spoil too much about where this movie is going but there is a character reveal that will make your hair stand-up. Colossal doesn't have too much to say about giant monsters or how to avoid them. But it does have a lot to say about the ulterior motives of "nice guys". I'm not in love with the way Gloria's character comes away almost blame-free by the end. But in a film with such awful, awful men, partying too much is not the worst crime.
13. The Square
I think I get The Square, but I'm not going to pretend to an authority on this. In fact, be suspicious of anybody who thinks they can explain what this is.
The Square is a Swedish slice of ultra-artsy filmmaking that won the Palme d'Or last year at Cannes. But it is also a weird, weird film that is probably beyond description. How much can you take of slow uncomfortable absurdist situations? This comedy doesn't really have gags as much as pieces that don't fit together and linger.. Eventually you have no choice but to laugh at the material, because how else do you react to this? The Square feels a lot like the Coen brothers A Serious Man, if not so bleak. They're both about a character searching for some balance to the world and finding none at all. Only this movie has old people trying to rave in a Swedish castle.
Claes Bang plays Christian, the curator of an ultra-pretentious art museum in Stockholm. The museum's newest attraction is "the Square", a modern art piece that nobody seems to understand. Christian lives a life full of moral compromises and exists in an art culture made out of pure bullshit. Yet most of what goes wrong here is due to simple carelessness. Christian gets robbed at the beginning of The Square, then he decides to embark on a quixotic quest for justice. Only this leads to a series of disasters, ending up with Christian hiding away from a small boy he accidentally screwed over. Christian can't even apologize to the boy - over voicemail, no less - without rambling about class politics to hide his guilt.
But maybe I don't really care at all about the message or the content of The Square. (Just like I couldn't begin to tell you what the in-movie Square is supposed to be either.) The film itself just has enough weird-ass stuff to recommend. Partially of note is a freaky high society dinner where a performance artist turns into an ape monster and nearly rapes a woman. Or Christian's night with Elisabeth Moss where they fight over a condom. Then a chimpanzee walks into the room.
12. The Shape of Water
Years ago I decided I needed to review every Twilight movie for this website. And boy are those reviews embarrassing to me now... There's a reason nobody asked for a twenty-year-old male's view on those films. (I regret every use of the word "fruity".) But at some point during my asshole takes on the "Saga" I decided that the protagonist, Bella, needed to fall in love with a Creature from the Black Lagoon boy. Sadly Twilight never went far enough and Bella never fell in love a Gill-Man. However, in 2017, I finally got my wish with The Shape of Water, a movie where a woman fucks a fish.
I think the Twilight comparison is pretty apt for Guillermo del Toro's take on a Universe Studios monster movie romance. There always was this confusing contradiction in Twilight where the movies were so shamelessly female gaze and kept skirting with being transgressive, yet Stephenie Meyer had to lurch the stories back to traditional sexuality every time. The Shape of Water is proudly transgressive. The original Creature from the Black Lagoon had a white handsome male hero protecting a woman from a barbaric rapist creature in the Amazon jungle. (This is 19th century Victorian sexual themes.) The Shape of Water sets itself in the same Fifties period, but its great white hunter is a deranged monster played by Michael Shannon. And the woman chooses the fish-man's penis.
The rest of The Shape of Water is a juxtaposition between its twee Fifties esthetic and its counter-cultural heroes. The good guys are made up of a communist spy, an older gay man, a strong black woman, and the lead, Sally Hawkin's Elisa, a deaf woman who feels no shame in her sexuality. Del Toro seems torn between a real love of Fifties pop culture and also hating everything the Fifties stood for culturally. Yet the movie works anyway. As lewd as The Shape of Water's premise is, the movie feels no shame in exploring it. You wouldn't think a perverted fish-fucking movie would have an adult view of sex. Then again, you also wouldn't have guessed that the tawdry vampire romances of a decade ago would be so chaste.
11. John Wick: Chapter 2
There is a moment in John Wick 2 where Keanu Reeves visits a master gun dealer in Rome. Of course, in this universe a gun dealer is called a "Sommelier" and the entire exchange is called a "tasting". Wick needs something "robust" and "bold". What's for dessert? Knives. This film series puts a wonderful upper class flair to B-movie trash. It's like going to the Louvre to stare at porn. The entire world seems to be controlled by a secret society of boujee assassins. And I love every detail of the world building.
Once John Wick has ordered his "wine", he spends the next ninety minutes killing the shit out every fucking thing. John Wick 2 raises the stakes, of course. Instead of targeting just one Russian mob gang now Keanu Reeves has to fight off every assassin in New York. He casually destroys half a dozen professional murderers on his commute then takes down a few of the tougher bosses. Meanwhile the regular public casually ignores all the reckless action movie stunts happening around them. There's a shoot-out at the World Trade Center PATH station and the civilians don't even flinch. Keanu Reeves and his rival, Common, might as well be shooting at each other with finger guns.
The first John Wick was merely a damned good action movie, a throw-back to a time when those things flourished. John Wick 2 is a statement of much grander ambition. It expands the universe and scale - and ridiculousness, and pulls it off. It's even a better-shot movie. The museum climax is absolutely gorgeous. Obviously John Wick win and remains as stylishly invincible as ever.
He will be back to kill more. I cannot wait.
10. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion
I said I was very tired of superhero movies at start. But I'm not tired of huge action films, or movies starring super-powered protagonists, or even blockbusters. I'm just tired of how repetitive Hollywood has gotten. So to break things up I went to see an Indian movie, which is a sequel to a film I never saw. It was amazing. Baahubali 2 is a feast of a film. It is everything you could want out of a movie, and so much more.
The film is the story of Baahubali (played by an actor known as "Prabhas"), an epic warrior in the mold of Achilles or King Arthur. It's set in a fictional Indian empire but if you know your mythology you'll have a good idea what you're getting. Baahubali is strong enough to punch-out an elephant, has a great singing voice, and a heroic mullet. In this film we see first a comic romance based on mistaken identity, then a Shakespearean tragedy, and finally an massive war that defies all physics to defeat the evil king. Also it's a musical. Baahubali 2: The Conclusion has literally everything. Characters fall in love, turn to evil, are forced to betray their friends, and finally save the world.
Now, I'll admit I don't know much about Indian filmmaking. Baahubali 2 is not actually Bollywood, it was filmed in Telugu. (I had the experience of seeing this film dubbed in Hindi then subtitled in English, so I was two languages removed from the original.) Baahubali 2 was at some point the most successful Indian film in North America. I can't say it's the best Indian film out there or even a particularly good one, just it is a very good movie. Considering the triumph that is Baahubali 2, I think we need to pay attention to India more. There are amazing things happening there.
9. Get Out
Get Out is the kind of movie that is so perfect as to be almost boring to discuss. Because what do I have to add? Everybody adores this movie and it already had a huge swell of hype. It is the rare movie that is as much beloved by critics as it is adored by the public. So I dunno... skip to the next movie. My blurb will pale in comparison to what's already been written. Just know this: out of all the movies I saw in theaters this year, Get Out left its crowd the happiest.
Get Out is as much a crowd-pleasing comedy as it as a disturbing horror film as it a subversive satire of liberal-seeming white folk. (Full disclosure: I'm very white.) It's all about how white people over-correct when dealing with a family member bringing a black person into the home. There's this phony attempt to seem "woke" and the behavior is clearly unnatural. Jordan Peele found a great subject here. There's a billion movies that have been made about avert racists. This is why last summer's Detroit was forgotten almost immediately. You already knew the story. Get Out is more about the hypocrisy of the "allies". Upper class white people sure acted like they believed in equality. Maybe they felt guilty enough to Redbox 12 Years a Slave. Then, with their conscience clear, they voted for Donald Trump.
Since Get Out was released early last winter it wasn't a reaction to the election, but Jordan Peele saw something a lot of us wanted to ignore. He also wrote a great script full of subtle details. While on route to their Guess Who's Coming to Dinner visit, the main character is confronted by an angry white cop. His girlfriend protects him, theoretically, "you don't need to see his ID". She must be a true blue Black Lives Matter supporter, right? Just keep watching. I love a scrip that can be this subtle and clever.
8. Coco
Something is strange about American cinema, and this is particularly clear with Disney. There's this huge gap in seriousness that happens with films that are marketed to teenagers or young adults. There are, of course, plenty of intense and serious movies made for adults. Then there are tons of really sincere and wonderful movies made for kids, Coco being one of them. But then, all their live action stuff is schlocky action comedy that can't stand accept any kind of sincerity. I don't get it. Disney is capable of great writing and complex films, and they know their youngest audiences can take it. But as for audiences any older? Give them the same MCU and Star Wars shit every fucking year. Keep feeding those stupid hogs trash until they are fat and bloated and ready to consume again. It is awful.
However, what is not awful is Coco. Coco is the kind of movie that leaves no eye dry. Even my baby brother cried at the end, and he's only ten. It's been seven years since Pixar made Toy Story 3, and while their movies never became bad, they never felt important. Even Pixar had to know that things like Monsters University or Cars 3 were hardly landmark releases. Coco, however, is the studio going for broke. It's a huge production with massive detail in every scene. Actually I think visually Coco is a bit overstuffed. There's too many polygons on screen, it's dizzying. Still, it gets the human element right.
Coco is a grand celebration of everything Mexico from the obvious Day of the Dead motif to Mexican music to even a cameo by El Santo. But you don't need to be Mexican to see the more universal themes here of family and togetherness. This is a movie made full of love, that fully commits to its emotions. You won't know why the movie is called "Coco" until near the end. And you won't know the real meaning behind the lyrics of "Remember Me" until the last scenes. When you do, I dare you not to cry.
7. Ingrid Goes West
We are all diseased. When this article is done, however many thousands of words it ends up being, I'm going to share this on social media. I might get likes on Facebook and retweets on Twitter. And all that meaningless input from people I mostly don't know and will never know, will somehow make me happy. I'll gain more points in the infinite and pointless MMO that we've turned our society into. In our fantasy social medias we are the Brangelinas, we are the T-Swizzles. And look at what this has done to the world. 2017 was great, right? All our dreams came true.
Ingrid Goes West is a movie that dives straight into this world of social media and zombiefied interactions. It isn't saying outright that social media is a disease (I'm saying that), it actually treats its "phonies" with a great deal of respect and humanity. Aubrey Plaza's Ingrid is clearly somebody with a mental illness, it isn't social media that broke her. She even recognizes her behavior is sick but can't help herself. She becomes addicted to an Instagram "celebrity" named Taylor (Elizabeth Olsen), who lives out in LA. Taylor lives what seems like the perfect life. Ingrid is driven to be a part of that, no matter what cringy lies and embarrassing obsession it takes. Turns out that Taylor is, yes, a phony, but she's a warm person beyond her Influencer persona.
Ingrid Goes West is as tough of a movie as I watched in 2017. I have such an intense fear of embarrassment I feel physical pain watching characters be humiliated in films. I had to pinch myself in the thigh to keep watching Ingrid Goes West and left myself a fat black and blue mark that lasted for a week. Still I recommend this movie to everybody. The cast is exceptional, with special stand-out being Ingrid's Batman-obsessed boyfriend played by O'Shea Jackson Jr. Watch this guy, he's going places.
6. Raw
Raw is a sick, nasty little movie. In this film, Justine (Garance Marillier) goes off to veterinarian school a repressed virgin vegetarian. A few weeks later she's a sexually awakened and hungry for her male roommate's flesh... in more ways than one. Yup, Raw is a cannibal coming of age story. Certainly this isn't the first movie to equate primal urges like eating with sex. But I think this is the only one where your heroine has to take a bite out of her arm during intercourse. Raw is a great movie to see to show off to others. "Guys, guess what I saw? Yeah, there's a part where Justine eats her sister's finger." Cannibalism has never been more erotic.
What elevates Raw from being a one trick pony is Justine's older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf), who in one scene has her arm up a pony's ass. Their relationship starts out distant, with Justine clearly being the sheltered, more awkward sibling. Then it becomes something much more bizarre. I won't spoil the big twist but quite a few bodies are going to rack up around campus. Justine and Alexia end up in an complex rivalry of sorts, both trying to sort out their impulses. And yeah, Justine eats Alexia's finger. It comes off after an amazing scene where Alexia is giving her sister a bikini wax. That's gross enough already, and then there is a mishap with scissors. Justine couldn't help herself. (See, this is a great movie to tell others about.)
The thing with Raw is that it is a disgusting movie - perhaps the marketing over-hypes how gross a bit - but life is gross. Human beings are animals under it all and as best we try to hide it, fluid and secretions and digestion are what really drive us. David Cronenberg made a whole career out of that observation. Also college is a confusing time even when you're not a cannibal.
I left Raw in a thumping good mood. Also I was incredibly hungry.
5. Your Name
I wasn't the biggest fan of anime director Makoto Shinkai before Your Name. He's always come off a bit chilly for my tastes. Things like Voices from a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days had really great ideas but the characters felt passive and mopey in an unexciting way. Then I thought Children Who Chase Lost Voices was just a worse version of Hayao Miyazaki films. But with Your Name Makoto Shinkai made something that doesn't feel like him at all. Imagine if Lars von Trier made an upbeat romantic comedy.
Your Name has been as hyped as any anime movie I recall. And it lived up to it. Your Name starts out with a Freaky Friday premise. A teenaged girl out in the country starts switching bodies with a boy living in Tokyo. This, of course, leads to all sorts of awkwardness. As a said before, this is a remarkably sweet movie from a guy who became famous for depressing mood pieces. The lead boy, Taki, actually finds his love life improved by having a feminine perspective take over his life every so often. The lead girl, Mitsuha becomes more confident and assertive. Slowly all this intimacy between them has a predictable side effect: they fall in love.
That's when the other shoe drops and suddenly Your Name remembers this is a Makoto Shinkai film. It stops being a meet-cute and instead becomes a journey across time to stop an impending disaster. Your Name spends about forty-five minutes swinging wildly between a sad artsy ending to a good ending to a bad ending to another good ending to an unclear ending, until finally making up its mind. Those aren't complaints as much as an observation. Your Name starts out light fun and ends up being emotionally exhausting. But it's still the best anime film of last year and definitely Shinkai's best work.
4. Phantom Thread
A great thing movies can do is give us a view of a world we never would care about otherwise. I don't wear wedding dresses (surprise, I know) and I am not exactly interested in post-war English fashion. But Paul Thomas Anderson's newest movie is interested in those things. It drives the characters and is a constant obsession for them. Plus the film... and forgive the unavoidable pun... weaves in themes of class and sexual domination into the fabric of the dresses. Fashion is never just fashion.
Phantom Thread makes this literal, the business seems to ebb and flow based on the mindset of their designer, Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis). The night he falls ill is also the night a key wedding dress is damaged almost beyond repair. The dresses are multilayered and complicated, Woodcock hides notes and secrets within them. His character is difficult, to say the least. Despite being surrounded by the totems of romance, he's decidedly anti-affection. Woodcock uses fastidious manners as a screen for what can only be described as childish temper tantrums. His spinster sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville) has to act as his battleax matron to keep both the business and his social life afloat. And seriously, don't fuck with Cyril, under any circumstances. Yet between Woodcock's days of being an utter prick, he can become vulnerable and even loving.
Daniel Day-Lewis will get top billing but the protagonist of Phantom Thread for my money is Alma (Vicky Krieps), the latest of Woodcock's many relationships. It says a lot about this family that Woodcock picks women that are also great business decisions, Alma has a perfect model's body. He can keep his lovers at a comfortable distance by alternating between boyfriend or employer. (Much like in Raw, sexual hunger is equated to food hunger.) But while Alma has the patience of a saint, she isn't going to take this bullshit. From there Phantom Thread is a difficult movie to parse out. Is it a straight period romance? Or is it going to become a deadly thriller?
I can't really explain the central relationship of this movie. But I love stories I can't fully explain.
3. mother!
mother! is a complicated movie to say the least. It was marketed as a horror movie. But what came out was a mind-bending Biblical allegory that it is itself an allegory for artistic expression and emotional abuse. Regular audiences didn't feel like putting in the work to parse through everything Darren Aronofsky was saying. So mother! got that F on Cinemascore. Most of my audience fled the theater an hour in. All people wanted was a creepy modern take on Rosemary's Baby. Yet if horror was what they really wanted, they got plenty of it. This isn't the easy kind of horror with a ghost and jump scares. It's a much more disturbing nightmare.
All Jennifer Lawrence's nameless character in mother! wants is to be loved by her husband, Javier Bardem. Instead her happy country home is invaded again and again by strangers. A party where the unwanted guests won't ever leave doesn't sound too creepy, but just hold on. At some point you need a personal space all to yourself, you need to escape, and there is none. mother! is a suffocating piece of paranoia and claustrophobia. Javier Bardem keeps inviting people in, and they literally devour the Jennifer Lawrence's world. mother! is uncomfortable enough when it was just playing out Adam and Eve then Cain and Abel. Just wait for the third act when the movie goes completely off the rails as Jennifer Lawrence finds out that her husband invited Armageddon into their home.
mother! is a strange story with enough threads that you could read anything you want into events. But what I see here is an artist betraying his loved ones. Javier Bardem is a poet who only uses Jennifer Lawrence as a muse - he has no real ideas of his own. He finds the moment of greatest happiness in her then packages it as a commodity. What he gets is a fandom. And like all fandoms, it is ravenous and all-consuming. The metaphor of "crazy cult religion = fanbase" isn't even all that strained when you see how angry Star Wars fans get. When we consume media we consume emotions, we consume lives that aren't ours. Jennifer Lawrence is our victim in mother!
2. Baby Driver
Okay, those last few movies were a bit too heavy all at once. How about something fun? Here's Baby Driver. I don't usually see movies more than once, there's just too much to see. Yet with Baby Driver, I had to go back just a few days later.
Baby Driver is the movie that made me the happiest out of anything that came out in 2017. This movie is pure car action joy. I actually could have seen the new Fast and Furious but what would be the point? It wasn't going to have better vehicle stunts than this. Yeah, maybe Universal was going to roll out an entire car armada to the Arctic and spend a billion dollars smashing them and cutting to Ja Rule saying something vaguely funny and then cutting to an upskirt shot. Yet where's the style? I'm all for excess, but atomic submarines are a blunt stupid kind of cool. It's fine. But you know what's really cool? Queen is cool.
Baby Driver is a mix of two of Edgar Wright's great loves: car movies and rock. There's a long tradition in cinema with car movies being epitome of cool. Ansel Elgort as the titular Baby may not be Steve McQueen yet but with those sunglasses and that vest, he's well on his way. (Am I alone in thinking that he would make a better Young Han Solo than Alden Ehrenreich?) Thanks to the electric editing, Baby can swerve around Atlanta cops to the loud rifts of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. However even out of the car, just Ansel Elgort walking down the street listening to some Soul music while getting coffee is amazingly cool. Crisp, lightning-sharp cuts to the rhythms of the songs does a lot of the work to make Baby Driver so much fun.
Yes, this movie is more style over substance. Usually that's a negative. Lily James as Baby's love interest is there to be a beautiful face in a waitress uniform. She's not that solidly written of a character. The rest of the cast is there to be various forms of thugs or quip machines, though Jon Hamm turns out to be particularly intense. All that is true. But style can win over substance when the style is this much fun. Style isn't just beating substance here, it is triumphing over substance! Die, substance! Be gone! Baby Driver is a slick mixture of petrolhead and metal head fan service. It isn't much more than that... but fuck it's cool.
----
Next would be my Number 1. But first, let me very interrupt to go over the worst movies I saw last year:
About five minutes of Bright - I made it to the part where Will Smith said "Fairy lives don't matter" and then put something else on. America, you could have watched Ava DuVernay's cutting documentary 13th and instead you watched this. This is why this country is dying.
Life - In this rip-off of Alien, an extraterrestrial overcomes the six stupidest astronauts of all time and finds itself to Earth to wipe out the human race. If our species is as worthless as the characters in this film, I gotta say "good riddance".
Alien: Covenant - If you're going to see a shitty Alien movie, accept no substitutes. Ridley Scott answered all your fanboy nitpicks about Prometheus with a cheaper, crappier sequel. Are you happy now? Somehow the humans in Alien: Convenant are even dumber than the ones in Life. At least there's two Michael Fassbenders who are super hot for each other. "Watch me, I'll do the fingering." Between Life and Alien: Covenant, which one was worse? The answer: who cares?
Personal Shopper - Remember when I said I had an artsy movie limit? This is it. Kristen Stewart has been a great actress in spite of my impressions of her from Twilight. Sadly this movie kinda goes nowhere. Clouds of Sils Maria was far better.
Justice League - I didn't see this movie but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and assume it was ass.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets - Most disappointing movie of the year. It just couldn't live up to the high bar set by Jupiter Ascending.
The Snowman - HAHAHAHA, Michael Fassbender plays a character named "Harry Hole"! That's still funny! The rest of The Snowman is a goddamned mess. Somewhere there might have been a halfway decent thriller in this thing. Or at least a crazy B-movie with a killer who puts women's heads on snowmen. Instead we got a movie that was so badly torn up in editing it felt like it was made by aliens. Val Kilmer has a small role but due to medical issues was unable to open his mouth. Yet they left him in the movie. Also the main character is named "Harry Hole"!
And worst movie of 2017 is....
The Dark Tower - Akiva Goldsman has been a horrible screenwriter for decades with such career highlights as Batman and Robin and Winter's Tale. That he still manages to get work and fail upwards is an inspiring tale about the power of privilege in Hollywood. Will Goldsman lose any sleep for creating this aborted take on Stephen King's Dark Tower series? Maybe he could just put the blame on his three - yes three - credited co-writers. It is rare these days to see an adaptation so completely disregard the source material. They fucking ruined these books. Beyond that, there is nothing to say about The Dark Tower. It is a piece of nothingness filmmaking that nobody wanted or loved. Truly sad.
----
And now with that done, here's the Best Movie of 2017:
1. Lady Bird
I think I tipped my hand in my Best Game of the Year post when I wondered if there could ever be a "Lady Bird of video games". Spoilers, I guess. Now, let me ask: can there be a Night in the Woods of movies?
Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical feature from Greta Gerwig, a mumblecore survivor who has only gotten better over the years. I remember first seeing Gerwig in a film that she co-wrote called Hannah Takes the Stairs, which was... just horrible. It was like you took every cliche of the mid-2000s ultra-cheap art film scene and made something bland and awkward out of it. Terrible movie but not every creator has to get it right on their first attempt. Since then I thought her writing work in Mistress America was incredible (and I really need to see Frances Ha). With Lady Bird, however, Gerwig's voice has never been more clear.
The movie opens with a scene that gives its intent. An eighteen-old-girl who demands to be called "Lady Bird" (Saoirse Ronan) is being driven home from a college visit road trip with her mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf). What starts out as a pleasant conversation turns strained as Lady Bird reveals she doesn't want to go to a local California school. Then she dramatically jumps out of the moving car to make her point. Saoirse Ronan wears a pink cast for the next half of the movie. Lady Bird is a typically angry teenager, upset with her social class and the lack of culture in her home town. She doesn't know it, but all this is deeply hurting to her mother, who has to wrestle with the fact her she can't provide a life her daughter is satisfied with. The conflict is built out of love yet almost tears them apart.
What I love about Lady Bird is that its protagonist sets out to break free from her surroundings, yet she never receives the obvious fight back. Her Catholic high school is remarkably understanding of her needs. When Lady Bird vandalizes a nun's car, the nun finds it all a great joke. One of her boyfriends is a pretentious anti-Bush Howard Zinn-reading poser (who looks suspiciously like Noah Baumbach). There's no real revolution in the air, just a teenager's whining. Lady Bird later struggles to fit in with the richest kids and actually succeeds. But conforming turns out to be as empty as rebelling. She doesn't even know what she wants or why she's pushing herself, but who does at that age?
A more narcissistic movie would feature Lady Bird as this great hero battling against society. Actually our protagonist is more of a selfish teenager. But Lady Bird also doesn't attack its hero. It's written from an older, wiser place. Greta Gerwig can empathize with her past self but also with Laurie Metcalf's character. It accepts its character not as a hero or a villain, just as a flawed human trying to figure out adolescence. And it doesn't even end with the character moving on to college. It lingers for several more scenes just to remind you that no, Lady Bird (or "Christine" as she is now calling herself) hasn't figured out the answers yet.
High school isn't some grand quest that ends with college as the reward, it is just one phase of life fading into another. You never actually get all the answers.
----
Also, here's a ton of Honorable Mentions that you should also see:
Wind River - Wind River makes for a trilogy now of Taylor Sheridan depressing neo-Westerns, after Sicario and Hell or High Water. Sheridan has an eye for the most depressing sides of this decaying culture of ours. With Wind River he picks the most ignored: sexual violence against Native American women.
xXx: The Return of Xander Cage - I said I liked trashy shit, didn't I?
It Comes at Night - The ending is too abrupt, but everything else about this super bleak horror film set during a modern plague is sublime. Spoiler: there is no "it", but I was terrified none the less.
Last Flag Flying - It sounds like a downer premise: a father and his Vietnam buddies have a road trip to bury his son who died in the Iraq War. It's actually one of the best comedies of the year. A lot of 2017 was spent obsessing over kneeling for the flag and showing respect to veterans. However, a lot of us are more interested in "showing respect" instead of actually giving respect and listening to the stories of our veterans. Last Flag Flying is about those stories.
Dunkirk - It's a really cool war film. However, that's all I have to say about it.
I Am Not Your Negro - I didn't know much about black social critic James Baldwin before I saw this movie. I'm really glad to learn about him and his thoughts about America's deep, deep problems.
Logan - Disney just bought Fox and the X-Men so we won't be getting superhero movies like this anymore. Logan actually has things to say about its character and is a somber ending to Hugh Jackman's many years playing the part. Unlike the MCU, it was not afraid to be sincere. Sincerity is over now.
The Lost City of Z - If David Lean ever made a movie about the Amazon jungle, it would be a grand historical epic just like The Lost City of Z. It is a slow, contemplative movie, but a really interesting one.
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) - Here's an ultra-Jewish family drama featuring an actually good use of Adam Sandler. It is the tale of a Manhattan family led by cantankerous men who mostly talk past each other. They're all bitter and incredibly smart and a bit grotesque, but when you get right down to it, they're actually all the same asshole.
The Beguiled - In a white Southern girls school during the Civil War, a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell) wanders in. He tries to get some. It doesn't work out. Second best use of poisonous mushrooms in 2017.
The Lego Batman Movie - I want Warner Bros to give up on its Zack Snyder live action nightmare and make all its superhero movies out of Legos from now on.
Atomic Blonde - Best action of the year. Charlize Theron is the best action star working today. Atomic Blonde is all spycraft, stilettos, and sex. Too bad the plot makes no sense.
The Florida Project - I loved this look at the life style of the ultra poor in Florida motels. I really did. But the last minute killed the whole movie for me.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - Best cast of the year, some of the best humor of the year. You never want to miss a Martin McDonagh project.
War for the Planet of the Apes - The best movie of the new Planet of the Apes trilogy by far, and nobody saw it. (Sigh)
PS: Apologies this ended up being 7,000 words long. At the rate I'm going my Best Of list for 2018 will be 10,000 words long. By 2020 I'll be writing Tolstoy-length epics.
No Disaster Artist? YOU ARE TEARING ME APART, BLUEHIGHWIND!
ReplyDeleteEh.
DeleteI don't see the last Jedi on this list. I'm guessing besides the meta context, you weren't very fond of it?
Delete