Best and Worst of 2017
The Oscars are on, and crappy movies are mostly winning again, so I figure it’s a good time to share my list of the best and worst of the year. I’ll start of optimistically with with my top movies, counting down from my pick for best picture of 2017.
1: Blade Runner 2049
Director Denis Villeneuve delivers on the potential that Ridley Scott only hinted at in the original Blade Runner. Set thirty years after the original, Blade Runner 2049 speaks the same visual language as the original but takes viewers much farther around its world, with a story much richer and better paced. But comparing it to its predecessor isn’t what I’m doing here; I’m comparing it to the other films of 2017, and frankly, it blows them away. Technically, it is a marvel: not just top-shelf visual effects, but fantastic sets and costumes, along with some of the best use of sound I’ve heard in a film. The story asks how godlike man can become, but like all good science fiction, it’s ultimately a mirror in which to see our own humanity.
2: The Florida Project
Since I just saw The Florida Project, putting it at №2 is arguably the result of my excitement blinding my reason. I may also be unduly influenced by the nostalgia I feel for my home state, which is captured better in this film than any other I’ve yet seen. Also adding to my appreciation of it was the conversation I had right after with friends (one of whom works with the homeless and has experience with poverty that I cannot claim). But I don’t think my own biases and predilections are the reason The Florida Project resonates the way it does. This film is a triumph. It’s not easy to watch, and it’s one I would recommend with qualifications, but it speaks to poverty in a way I’ve never seen in a movie. Like Hillbilly Elegy (sorry, I had to), this film showcases a set of unflinchingly real characters—their language and their sins and their crimes are all necessary parts of a whole story of marginalization. Love still shines through every scene — all lovingly crafted and lovely to behold, even when it is trying to watch.
3: Lady Bird
I’ll be honest, I hate rebellious youth as a plot device. It’s overused in Hollywood, and it’s undercooked almost every time. Filmmakers too often think showing a kid’s parents being out-of-touch is all the work their stories have to do to lay the foundations for his grandiose acts of defiance. And so I have to credit Lady Bird for making me love a story of a rebellious high-schooler, a capricious, rapacious, licentious teenager, and also a creative, loving, spiritually-longing human being. Saoirse Ronan deserves credit for a humorous and powerful performance as the titular character, but Laurie Metcalf’s performance as her mother is even more impressive (and should have won her an Oscar). The conflict between mother and daughter rings true in every scene. Squabbling is interspersed with friendly chit chat. Understandings form after fights. But divisions emerge that seem tied to their very natures, giving viewers the chance to ponder how much work goes into reconciliation. Lady Bird is a good example of what can happen when filmmakers treat rebellion not as a plot device, but as a capacity residing in every human heart.
In addition, Lady Bird gets the Shepherd Book Memorial Award for presenting religious people in a dignificd and fleshed out manner, rather than merely freaks, legalists, or hypocrites.
4. Get Out
Is it a comedy? Is it horror? Is it cinema’s best argument for the validity of racial profiling? Get Out defies description just like it defied expectations. This genre-bending work by a first-time solo director — best known for his TV sketch comedy — made $255 million on a $4.5 million budget. This is one of those movies that works completely because the vision for it is so comprehensive. It was writer and director Jordan Peele’s years-in-the-making project over which he was, thankfully, given full creative control. It’s no surprise that the movie demonstrates his impeccable sense of comic timing, but the level of narrative coherence is remarkable.
5. Coco
When you’re a sucker for animated films, it’s always great when Pixar delivers. Coco has it all: laughs, tears, music, magic, a stupendous cast of characters, and much more, all fully realized in an animated world created by approximately ten zillion of the best animators working today. I’ll sound outrageously cheesy if I go too much further, but if you’ve seen it, you know what I mean, and if you haven’t, you should remedy that post-haste.
6. Icarus
This documentary shows how systematic Russian cheating at the Olympics went all the way up to President Vladimir Putin. As it turns out, the feckless International Olympic Committee is something of an ideal adversary for the KGB agent-turned-strongman. The sporting committee was no match for chemist Grigory Rodchenkov’s skill and the FSB’s muscle — certainly not on the Russians’ home turf at the Sochi Olympic Games in 2014 — and there’s a grim satisfaction in seeing how Russia orchestrated its record medal haul by seizing incriminating urine samples from the Olympic lab. It’s also an impressive bit of filmmaking, combining Rodchenkov’s testimony, footage from the games, and digital models of the buildings. My full review is here.
Honorable Mention:
Thor Ragnarok, Wind River, The Boss Baby, I, Tonya, Mary and the Witch’s Flower, Wonder Woman, Phantom Thread, Wonder, and Transformers: The Last Knight (edit: I forgot the last three when I posted this, mea culpa).
Below are my picks for the worst films I saw in 2017, ordered from terrible to truly atrocious. There were plenty of crappy movies this year. Some of them I was mercifully spared from, such as Justice League, and others were disappointingly flawed but didn’t draw my ire. These three, however, deserve to be singled out.
A Franchise-Wrecking Disaster: The Last Jedi
Much hot air has been spent between in the war of words over Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and probably far too much of it has come out of my mouth. I’ll zero in on the core problem of the movie, expressed in eight words a friend (who is not a Star Wars nerd) used to sum it up: It didn’t feel like a Star Wars movie. The Last Jedi eschews all everything that makes Star Wars what it is, in favor of an achingly “relevant,” thematically flimsy story about a starship running out of space gasoline. Our heroes attempt to save the galaxy with cloying platitudes about love and nonsensical schemes to get help from space gamblers in space Monaco. That’s when they aren’t inexplicably undermining one another for the exclusive purpose of manufacturing conflict in a screenplay devoid of intrigue. It’s everything Star Wars shouldn’t be.
A Lame Christian Movie, but for Progressives: The Shape of Water
My boss at the Free Beacon described The Shape of Water as both a morality play and a fairy tale for adults. I concur, but what it reminded me most of were those terrible Christian movies that beat viewers over the head with their message and put absolutely no depth or ambiguity into the characters. The film seems to have outright contempt for anything that would distract from the flashing neon sign of a message that infuses every single scene and demands viewers root for every act of #resistance by the protagonists. It is comical how every Bad Person is required to have multiple, heavy-handed instances of outright bigotry just to make sure snoozing viewers couldn’t possibly miss that they are, indeed, Bad.
That would be enough to make the film trite, but its focus on sexual gratification — even when it involves venturing outside the species of homo sapiens — brings it into disturbing territory. The movie puts no effort whatsoever into developing the character of the fish-man with which Elisa is infatuated, instead making him a sex object on which she projects her fantasies. The movie preaches a radical sexual-liberationist ideology and then shamelessly gratifies the audience by having (spoiler alert) all the good guys in the progressive political coalition defeat all the bad people in the authoritarian wing of the Republican Party, as they carry on deviant sexual relationships that, in this movie’s logic, verify their status as self-actualized Good Folks. It probably won’t make a difference to tell Hollywood that making others into sex objects is bad, but I hope they’ll at least consider the idea that they should make movies that don’t so closely resemble religiously didactic “art.”
An Affront to Human Dignity: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Even more than the Shape of Water, Three Billboards is a morally offensive work. It is, frankly, degrading toward the human person. This is seen most obviously in its glorification of suicide but most perniciously in the way the primary characters go about harming one another to no purpose besides the filmmakers’ lust for carnage. The protagonist is a mother stung by the loss of a daughter, and she responds to it by terrorizing people who had nothing to do with the crime, mistreating the living child she still has, and turning her own pain into a fetish that swallows up all her energy and, ultimately, all her worship. The film glorifies this loss of dignity again and again, and yet it also presents a fantasy world where there are no consequences. She assaults dentists, commits arson, hurts her son — all 4 the lolz, or something, I guess. Meanwhile, people lose their lives, their jobs, and their families in a completely weightless way.
Stepping off the soapbox, I’m going to be the fly in the ointment and point out a series of undeniable failures of Three Billboards. The overwritten and over-acted dialogue is frequently cringeworthy. Martin McDonagh is clearly very aware of his status as a world-renowned playwright, because his characters launch into unprovoked screeds about everything from the Catholic Church to the injustice of the universe. The themes fall flat over and over, most notably racism and criminal justice reform, which appear to be important until they are discarded and all non-white characters are forgotten. The film ultimately turns into a star-vehicle for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, both of whom are almost certain to win Oscars despite their characters’ soullessness, and the little thematic groundwork that was laid quickly vanishes in favor of cynicism and cheap violence. Except the movie can’t even do that right, so our heroes end up hatching a silly plot to get revenge on a rando in Idaho to give the movie a faux-ambiguous ending. Every crazy thing these characters do (and there are many) feels like it was shoehorned in by McDonagh to get the plot to the next crazy thing, all in an endless chain to no narrative effect.
