Favorite Movies of 2017

Well, here we are again—another one of these lists. I'm not going to do one of those long preambles. As usual, this post is divided between my favorite movies (emphasis on "favorite," not "best," whatever that means) and other movies I thought were notable, either for good or ill. Also as usually, I admit that I (obviously) haven't seen every 2017 movie, and I resent that the elitist and outdated distribution schedules have kept some of my most-anticipated movies away from Knoxville (more importantly, The Post and Phantom Thread).

I hope y'all enjoy it. Please, disagree with me; share your own picks; discuss. I've said it before—I love discussing this list stuff.

Favorite Movies

1. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
It's all about death, when you get right down to it: our lives, our actions, our thoughts—whether or not we're conscious of it, they're all defined by that firm bookend. Warm and easy-going, The B-Side resembles that other Errol Morris masterpiece, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, by allowing a mix of editing and unfettered obsession over a craft (here, Polaroid portraitry) to accumulate into a towering treatise. I haven't seen a ton of people love this movie as much as I did, but more so than anything else I saw this year, The B-Side is profound.

[Read original review here]

2. Good Time
A damning character portrait disguised as a feature-length chase sequence, Good Time is fun until it's devastating. It's the sort of movie where you'll spend most of the runtime with your hand over your agape mouth, your eyes dazzled by the gorgeous nocturnal cinematography, your ears ringing from the assaultive score. If you haven't already seen it, the most viscerally exciting movie of the year is well-worth your time.

[Read original review here]

3. The Shape of Water
In the running for Guillermo del Toro's best English-language film, The Shape of Water is by turns swooningly romantic and gory, baroque and grimy, nostalgic and mythic; it's a blender of all of del Toro's best preoccupations, from classic Hollywood to B-movie trash, and it's great. You'll believe a fish-man can dance.

[Read original review here]

4. A Ghost Story
David Lowrey's hypnotic, unpredictable art film about grief is something of a feature-length remake of the "I got a rock" refrain from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, right down to the sheet ghost. The magic of this movie is that it's also heartbreaking, and not in that gentle Charlie-Brown-style way—it's legitimately staring-into-the-void-style sublimity.

[Read original review here]

5. mother!
If Darren Aronofsky wanted to just make provocative, stylistically adventurous Bible movies for the rest of his career, that would be a-okay with me. Whatever you think of the theology here, the sheer daring of this movie's scope is in a league of its own.

[Read original review here]

6. The Beguiled
Sweatiest movie of the year, bar none. This is supposedly set in Virginia, but this is definitely Louisiana, and rarely has humidity been so palpably captured on film. It's Sofia Coppola's best in quite some time, and it's no accident that it's also a tight, mean little thriller, Coppola's usually dreamy atmospherics morphing into something as sinister and phantasmagoric as it is beautiful.

[Read original review here]

7. A Quiet Passion
An exquisite tribute to Emily Dickinson couched in Terence Davies's usual visual splendor—a particularly good match of subject with director, as Davies's understated formalism complements Dickinson's own poetic style wonderfully.

[Read original review here]

8. Logan
The only superhero movie in this superhero-stuffed year I'd call "great," and while we've had plenty of movies with politics on their minds, this, with its apocalyptic squalor, is one of the few that really captures my fears of where we seem to be heading.

[Read original review here]

9. A Cure for Wellness
Something something good taste something bad script something something. I don't care. This movie looks awesome, and it's the best gothic horror we've gotten at the movies since Crimson Peak. Plus, there's no topping the compositions and lighting of the visuals here.

[Read original review here]

10. Your Name
It has all the gorgeous detail of previous Makoto Shinkai features and, a first for me with his work, a story I really bought into. The final half hour or so of the film is some of the most cosmic, beautiful film imagery, animated or not, of the year.

[Read original review here]






Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Best Zeitgeist-Defining Movie: Get Out—This is the 2017 movie, and I don't see many good arguments to the contrary. It's far from my favorite, but Get Out is still really freaking good, hilarious and frightening in equal measure, bolstered by a diverse cinematic tradition alluded to heavily in Jordan Peele's dense and frequently brilliant screenplay. But this is more than a spot-the-allusion film; it's a film that uses movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to genuinely subversive ends, playing off our familiarity with the beats and images of these movies to shock us. Also, it's about race; more specifically, it's about predatory white people. Let's not pretend like that isn't the most 2017 plot in all of cinema.

Best Drama: The Salesman—And I mean "drama" in the sense that it resembles a play. Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman isn't play-like in the derogatory way that movie critics usually mean when they compare the two media; rather, I'd just like to call attention to and celebrate that way that, like always, Farhadi brings a tense efficiency to the screenplay that recalls the immediacy of the stage. Farhadi's movies are as tight as drums, and while there are some elements in The Salesman that makes it less tight than, say, The Past, it still makes a mighty sound when struck.

Best Coming of Age: Lady Bird—I haven't had a chance to formally review this one yet (it's likely the final 2017 movie I'm going to see in a theater), but I love me some coming-of-age cinema, and this one is very good. Willing to be honest about the specific ways in which high school students can be various shades of pretentious and careless in a way that recalls last year's masterful The Edge of Seventeen, it's a tremendously well-observed film that, for all its plot shagginess (and there is that, sometimes to its detriment), is so sharp and specific in its characterization of Lady Bird herself that she practically jumps off the screen to shake your hand.

Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049—I get the thematic and narrative critiques of this movie, but I won't hear anyone dissing Roger Deakins's astounding, beautiful, lay-me-down-to-rest-because-I-have-seen-the-face-of-God visual work. Some kudos probably goes to the production design, too, without which this probably wouldn't have been so stunning. But come on; it's also Deakins we're talking about here.

Best Cry: Coco—Pixar, y'all. "Remember meeeee..."

Best Action: John Wick: Chapter 2—It's like dudes in suits shooting each other in art galleries in highly choreographed ways. What's not to like about that?

Best "Not Quite the Best Action, but Hey Look! Tarkovsky!": Atomic Blonde—Don't get me wrong: the action in Atomic Blonde is very good. It just isn't John Wick: Chapter 2 good. Still, there's a fight scene in front of a projection of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, so major points to this movie for making a cheap retro allusion that I am physically unable to resist. Take that, Ready Player One.

Best Action (Ape Division): War for the Planet of the Apes—Apes on horses! Apes with guns! Apes breaking out of concentration camps! Apes doing all sorts of things! All our movies should have more apes. (But all kidding aside, this really is a good movie)

Best Animation: The Boss Baby—Am I losing my mind? Pixar has the photorealism, Cartoon Saloon has the serious stylization, Illumination Entertainment has all the really crappy-looking stuff, but it's DreamWorks Animation—frikkin' DREAMWORKS—that's actually doing the animation I like best on an aesthetic level these days. This studio has finally done what I'd considered impossible and made CG animation as flexible and convincingly cartoonish as hand-drawn stuff, and for that, they have my sincere gratitude.

Animated Movie I'm Most Thankful For: The Breadwinner—This movie is flawed in significant ways, but, along with the DreamWorks output this year (?!?), it most pushes English-language animation in directions I wish the whole medium would all go: serious-minded, audience-trusting, culturally diverse, stylistically (not realistically) animated.

Best Opening Sequence: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—The first five minutes of this movie, set perfectly to David Bowie's "Space Oddity," are the best five minutes (opening or not) of any movie this year. It's a warm throwback to the optimism of sci-fi's 1940s/50s golden era, only flipped to show interplanetary contact to be an intrinsic element of this future utopia, not its greatest threat. Any other year, it wouldn't be a particularly political statement, but with every inter-species handshake, it's impossible not to feel that cooperative multiculturalism is a necessary piece of humanity's future, and also to feel the chasm between that ideal and our contemporary political discourse.

Best Opening Sequence (Non-David-Bowie Division): Baby Driver—Edgar Wright's crime caper never really delivers on the promise of this scene as an action movie intricately choreographed to pop music, but for its opening scene (and honestly, the decidedly more pedestrian second scene), Baby Driver is the perfect realization of this premise. It's wonderful.

Best Use of "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Logan Lucky—This movie's a lot of fun all around, but it's only a great movie in one moment, and that's at a children's beauty pageant, of all reprehensible things. People sing this song; it's moving.

Best Use of the Word "Poop": Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie—There's a lot of poop-centric stuff in this movie. It's great.

Worst Use of a True Story: Same Kind of Different as Me—Pure Flix strikes again! This time, they've skimmed over all the legitimately interesting stuff about the kind of amazing true story that informs the plot and instead left us with the most boring, cookie-cutter inspirational trash ever. Hurray!

Most Misunderstood: The Glass Castle—Critics saw a toothless weepy in a tremendously difficult, thorny film about what it means to feel love for a genuinely abusive person. This is not a movie of easily-arrived-at adages; it's a film that languishes on messy, complicated, intentionally problematic questions and doesn't suggest anything cheap about its film-ending catharsis.

Best Quote: The Big Sick—"This is why I don't want to go online, 'cause it's never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump." Terry (a great Ray Romano) gets it.

Best Use of Social Media: Personal Shopper—Briefly, the quiet psychological thrills of Personal Shopper get cranked up to sheer horror-movie levels, and it's all thanks to a clever playing off of what we know about texting and social media engagement.

Best Use of Outer Space: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—There's a lot about these Marvel movies that's getting stale, but I'll give them this: as long as they are making colorful, goofy, imaginatively designed space-opera visuals (see also: Thor: Ragnarok), I'll probably still watch them.

Best Shower: Alien: Covenant—You'll know it when you see it.

Best Kiss: Alien: Covenant—Again, you'll know it when you see it.

Best "Well, We're Going to Be Making These Movies Until Human Extinction, So We Might As Well Make It Interesting": Star Wars: The Last Jedi—This actually probably belongs again to Alien: Covenant again, but I'm not confident that they'll be making Alien movies for that much longer. Star Wars, though... Star Wars is forever. The Last Jedi is likely the most experimental that we're going to see Star Wars get for a while (though judging by some of the fan outrage, they need to get a lot more so—just rip that band-aide off, Kennedy), and even this isn't too dramatic of a departure (I can't be the only one who wanted Rey to join Kylo like he asked). However, it's by far the most interesting engagement with the series mythology since the prequels, and this is the first time since Lucas was at the helm that the Star Wars universe felt like a living, breathing place full of species and planets we haven't seen before. It's enjoyable.

"Good Try, I Guess" Award: Song to Song—Does Terrence Malick actually know what rock music is, or did he just read the Wikipedia page? QUESTIONS TO PONDER.

Worst Application of Corporate Synergy: Beauty and the Beast—We did not need this movie, and we certainly didn't need it to be as bad as it was. Disney's been pretty good at making questionable (and nakedly money-grubbing) decisions at least blandly enjoyable this decade, but NOPE. Not this one.

Best Slow, Monarchical Death: The Death of Louis XIV—The title says it all, and let me repeat: it is sloooooow. But it's also beautifully costumed, and there's something about the languorous, meticulous way that we watch the Sun King pass from this life that feels so profoundly conscious of the realities of death in a way that reminds me of Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.

Best Non-2017 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2017: Ordet—A dialogue between realist modernity and old-time supernatural religiosity that feels like a genuine expression of both worldviews and, more impressively, a genuine fusion of both. It's a majestic film, one of the best-ever about faith, right up there with Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Bergman's Winter Light though considerably more optimistic than either of those, and without a doubt the most fully I've been moved by a motion picture this year.

Mini-Reviews for September 18 - 24, 2017

"Mini," in the case of the mother! review.

Movies

mother! (2017)

There's not much point in talking about mother! without laying bare its whole game, so Spoilers Ahoy!. And here we go: Darren Aronofsky's latest film is basically an allegorical adaptation of the entire Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, albeit through an idiosyncratic interpretive lens that I first thought was Gnostic and now think is probably closer to an environmentalist exploitation of Gnostic mythology. Because here's what we have: Javier Bardem as a frustrated artist (aka the Abrahamic God, it becomes clear soon enough) who cares more about his creation—both the actual text of his poetry and the rabid fandom that it spawns—than about his relationship with Jennifer Lawrence, his wife whose own artistry lies in the restoration of their beautiful home after a fire (basically a Mother Earth figure and clearly the one of the two who has anything like a sense of moral priorities). It's Lawrence's character, then, who bears the trauma of the ways that the increasingly unruly fans (aka humanity) Bardem invites into their house tear her work to pieces. And from this perspective, we get a parade of increasingly literal analogues for Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, the Flood, the life and death of Jesus, and more, all driving toward one resounding message: that humanity's presence on Earth is a costly mistake by an egotistical creator intent on exploiting the planet's profound beauty toward profoundly short-sighted ends. And if I already sound like an overly self-impressed divinity school egghead, that's just the kind of thing this movie is going to do to you and just the sort of naked grasp at showy profundity that people tend to hate Aronofsky movies for. I don't begrudge people for hating this movie. For the Christian crowd, it is blatantly and unapologetically heretical (essentially postulating that Christianity itself is an assault on the Earth—sort of the opposite message of 2014's Noah, for what it's worth); for others (and likely Christians, too), it's yet another movie that uses the cruelty of men toward women as a metaphor, and a metaphor that hinges on a brutally depicted assault that's likely to be the hardest-to-watch cinematic moment of this year; for others still, it's a solipsistic movie about Aronofsky himself (he's actually in a relationship with Lawrence, so...), and as self-critical as it is, there's no denying that he still casts himself as God Almighty; for even more others, it's an aggressively experimental movie that, rather bafflingly, someone somewhere convinced a major studio to produce and market as a mainstream horror flick. So I get it, and I even hold some of those reservations myself and even kind of wonder what the use of such an aggressively anti-human allegory is beyond pure head-trip academics, given that all those involved in making and experiencing this movie are, I assume, human themselves (and given that, I also assume, Aronofsky is not really advocating for a species-wide extermination). But still. I can't quite shake this movie. Goodness knows we need more movies interested in critical engagement with the Biblical narrative (as opposed to stifling and narrow-minded adaptation), and as much as I scratch my head at the idea that humanity should not exist, I'm all for knocking the human race from its presumption that it deserves a central and proprietary role in creation; the movie is, if nothing else, a veritable scream for the human race to recontextualize their place on this planet, and if the ideological means that it uses to get there are a little eyebrow-raising, it's at least a conversation I can get behind. Plus, there's no discounting Jennifer Lawrence's performance here, which is like a far more personal iteration of Catherine Deneuve's Repulsion tour de force; it's incredible, all the more so considering the fact that the camera spends approximately 80% of the film a few inches from her face. And speaking of the camera, it's worth noting that for all the narrative insanity, mother! is Aronofsky's most stylistically restrained film yet, and that precision pays off handsomely. It's a masterfully directed movie; we can argue about the ends to which that direction is devoted, but I will fight anyone who trashes the actual craft here. All of which is to say: I think I like this movie a lot. Grade: A-

It Comes at Night (2017)

I hate to be the "what's the point" guy, but... what's the point? It Comes at Night has some cool atmospheres and is across-the-board well-acted, sure, and I guess if you squint, you could call it some sort of examination of paranoia or humanity's tendency to mistrust to self-destructive ends or whatever. But this movie's genre Jenga game in which it takes out the conventional expository and narrative pieces we're used to leaning on in psychological thrillers has progressed so far that it's basically captured the exact moment that the whole structure is toppling in on itself. And besides, the one element that it needed to take out to make its commentary on paranoia have any weight at all—i.e. the certainty of the existence of "it," the threat of the title—is still right there staring us in the face in a mid-film plot point. I'm not sure what all the acclaim was about here, honestly. Grade: C

Rough Night (2017)

On paper, there's a lot here to like: a fun cast, gender-flipped comedy tropes, a screenplay that seldom relies on improv, physical humor involving corpses. And some of that pays off in brief flashes of success (e.g. the corpse comedy, because it's hard to get that wrong). But outside of those small moments, there's really not a lot going for this movie. It's not "bad" per se, but it's very, very forgettable. My ongoing distaste for mainstream American comedies is largely to blame, I'm sure, but this movie sure doesn't do a lot to be an ambassador to us hard-to-please viewers. Grade: C

The Double (2013)

There's nothing like a movie trying very, very hard and succeeding. With The Double, I'd say this is the case about 75% of the time, and as such, it's an often gratifying and exciting watch. I do feel like, as with the similarly inventive and energetic Cosmopolis (released within a year of this film's debut), I'm missing a piece here having not read its source material—in this case, an 1866 Dostoyevsky novella. It's all very interesting and engaging, but without the original novel, I'm having a hard time figuring out the starting line in this race. Grade: B+

The Chorus (Les Choristes) (2004)

I'll give the movie this: the rickety inspirational-teacher tropes bear a little more weight when they're put to use in a story that shows a teacher motivating troubled students through musical extracurricular activities instead of classroom instruction. But otherwise, I don't have a ton of positive things to say about Les Choristes, a movie that, when it isn't paint-by-numbers, is making some pretty baffling narrative decisions like making one of the troubled youths a legitimate sociopath who then conspires to destroy the school (there are many things that teaching movies don't capture about real-life teaching, but never once have I watched one and thought, "You know, the one thing this movie is missing is turning one of these students into a flat villain"). And of course the kid with the child with the most beautiful voice is the one who is also the one who looks most angelic. Because as we all know, soulful blue eyes are a direct contributing factor in singing ability. Grade: C-

Music

LCD Soundsystem - American Dream (2017)

The band's return from the shortest breakup ever more than justifies the questionable ethics of returning after such a high-profile and definitive exit. Leaning more heavily on post-punk textures than ever before, American Dream is an uneasy, atmospheric album that, while not a complete reinvention, is far from a retread either, and tracks like "How Do You Sleep?" and "American Dream" pulse with a sort of personal dark-night-of-the-soul feel that's relatively unprecedented even in the more emotionally forthright moments in group's coolly hip past. There's a sleek consideredness to even "All My Friends" that's mostly absent here; instead, Murphy's production and lyrics aim for a rawness that, though not really ragged in a punk sense, still feel more transparent and prickly than ever before. That said, it's probably LCD's least-compelling album since their self-titled debut, which isn't to say that there's anything expressly "wrong" with this album, but just because it doesn't reach the dizzying heights of Sound of Silver or This Is Happening (or even, for that matter, "Losing My Edge," though "Tonite" tries its darnedest). There are few tracks here I would rank among LCD's best, but that's an unfair standard to hold any album to. Grade: B+

The War on Drugs - A Deeper Understanding (2017)

What I remember and return to most in 2014's Lost in the Dream are the anthems: the moments when The War on Drugs filtered Born to Run through Tunnel of Love and arrived at something transcendent and huge. Very few moments on their new album approximate that diesel-fueled grandiosity. Instead, A Deeper Understanding goes for the slow burn, taking as many inspirations from '80s R&B and power ballads ("I Want to Know What Love Is" is a major touchstone here) as from Bruce Springsteen and heartland rock. This is never better than in the album's fourth song, "Strangest Thing," in which a slow, synthy riff builds to a stadium-sized climax. Still, without the speed of Lost in the Dream's peppier tracks, A Deeper Understanding lags a bit, and it's a far looser, occasionally dull experience as a result. They key is its length, I'm afraid; it's long, a full seven minutes longer than Lost in the Dream (an album that was already flirting with bloatedness). I can imagine an absolutely stellar 40-minute version of this album, but at 67 minutes, it's reminiscent of the CD long-windedness of that '80s era it clearly adores, which dilutes the undeniable greatness somewhat. Grade: B