Top 10 Films of 2017

Altogether, 2017 wasn’t a bad year for movies. Even if I had to travel to art houses to watch something worthwhile, there was never a shortage of interesting things to see. There were also a handful of mainstream movies such as Patty Jenkin's "Wonder Woman," Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” and  Marvel’s “Thor: Ragnarok” that made an impression beyond their minimum financial requirements. My list contains many unabashed genre movies, including three monster movies, one superhero film, and two psychological horror films. In fact, only three of the films listed tell relatively common stories within a fairly naturalized version of the world we live in. Nevertheless, the list below represents last year’s films that stuck with me the most.

10 – Okja
South Korean director Bong Joon Ho’s subversive allegory tells the story of a girl who fights the powers of the food industrial complex to keep her genetically modified super-pig from being killed. It’s heartwarming, weird, campy, smart, disturbing, and politically conscious without forgetting to keep you entertained.

09 – Call Me by Your Name
Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of Andre Aciman’s novel of the same name explores first love and the complicated emotions associated with young hormones and queer awakening with the perfect proportions of guilt, lust, and righteous indignation. The performances by romantic leads Timothee Chalamet and Armie Hammer are honest and the movie’s total sensory immersion within this 1981, summer vista in Northern Italy only helps to drench this dream-like romance in youthful idealism.

08 – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
Every year has a great crime film, and this year’s entry by playwright/director Martin McDonagh, while not without a few tonal and narrative stumbles along the way, left a lasting impression.  McDonagh embraces the story’s pulpy post-Cohen trappings while finding surprising ways to empathize with every morally complicated character in his southern-gothic murder ballad.

 07 – Logan
 “Logan” went far and above anyone’s expectations, considering it was the third spinoff from 20th Century Fox’s wildly uneven X-Men franchise. This hard-R action thriller only concerned itself with its comic book origins when it needed to advance the thoughtful arc of its title character. This is the type of action fare that originally set the bar for fanboys, back when movies like “Robocop” and “Terminator 2” were the standards, instead of toothless, PG-13 cartoons, designed by committee.

06 – Colossal
Anne Hathaway and Jason Sudeikis explore gendered power dynamics and alcoholism in Nacho Vigalondo’s unique comedic fantasy “Colossal.”  The relationship depicted here is mirrored by (and perhaps in control of) giant monster attacks in Seoul, South Korea. This is unquestionably one of the most creative and underappreciated films released in 2017.

05 – The Shape of Water 
After a decade of playing in his toy-box and exploring new technology with films such as “Hellboy: The Golden Army” and “Pacific Rim,” Guillermo del Toro was in desperate need to scale things back and explore emotional storytelling again, and that’s exactly what he did with his spectacular inter-species, cold-war romance, “The Shape of Water.” This takes familiar sci-fi/horror tropes and weaves them into a sophisticated love story about living in the margins of society.

04 – Get Out
Comedian Jordon Peele released his post-racial horror-comedy “Get Out” just as our country began to reexamine the old prejudices that we had been trying to ignore for decades. His film cleverly reinterprets the tradition of paranoid, socio-political supernatural thrillers such as “The Stepford Wives” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” but it’s also become a conversation piece around a time when Americans were forced to deal with the fact that polite racism is still racism.

03 – Raw
This Belgian horror film explores the sexual awakening of a college-aged vegetarian through the metaphor of cannibalism and manages to be vicious, disgusting, and painfully relatable at the same time. Scenes of grotesque mutilation and bloody meat-eating are fetishized through the laser-focused perspective of our confused protagonist. While being one of the gnarliest seat-squirmers released in recent memory, this also happens to contain one of the most honest portrayals of competitive sisterhood captured on film.

02 – The Florida Project
Sean Baker’s film about struggling families living week to week in cheap hotels outside Disneyworld was one of the more affecting movies I came across last year. This contains strong performances by children and non-actors and a subtle compassion that glows through the entire production. Baker presents these marginal lives with an insider’s objectivity that refuses to other them or turn into magically-wise gypsies.

01 – Lady Bird 
“Lady Bird” is my favorite film of the year for the sheer reason that it kept me in a good mood for at least forty-eight hours after I watched it. The level of specificity in its character dynamics and its 2002 Sacramento setting, alongside the underlying mother-daughter story and its themes about embracing your small-town roots, sets this film apart from the usual ‘quirky’ Sundance fodder. This is what great American filmmaking should look like.

Honorable Mentions: The Big Sick, Thor: Ragnarok, Downsizing, Happy Death Day, It, Blade Runner: 2049

Listen to this week's episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about our year-end lists.

Lady Bird review

Quentin Tarantino once said of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” “Yeah, it’s personal, but if it isn’t good who cares?” This was, of course, Tarantino’s lead into a strong endorsement of the indie filmmakers critically high-point, before Smith eventually squandered most his good will on half-baked stoner comedies and non-sense podcast fodder. But it’s this sentiment that comes to mind when reviewing actress Greta Gerwig's “Lady Bird,” her debut film as both writer and director. Based heavily on the 34-year old’s  own coming of age experiences in 2002 Sacramento, the movie plays as both a love letter to the California capital, as well as a tender-hearted comedy about a big fish in a little pond who’s awkwardly splashing her way to grander opportunities.

Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a high-school senior who is desperately trying to leave her small town life. While forced to live a lower-middle-class existence, fighting with her pragmatist mother (Laurie Metcalf) and preparing graduation from her strict Catholic education. As she tries on many new personalities she ready’s herself for a more cultured life at one of the prospective east-coast universities she hopes to attend. This is made explicitly known to her friends and family when she forces them to refer to her as Lady Bird instead of her given name. After deciding she needs an artistic outlet, her and best friend Julie (Beanie Feldstein) take small parts in the school musical, just before Lady Bird finds a new group of partying, pseudo-intellectual parking-lot rebels. In the background of this, with the help of her out-of-work father (Tracy Letts), our protagonist tries to apply to as many out-of-state schools as she can without her easily-worried mother finding out.

Gerwig’s treatment of this coming-of-age story is grounded by its specificity. It’s not a story that has to take place in Sacramento to work, but in doing so the city becomes another character whose relationship with Lady Bird is just as nuanced as the other human relationships in the movie. This didn’t need to be set in 2002, but the music and wardrobe choices, as well as the pre-smartphone, pre-social media time-frame that’s captured here, keep the characters isolated in their suburban malaise that’s lovingly recreated. It’s also nice to see a story about a realistically middle-class family who is struggling financially but without shifting the narrative away from the protagonists

The other element that separates this effort from the film’s generic teen-movie lineage, is the quality of the performances combined with Gerwig’s funny yet truthful, conversational dialogue. The many prickly scenes between Metcalf and Ronan’s mother-daughter exchanges is like watching two tennis pros bat the ball back and forth without ever letting it hit the ground. These actors are totally in tune with each other but not at the expense of movie’s larger impact. As real and emotional as the acting is, it never overwhelms the story or dampens the scripts many comedic highlights. Actor/playwright Letts also has complicated arc throughout the story as his personal and professional failures are redeemed through his daughter’s naive ambitions. It’s a heartbreaking arc that the film doesn’t explicate in an overly sentimental way. 

Not only is “Lady Bird” an exceptional effort from a first time director, this has been one of the strongest films to come out this year--though it should be stated Gerwig’s collaborations with directors Noah Baumbach and Joe Swanberg was more extensive than the usual co-writer or actor. Every scene advances or complicates the characters and never lets them settle into a comfortable archetype, and the craft behind the earthy, amber-hued visual design of the picture also shows a level of stylistic confidence that elevates the project beyond either the teen genre or the usual Sundance crowd-pleaser.  Like any great filmmaker who understands how to balance story with style, Gerwig’s snappy dialogue and personal touches are in perfect sync with the rhythm of the narrative and in service to the overall quality of the final result.

Grade A+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2017

Listen to this episode of Jabber and the Drone to hear more conversation about "Lady Bird."