Movie Bummys: Best Movies of 2017

For some reason this took me forever this year. I’ve had the list made for months, I just got to writing other things. Oh well.

Top Ten

10. Lady Bird: Around Oscar time earlier this year, some of my friends commented that they didn’t quite understand why Lady Bird was in the Best Picture race; they liked the movie a lot, but something about it didn’t strike them as a Best Picture kind of movie. I’m inclined to agree with them, but I think this kind of coming-of-age movie, when done right, really appeals to artists. Lady Bird sees herself as wholly unique from everyone around here, and what artist doesn’t feel the same? The screenplay and performances are directed into such a perfect imitation of life that her experience of being humbled as she starts her life is all too relatable.

9. The Killing of a Sacred Deer: Yorgos Lanthimos (this year’s contender The Favourite) made one of my favorite movies from 2016, The Lobster, but where The Lobster is unsettling in its weirdness, Sacred Deer is unsettling in its terror. Colin Farrell stars as Steven, a surgeon who is faced with an impossible decision given to him by a strangely powered young man, Martin (Barry Keoghan): he must kill one of his family members or all of them will die. Lanthimos never explains how Martin is able to inflict the debilitating, paralyzing disease on Anna (Nicole Kidman), Steven’s wife, and their kids, or how he might be able to cure them if Steven follows through with Martin’s demands, but that’s the beauty of Sacred Deer. Nothing is explained, so the unsettling nature of the stark filmmaking is allowed to take on a life of its own.

8. Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Lost among the Neanderthal frustrations some people had with the more diverse cast and some misinterpretations of Luke as a character were genuine critiques that made a lot of sense: the jokes didn’t feel like they fit organically with the tone of the other Star Wars films, there are some storylines that feel unnecessary, and, oh yeah, Leia can fly through space without dying now? I heard those criticisms many times over the last year, and I do think they’re good, valid points of contention. I just don’t care. I loved The Last Jedi so much for its balance of theme and action, for the way it turns the entire franchise on its head, for the almost balletic action sequences – it’s not perfect, but to me, it’s damn close.

7. The Shape of Water: I’ve already written extensively about Sally Hawkins’s performance in this wonderful little fable of a movie, and how her mute performance speaks for all those people who cannot speak for themselves, so I’ll try not to rehash that entry here. Instead, I want to take a moment to appreciate how unlikely this movie is. Somehow, a fantasy movie that couldn’t be more in-your-face with its own weirdness, a movie that became known as the “fish sex” movie, ended up winning Best Picture. It’s a testament to how well the film works on multiple levels: as a fairy tale, as subtext, and as a big-picture allegory.

6. After the Storm: My enjoyment of After the Storm, a small Japanese movie made by Palme d’Or winner Hirokazu Kore-eda (Still Walking, also brilliant), is probably reflective of why The Last Jedi works so well for me: it doesn’t bother me when a plot doesn’t have a definite purpose. If it troubles you when a plot meanders, then After the Storm won’t be for you. But if you think it sounds constructive to sit through a movie that is basically a mostly uneventful day in the life of a failed writer and his family, a snapshot of his life, then find this movie however you can. I found it at my library, and I’m better for it.

5. A Ghost Story: If you think The Shape of Water is weird, A Ghost Story may be a bit too much for you. I’m having a hard time coming up with comparisons for the story that A Ghost Story tells, which focuses on a ghost (played by Casey Affleck, with a sheet over his head) watching the life of his wife (Rooney Mara) play out without him until she moves out of their house, and then things get weird. The closest analogs I can come up with are Malick’s The Tree of Life or 2001: A Space Odyssey, movies with an epic scope and epic themes. Director David Lowery went from making the great, family-friendly Pete’s Dragon with Disney to making this oddity, and I hope he keeps balancing out his more straightforward movies with bold ones like this.

4. Dunkirk: I had friends last year who were left cold by Dunkirk, saying the movie never quite lets you get to know its characters enough to involve you in the story. It’s a fair criticism, to be sure, and Dunkirk may be the most your-mileage-will-vary movie of last year. But for me, Dunkirk eschews a lot of the clichés that run rampant through war movies by pulling back from the soldiers and looking at the big picture. The story of Dunkirk isn’t one that could be told by isolating your focus onto a single group of soldiers with different personality traits; there were too many moving parts, which makes it the perfect story for the master of storytelling-via-editing, Christopher Nolan. Dunkirk is a story about heroism and the way men either fail to live into it or rise to the occasion. Obviously it’s the selflessness of the English citizens that gives this movie its soul, but Tom Hardy’s pilot, knowing there is no way he comes out of this without being killed or captured and choosing to spare the soldiers a little more time anyway, is the movie’s heart.

3. The Florida Project: Indie filmmaking at its best, the kind of filmmaking that isn’t hampered by obligations to studio interests, is the most exciting kind of filmmaking. While you may be acutely aware of the effects a lower budget has on a movie (fewer locations, amateur actors), you can still get lost in a well-presented story. And the upside is, literally anything could happen. Which is exactly what happens in The Florida Project, the second release from director Sean Baker to receive major attention after 2015’s Tangerine. You think you’re following a pretty straight-forward (if exceptionally acted by Willem Dafoe, Bria Vinaite, and breakout Brooklynn Prince, seen above mischievously licking her ice cream) story about a down-on-her-luck mom and her daughter at a motel in Orlando. But in the very last scene, Baker takes the camera down a rabbit hole I never expected, leaving me both broken-hearted and full of joy.

2. Get Out: I thought I had put Get Out a little lower on my tentative Top Ten list at the end of last year, but it’s actually at the same spot. What changed is that Dunkirk dropped a little bit past Get Out while Get Out remained as close to the top as you can get without actually being at the top. But the fact that Get Out is still at No. 2 doesn’t reflect how my estimation of the movie’s quality has changed. I’ve seen more movies since I made that list; there are six movies on that one that dropped out of the Top Ten and into the honorable mentions below, replaced by movies I hadn’t seen yet, but Get Out remained at the top, because my appreciation for it increased after seeing it for a second time. After seeing it in theaters, I was unsure if it was a sharp, smart horror movie or a transcendent, historically great movie. Seeing it again around Christmas last year, I became convinced: it’s both.

1. Call Me by Your Name: Coming-of-age movies can be hard to resist. If any part of you sees any part of your childhood on screen, the nostalgia factor can lock that movie into a certain status in your brain and throw away the key. I had this experience with 2009’s Adventureland– not that I worked at an amusement park, but that I had a crappy summer job before college, and I remembered the aimless restlessness of that few months before leaving. Adventureland may not have been as good as I remember; I may have been drawn in because I saw enough of my own story in its story.

There’s a danger of that happening with Call Me by Your Name as well. Not that I spent much of my life in Italy (I’ve been once though! It’s as beautiful as it looks in this movie.) or that I had a fling with my father’s older graduate assistant. But I see myself in Elio’s insecurity, his shame, and his desire to be special. Maybe I’m projecting, but I think all of that is up there on the screen. I wrote a little about this when I put Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Elio as No. 2 in the Top Performances from last year. He captures the in-between of your late teens so well, which is crucial to a coming-of-age story.

But Call Me by Your Name goes a little farther than most coming-of-age movies in its scope. The bare bones of the story fit into the genre, but its themes are more ambitious. Elio, 17, falls in a sort of love with Oliver (Armie Hammer), 24. Call Me by Your Name, in its luscious cinematography and languid screenplay, revels in the time that Elio and Oliver have together in which they just enjoy each other. But it also deals honestly with the decision any couple has to make: what does this relationship actually mean for my life?

I’ve had friends express concerns over pederasty and the power dynamic therein; while such concerns are valid on their surface, the movie doesn’t reveal any problematic abuses of Oliver’s power as an older man. Indeed, I think the situation in the movie is far more complex than such concerns credit it as. The movie isn’t so much “age ain’t nothing but a number;” rather, their ages do matter, but they’re both discovering who they are, and the conclusion they come to at the end of the movie says more about who they are than their ages.

I feel as though some of my Christian friends have let these concerns over pederasty (or even just homosexuality) keep them from seeing this movie. Everyone is entitled to well-considered convictions, so I would never say everyone should see any movie. I only hope that such concerns are truly well-considered and not simply the result of not wanting to be challenged. Call Me by Your Name is a technical marvel, beautiful by any standard. It’s also wonderfully empathetic and sees right through its characters. It could help you see right through yourself as well, if you let it.

Another Fifteen (alphabetical)

Baby Driver: The best music video of the year.

The Big Sick: The best romantic comedy of the year.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: The best Marvel movie of the year not named Logan. In all seriousness, as clever as the first with nearly as much heart and a tad more nuance.

It: The best horror movie of the year, because Get Out isn’t a horror movie.

John Wick: Chapter 2: The best action movie of 1999.

Logan: The best Marvel movie of the year not named Thor: Ragnarok. In all seriousness, a great example of how genre enhances themes.

The Lost City of Z: The best movie of 1949, and truly the most beautiful-looking movie of the year that wasn’t set in Italy.

mother!: The most biblical movie of the year. I realize that’s not saying much. But really, mother! is an experience.

Mudbound: The best Netflix movie of the year- as good as any released in cinemas, to be sure.

Okja: The best Netflix movie of the- damn it, I used that one already, didn’t I? The best movie with a super pig in it, not including Casey Affleck.

Phantom Thread: The Paul Thomas Anderson movie of the year that everyone praises, no one understands, and everyone will regret not putting higher on their list ten years later.

The Post: The best movie of the year that is in no ways prescient or relevant at this political moment in time, not at all, no sirree.

Thor: Ragnarok: The best Marvel movie of the year not named Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. In all seriousness, this was the funniest movie of the year.

War for the Planet of the Apes: The best movie about our inevitable future of the year.

The Work: The best documentary of the year. Seriously, this one’s a doozy.

Past Top Tens

2016

Moonlight
The Witch
American Honey
Arrival
Jackie
Green Room
Kubo and the Two Strings
La La Land
Everybody Wants Some!!
Hell or High Water

2015

Mad Max: Fury Road
Inside Out
The Look of Silence
It Follows
Creed
Ex Machina
Phoenix
The Big Short
Sicario
Spotlight

2014

Selma
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Whiplash
Inherent Vice
Two Days, One Night
Boyhood
Guardians of the Galaxy
Ida
Snowpiercer
Blue Ruin

2013

12 Years a Slave
Before Midnight
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Gravity
Captain Phillips
The World’s End
Short Term 12
American Hustle
The Past

2012

Zero Dark Thirty
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Dark Knight Rises
Silver Linings Playbook
Amour
Chronicle
Django Unchained
Moonrise Kingdom
Holy Motors
Life of Pi

Movie Bummys: Best Performances of 2017

Oscar season has begun, so what better time to look back at last year’s best of the best? Awards season is always busy and fraught with narrative. It can be difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in the midst of so much noise. I always benefit from months of remove to determine what I actually prefer.

It was a good year for the movies, but a great year for performances. A few notable performances that did not make my list:

• Margot Robbie or Allison Janney, I, Tonya: I love Janney, but her character is cartoonish in this movie. Robbie is very good, but the movie and its characters didn’t resonate with me at all. I found the screenplay very surface-level and uninteresting, playing at stereotypes rather than nuance.
• Sam Rockwell or Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri: I liked both of them in this movie, but neither of their characters has that many notes to play in this screenplay. Also, they both pale in comparison to Frances McDormand, at no fault of their own.

Here are the contenders for the best performance of 2017:

Top Ten

10. Robert Pattinson, Good Time: If you don’t pay attention to indie cinema, you probably only know Pattinson as the sparkly Edward from the Twilight series, but Pattinson has been quietly building a reputation as a serious actor willing to take risks in collaborations with directors as varied as David Cronenberg (Cosmopolis), David Michôd (The Rover), and James Gray (The Lost City of Z). There are times in the Safdie brothers’ (Heaven Knows What) Good Time where you could convince yourself that Pattinson’s Connie truly cares about his brother, but by the end of the movie it’s hard to believe he cares about anyone but himself. Pattinson gives us a portrayal of a true con man: he’s conning himself too.

9. Colin Farrell, The Killing of a Sacred Deer: I could have easily slotted any actor from Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Lobster; they’re all that good. But Farrell is the natural choice, since the central conflict- one of his family members, his wife, his daughter, or his son, must die to save the other two- revolves around his decision-making. The impossibility of both the decision and the circumstances surrounding his family are evident in the tension in Farrell’s body and face throughout the entire movie.

8. Zoe Kazan, The Big Sick: As great as The Big Sick is, it would not work without an actress as strong as Kazan. Kumail Nanjiani is hilarious, and this role (as himself, which couldn’t have hurt) is the most natural he’s ever been onscreen, but without Kazan’s mix of confidence and doubt, The Big Sick would just feel like a showcase for Nanjiani as a comedian. With Kazan, the story feels like it’s about real people.

7. Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out: When I first saw Get Out, I appreciated the movie far more than I appreciated Kaluuya’s performance, thinking of him as a cipher that the brilliant story carried along with it. But rewatching the movie, it becomes clear how much work Kaluuya is doing at every point in the movie, whether it’s to maintain his cool surrounded by weirdness or to hold on to reality before falling into the Sunken Place. Kaluuya is not an emotive actor, but that’s a good thing; his strength in Get Out is how he portrays Chris actively trying to hold up a front while his emotions burst through anyway.

6. Nicole Kidman, The Beguiled: Nicole Kidman continues to make wonderfully offbeat choices for her career, eschewing mainstream roles (which probably also speaks to the quality of the roles offered to a woman in her 50s) for prime starring roles under talented directors like Yorgos Lanthimos in The Killing of a Sacred Deer and Sofia Coppola in The Beguiled. As the headmistress of a girls’ boarding school in Virginia during the Civil War, Kidman struggles to hold the school together after a Union soldier turns up wounded on the school grounds. The sexual tension that plays out after his arrival is delightful, and Kidman’s character is not immune, but it is a joy to watch her choose between her desire and her principles.

5. Meryl Streep, The Post: Oh, how original, putting a Meryl Streep performance in the Top Ten. Yes, but did you see this Meryl Streep performance? While Tom Hanks chews the scenery as Washington Post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (and I mean that as a compliment), Streep’s turn as the newspaper’s owner grounds the movie in real concerns over a woman’s (lack of) power and control in a field dominated by men.

4. James McAvoy, Split: This role could have been so laughable- a multiple-personality horror-movie villain? Give this role to an actor who’s not ready for it, and it could derail the whole concept. But McAvoy is a revelation, jumping easily between personalities as varied as an uppity British woman named Patricia to a frightened little boy named Hedwig.

3. Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird: Saoirse Ronan is 24 years old and already nominated for three Oscars, so she doesn’t need any praise from me to validate her talents. But I’ll do it anyway: Ronan is the best young actress of her generation. At some point they tried to make her into a young-adult star, but thank God that failed, because watching her thrive equally well as a willful Irish woman in Brooklyn and as a lost Catholic schoolgirl in Lady Bird has made Oscar season fun the last few years.

2. Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name: There’s a lot to process about the quality of Chalamet’s performance in this movie. He certain doesn’t stand alone. He has a great script that provides him ample opportunity to showcase emotions and internal reactions. Chalamet also stars in the best-directed movie of the year, with beautiful shots and locations to frame his character’s coming-of-age story in the most idyllic way possible. And his costars are seasoned performers at the top of their games, so surely their presence elevated his performance.

There may be a mathematical way to separate out all these factors and truly rate a performance for what the actor does on his own, but I don’t know it. I can only report how I respond to a performance, and Chalamet’s performance moved me deeply. I saw so much of myself in his character, Elio, as he stumbled along the path to discovering a little more of who he is.

The clip in the link is a great example of how I felt much of my teenage years: struggling to project confidence while actually being self-conscious about my imperfections and body and sexuality. There is another scene in the movie in which Elio collapses in tears against Oliver (Armie Hammer) out of shame and fear that he will lose him. It’s by God’s grace alone that I don’t perpetually live in that state.

Chalamet also featured in another Best Picture contender from last year, Lady Bird, as an aloof sexual partner for Ronan’s Lady Bird. He actually has one of the best lines in the movie: “You’re gonna have so much unspecial sex in in your life.” Elio could never say that line; he could never be cynical enough, and it’s a sign of Chalamet’s talent that both characters feel real. Chalamet has the potential to be a big star, an Oscar winner (this year, maybe!), and a generation-defining actor. If he does do big things, it will all have started with this simple, sad, soulful performance.

Click to continue reading for the top performance of 2017, along with all the honorable mentions.