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 Florida Project review

Sean Baker’s “The Florida Project” is a near-perfect snapshot of real-world Americana. Unlike the usual glut of LA/NY films about the lives of ad executives and graphic designers, Baker gives us the fly on the wall point of view of a lively Orlando motel filled with immigrants, tourists and vagrants who are all doing what they can to make it through day to day.  Hollywood routinely ignores the poor unless they wish to exploit them or turn them into cartoonish stereotypes, and while Baker doesn’t shy away from the grimmer realities of those who have slipped beneath America’s social cracks, he never judges them and gracefully creates a deep sense of untraditional family with his cast of mostly unknowns.

Newcomer Brooklyn Prince plays the film’s unofficial lead Mooney, a spunky six year old with a potty mouth and an adventurous spirit that gets her and her friends into trouble. Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto) follow their instigator as they panhandle for ice-cream money, break into the hotel’s breaker room, and vandalize near-by abandoned homes. Mooney lives with her notably young mother Halley (Bria Valley), who sells hot merchandise and prostitutes herself to pay a weekly rent for their room at a Disneyworld-adjacent hotel, which is managed by the bighearted but overstretched Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe.

While there is clear character arcs the narrative there isn’t a clear three act structure with an inciting incident or second act moment of conflict to be resolved. Because of the movie’s impressionistic, montage approach to storytelling, some might find the lack of a “plot” frustrating. Baker doesn’t want to bog these characters down with a plot contrivance like a personal mission to achieve or a big problem to overcome. Instead this focuses more on the moments between the plot-points in our lives, and since most of this is being experienced through the perspective of a child, we are sometimes shielded from the harder aspects of Mooney’s daily experiences. What Baker creates is a painterly collage of brief moments of recognizable American childhood, where harder adult truths like making rent, finding free food and avoiding the police is treated like a fun game or a way of keeping yourself occupied during summer vacation.

With the exception of Dafoe as Bobby, who turns in a wonderful un-Dafoe performance as the hotel’s surrogate father, the rest of the cast blends into Baker’s attempt at documentary-style verisimilitude.  This means that the acting, like in Baker’s last picture—the iPhone filmed dark comedy “Tangerine”—is too real to focus on performance as an individual element. Much of the dialogue feels improvised and the children often scream and squeak their lines over each other, giving the audience the impression that they aren’t watching a movie, so much as peering through their window, wondering like a nosy neighbor just what the hell these kids are up to.  This, along with the non-traditional narrative structure, is likely to weed out viewers who are more accustomed to Wheaties- commercial style annunciation from their child actors.

The accumulative effect of “The Florida Project” is devastating if you’re willing to open your mind to its unique rhythm. The cinematography by Alexis Zabe combines the handheld immediacy of “Tangerine” with warmly lit, deliberate camera placement that recalls the moodier moments of last year’s Florida-based indie drama, “Moonlight.” Though all the individual components of the film work in harmony, with the exception of some random bathtub shots that are seemingly shuffled in to break up later scenes, the movie’s big takeaway is the compassion it displays for its characters and the tangible, relatable world they inhabit.    

Grade: A-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Nov-2017