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.

The Shape of Water review

Mexican born filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro is fascinated by the idea that people are often drawn to what initially scares them, usually only because they fundamentally misunderstand themselves and the greater context of their own fears. As such, his films--both indie darlings like “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” as well as studio blockbusters like “Pacific Rim” and “Hellboy"--are chock full of interesting and intricately designed monsters. As a visual artist and a storyteller Del Toro loves his monsters and for him, they always represent a complex emotional truth about the nature of humanity. With his latest film, “The Shape of Water,” the balance between his directorial compassion and his genre obsessions is blended delicately into a contemporary “Beauty and Beast” style narrative, with a central focus on diversity, tolerance, and equality.

The story is set in the cold-war 1960s at the height of the red scare. Sally Hawkins plays Elisa Esposito, a mute janitor who cleans a secret government science compound. Things get interesting when an amphibious humanoid merman is captured from his underwater home in South America and brought into the facility to be studied. Some of the scientists wish to keep him alive to understand his capability to learn, and others, like the stone-faced, military-minded Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon), plan to dissect the creature to develop new science to use against their Russian enemies. Hawkins secret friendship and eventual romance with the amphibious man leads to a rescue effort that involves co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), the sympathetic Dr. Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg), and her graphic designer neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins).

Given the time period this movie is set and the basic structure of the plot, it would have been easy to allow a story of this kind of coast of genre expectations alone. What makes the film stand out from being yet another high-concept take on “E.T” or “Free Willy” is Del Toro’s willingness to dig deep into a psychology of his characters and their worldview. The film's theme of what it is to be ostracized as a minority dominates and naturalizes the fantasy.  Hawkins’ character is mute, Spencer is black, and they both work as women in a government-industry dominated by white men. Likewise, Jenkins plays a closeted gay man, and it’s the unified ‘other-ness’ of this grouping of minorities that is manifested through the struggle of this abused and imprisoned merman. As we see the civil rights struggle in the background of this story, it becomes all the more evident that the creature's rescue becomes their rescue. 

The central love story between Elisa and this mysterious being, played with wonderful physicality by Doug Jones, takes risks and goes beyond the usual slow build to acceptance and eventual affection. Hawkins’ wordless performance strips away the possibility for coyness or coded language when it comes to all of her emotions and as the story progresses their love is expressed both emotionally and physically. This, along with Guillermo’s biting sense of humor, and the occasional jolts of visceral violence may alienate some audience members, but even if this is too weird for you to swallow, it’s difficult to deny the movie’s bold commitment to its premise.

Everyone already knows that Del Toro is Hollywood's current king of creature design and art direction. “The Shape of Water” is no exception. However, by putting his focus on one central creature, instead of a smorgasbord of weird looking monsters we are usually treated to in one of his previous films, he is able to dig deeper into the wider human world his characters inhabit. The 60s sets are well lit and creatively designed and the “Creature From The Black Lagoon” inspired look of Jones’ costume is textured and utterly believable, but it's Del Toro’s capacity to empathize with these characters and ground this world into an emotional reality that elevates this movie beyond its fairytale tropes and trappings.

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 "The Shape of Water"