The best (and worst) movies of 2017

Image courtesy Disney

Two thousand seventeen was a pretty solid year for movies. This is the first year the number of films on the worst list were outpaced easily by some pretty great choices on the best film lists, enough to require knocking off some really lovely movies from this list. What's left is a collection of reality altering indie movies, a tremendous horror movie, and a great movie about the frailty of marriage.

The films below are all ones reviewed from 2017. I kept the list to the top six to focus on the films most worth a second look, leaving out some wicked good selections. Just missing this year's list are Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Baby Driver, American Made, and Ingrid Goes West. 

Image courtesy Cohen Media

No. 1: The Salesman

Winner of the Best Foreign Language Film at the 2017 Academy Awards, The Salesman is a gut punch of a film about how a happy and fulfilling marriage can fall apart from obsession and anger.

Writer/director Asghar Farhadi uses a performance of Death of a Salesman as a backdrop for a story about a man who simply cannot let things go, despite the protestations of his wife. Moving on is an impossibility for a prideful person, one who is awful enough to use an attack on his wife as a means of taking control of the marriage. What was once a partnership devolves into something much darker, and The Salesman makes that transition hurt.

Image courtesy A24

No. 2: The Florida Project

The Florida Project is happily heartbreaking. It's a movie about the innocence of childhood and the need/desire to escape the sadness of the circumstances people are stuck under. The small family at the center of the movie doesn't have much going for them besides each other, and even that isn't enough to make for a sustainable lifestyle.

Buoyed by a wonderful performance by Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project succeeds at the small things that make childhood memorable, like making sandwiches with friends and pretending a firework show is just for you. Even the cruelty of reality that strikes at the end can't prevent the movie from engaging in one last flight of fancy, to provide at least a glimmer of a happy ending before everything falls apart.

Image courtesy Universal Pictures

No. 3: Get Out

Writer/director Jordan Peele is clearly a student of horror, knowing exactly what tropes to invert and which ones to follow to make Get Out a terrifyingly bleak look at the black experience in America. Peele swings a mighty strong hammer, explaining why a seemingly bucolic upper-class neighborhood can be a place of discomfort and fear from a certain viewpoint, as even the most welcoming of environments has an underlying evil to it.

Get Out is brilliant for many reasons, but the film succeeds at the most basic component of horror; making viewers feel uncomfortable and frightened. It's a horror movie that succeeds at scaring the audience for the frights it produces and for the thoughts it invokes.

Image courtesy Fox Searchlight

No. 4: The Shape of Water

Certainly the strangest film on this list, The Shape of Water is also the purest and sweetest love story to come out in many, many years. The film shows how powerful love can be, and how easily it can be taken away by the evils of man

The Shape of Water doesn't stray too far from writer/director Guillermo del Toro's history, inserting supernatural elements while undercutting the rosiness of bygone eras. This film layers on the romance more than he has in the past, putting the emphasis on the story of two awkward beings finding each other. That the central couple is a mute woman (a great performance from Sally Hawkins) and a fish creature makes it all the more interesting.

Image courtesy Warner Bros.

No. 5: Dunkirk

Dunkirk is the most efficient war movie to come out in the last two decades. Telling three intertwining stories in less than two hours, director Christopher Nolan gets at the desperation and despair found amid the young men trapped on a beach waiting for either death or a miracle.

What makes Dunkirk so remarkable is the tension that builds from the first moment through the end. Nolan keeps his foot on the gas, replicating the real life experience at Dunkirk and never providing his soldiers, or the viewers, a moment of true comfort. The reach of danger is never too far away, and even a celebratory round of jelly and tea can come to a crashing halt with a well-placed explosion.

Image courtesy Disney

No. 6: Coco

Coco is a pretty glorious animated movie. It's fluffy, brightly lit exterior is gorgeous enough to draw kids into a story about the inevitability of death and the uncertainty waiting in the afterlife.

A hallmark of good children's entertainment is how cleanly and directly it addresses complex and often said issues. Coco simply excels at just that, not just through the honest conversation about death, but the fear of becoming forgotten completely by time. The film treats it as a sad eventuality, a fact of life that is, ultimately, okay. Everything has to end somehow, and Coco provides a little cheeriness to that fact.

Image courtesy Warner Bros.

Worst film: Fist Fight

Even if this wasn't a perfect year for movies, there were still very, very few movies that could qualify as outrageously bad. Only seven films ended up on my worst films list, which is a drop from years past. With hindsight some of those selections aren't overly painful either; King Arthur: Legend of the Sword has a couple of decent sequences, and The Mummy comes close on occasion to being kind of fun. The Bye Bye Man is a train wreck, but still more fun to watch than the drivel spewed by Transformers: The Last Knight.

Two films battled neck and neck to be the year's worst. The Snowman came in a super close second – almost nothing goes right for that movie – but it lacks the loathsome factor that makes Fist Fight the absolute worst movie of 2017. Fist Fight takes no advantage of what is on paper a pretty stacked cast – Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell, Dean Norris, and Kumail Nanjiani should go off somewhere and make their own comedy – and has a loathsome plot to boot. Loathsome and irksome only wins at being awful, which is the best victory Fist Fight will manage.

Last Jedi an unpredictable adventure

Daisy Ridley in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Image courtesy Disney.

Star Wars as a franchise has always worked best when hope is challenged by impending darkness. Hope without challenge is meaningless; hope needs to be earned through tribulation to be worth a damn, the bleakness countered by faith in one's friends, allies, and one's cause. Star Wars: The Last Jedi favors that ambiguity, putting its heroes in a desperate situation, with only their hope and faith in one another and their cause to lean on. The film rarely provides assurances that the hope they have is justified, that it will result in a happy ending for all involved. It's also why this movie is the first Star Wars entry in three decades to feel unpredictable.
This is a very good thing. The new Star Wars needs to separate itself from 40 years of cinematic history to be worth anything going forward. The only way to continue producing interesting stories is to take risks, through a few curveballs into the very well-established formula and keep the audience guessing on how the fate of the Star Wars galaxy will go. The nostalgia that carried The Force Awakens (which earns justifiable criticism for aping A New Hope) and influences Rogue One won't last forever; younger audiences need their own characters to like. Instead of recreating what worked before, writer/director Rian Johnson takes a few chances with Last Jedi to take some ownership of the material and ensure this isn't a carbon copy of Empire Strikes Back.
Last Jedi shares a few traits with Empire Strikes Back, notably by showing the rebels in their darkest moment. Hope is really the only thing Resistance members Leia (Carrie Fisher, RIP), Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), Finn (John Boyega), Rose (Kelly Marie Tran), and Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern) have as they try to escape the evil First Order led by Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis), General Hux (Domhnall Gleeson) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver). Hope is what pushes Rey (Daisy Ridley) to the ends of the galaxy to recruit the bitter Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) to the Resistance cause. Hope comes despite the Resistance being hopelessly outgunned by an impending force of destruction and despite little evidence that the soul of Kylo Ren can be saved from the dark side.
As the film makes clear, hope is a tough thing to hold onto. As the Resistance gets closer and closer to its destruction, its members have to be reminded frequently to maintain their hope and faith, to not succumb to the daunting odds mounting against them. Last Jedi is the rare Star Wars film to not adhere blindly to that sense of hope though; even for characters from a galaxy far, far away that aren’t technically human, it remains natural and vital even to question one's faith. Hope is put on trial, the characters weigh the faith they have in themselves, their friends, and their cause, and the process to a verdict is painful and dangerous.
Johnson does a lot of house cleaning in the two and a half hours of Star Wars time he has to work with. The puzzle box concept J.J. Abrams crammed into The Force Awakens is stripped away, to the great benefit of the franchise and for audiences frustrated by the that movie’s unnecessary ambiguity. The key mystery in that movie is granted a simple resolution that serves as a reminder of how greatness can come from even the humblest of beginnings. The victories earned by the Resistance are always Pyrrhic, good enough to render hope from but still damaging for a cause that can't afford to lose that much. The Last Jedi fights against the supposed goodness of the Jedi as well, doing more to question the wisdom of the Jedi Order than the prequels did in three movies. The Last Jedi makes a very convincing argument for ending the Jedi line; it's only Rey's hope in what the Jedi could accomplish that makes the Jedi Order possibly worth redeeming.
There remains some value in the old ways for Rey and the Star Wars franchise. Last Jedi posits a need for legends and heroes to inspire faith and hope to spur a rebellion against an unrelenting evil. The past is there to serve as a guiding light for the present, to give the new characters a path forward in the darkness as they find their own way toward salvation. As it is for the franchise too, which slowly but surely will separate itself from the past and find some hope of its own.

Review: Four out of Five Stars



Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13
Run time: 153 minutes
Genre: Science Fiction

Ask Away

Target audience: The legions upon legions of Star Wars fans who will make Disney a whole ton of money this month.

Take the whole family?: Families will bring their kids regardless because Star Wars, but this could bother some of the really young kids. The length might also turn them away.

Theater or Netflix?: The effects are more than good enough to deserve a cinema trip. Whether it's worth paying for the 3D and IMAX is up for debate.

Where does this rank on the Star Wars pantheon?: Last Jedi still doesn't hit the mark of either Empire Strikes Back or A New Hope. I do put it ahead of the prequels, The Force Awakens, and the very good Rogue One, and as an adult I find Last Jedi to be more interesting and complex than Return of the Jedi.

Watch this as well?: Enough of the Star Wars franchise is good enough to merit another watch, especially Empire Strikes Back. Also check out a couple of writer/director Rian Johnson's previous works, Brick and Looper.

Shape of Water an odd twist to a classic story

Michael Shannon and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. Image courtesy Fox Searchlight.

 

In less capable hands, The Shape of Water could come dangerously close to being unwatchable. A blend of four genres telling an utterly bizarre love story with many grotesque details, the movie lives right along a number of thin lines that would tip it into being completely unwatchable, a pretentious art house movie that fails to blend the works of Davids Cronenberg and Lynch. Director Guillermo del Toro, who wrote the movie with Vanessa Taylor, is brilliant enough to use the oddity of his premise as a means of telling a basic love story between two fragile beings. What results is one of the sweetest, most charming love stories of the past decade.

There has always been something strangely benign about the supernatural beings that lurk just outside the real world in del Toro's movies. Ghosts are tragic creatures whose intents are benevolent to heroes and malevolent to the villains, and mythological gods provide aid and assistance for the protagonist's quest toward self discovery. The Shape of Water inserts the supernatural being into the center of the story, having a strange merman creature (played by Doug Jones) start an odd relationship with mute cleaner Elisa (Sally Hawkins). Elisa and the creature grow more and more in love and who receive aid from gay copy artist Giles (Richard Jenkins), Elisa's very reliable and understanding friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and Michael Stuhlbarg's mysterious scientist Dr. Robert Hoffstetler, as they fend off the very dangerous Strickland (a typically intense Michael Shannon). The cross between the fantastical and the normal is much more direct in this movie than some of del Toro's older, non-action movie titles, but the concept of a surprisingly ordinary abnormal supernatural presence fits with his modus operandi. Yet even those other movies come nowhere close to being quite as brazenly weird as The Shape of Water. It remains difficult to reconcile the romance between Elisa and the merman given the physiological differences and just how intimate their love becomes. It's not entirely unusual for a movie to create an emotional bond that toes the line at a physical relationship, but The Shape of Water goes right over that line and shows how close their relationship has become.

Their relationship might not be the strangest part of The Shape of Water. What's really disconcerting, aside the unfortunate fate of an unlucky cat, is the multitude of genres thrown together for this film. The Shape of Water is a fantastical love story, with elements of a Cold War spy movie and an era piece that digs under the artificial happiness of the early 1960s. As characters, Zelda and Giles could fit in just as well, if not better, in supporting roles in a romantic comedy, there to support the female lead as she pines for the dreamy captain of the high school swim team. Del Toro and Taylor even toss in elements of musicals, including a lovely and heartbreaking musical number that shines through Elisa's imagination.

None of it is overly distracting though because The Shape of Water's attention is focused on the relationship between Elisa and the merman. It's a beautiful romance, told quietly through kind acts and courageous feats. Everything between Elisa and the merman is driven by love and devotion, an unspoken romance that never strays into being sappy or saccharine. Every tender look, every embrace is earned because of how well Hawkins and Jones connect their characters. The other elements are there to elevate the romance, adding the necessary complications to move the story forward while adding a dreamy, nostalgia-tinged element to the film.

Nothing about tale told by The Shape of Water is overly complicated. To quote another movie about a woman and a beast falling in love, this is a tale as old as time about two beings who are exactly right for each other despite the circumstances around them. What's different is the lens used by del Toro and Taylor to tell this tale, to provide their unique take at how far true love can stretch physical impossibilities. Del Toro and Taylor have taken a banal plot and turned it into an indelible, beautiful love story about two incomplete beings completing each other and finding love in an otherwise hopeless place.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 123 minutes

Genre: Drama

Ask Away
Target audience: Romantics with a sense of the macabre, so anyone who likes Guillermo del Toro movies.

Take the whole family?: No for several reasons.

Theater or Netflix?: This would make for a pretty interesting date night event.

Academy Award odds?: I hope this gets a Best Picture nomination, although it wouldn't be too surprising if this was snubbed because of how weird it is. At the least Sally Hawkins deserves a nomination for her quiet brilliance.

Watch this as well?: Guillermo del Toro's backlog is unique and often excellent, highlighted by The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth. The Shape of Water also has hints of Pedro Almodóvar, so check out the very fun but slightly supernatural Volver.

Coco an emotional, spiritual journey

Miguel enters the Land of the Dead in Coco. Image courtesy Disney.

Coco is the darkest movie in Pixar history. Pixar has a knack for diving into some dark and sad territory, but this is the first time the company has centered its story on death. This story is literally about spirits and aging and the ever present thought of mortality. Pixar, being Pixar, translates a story about death into a visually-stunning, family-oriented, crowd-pleasing musical rife with joy and a few lessons for everyone. (Except the bad guy, whose moral retribution is among the most dreadful in Disney's long history of making the villains pay for their transgressions.)

At stake in Coco is both life and eternal life. The life of the precocious but impetuous Miguel (voiced by Anthony Gonzalez) is the most trenchant threat the movie has to offer, given the fear of dying at a young age is about as close to a universal horror as it gets for Coco’s young target audience. More existentially horrifying is the death that comes after death, as the spirit Héctor (Gael García Bernal) describes to Miguel after watching the already dead dissolve away into nothing. All life effectively ends once the world has forgotten about you, the memory imprinted into others is the flickering candle that keeps the souls fresh in the Land of the Dead. Death is inevitable, but a second death caused by the world forgetting you, and knowing that is exactly how one is fading toward oblivion, is terrifying and inevitable. Coco attempts to cover the darkness of its subject matter with what is a gorgeous depiction of the Land of the Dead. What could be shown as a dark and morbid place is depicted instead as a lively city light brightly and festooned with garish lights and lots of light hues, showing how the denizens of the Land of the Dead haven’t lost their humanity.

And yet, this is still a movie about an impossible to know subject explained to children with little cognizance of what death actually means. Coco resides in a very dark place for a Pixar film, putting its child protagonist at risk of a premature entry into the Land of the Dead from the start of act two. The film gives its young character an easy out by requesting forgiveness from long-dead matriarch Mamá Imelda (Alanna Ubach), under the condition Miguel abandons his love for music and adopts his family's shoemaker life. Miguel actively resists his dead family's help and instead searches for  guitar legend Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt) for absolution, preferring the possibility of death over the death of his passion. It's a headstrong and dangerous choice, albeit one the movie doesn't fault him for either. It's a Pixar tradition to have complicated moral lessons, never quite showing one side of an argument to be more right than the other. There are shades of correctness, areas in which compromise between the warring parties should take precedence because of their shared bond. A lesson is learned by all, but everyone learns their own lesson to reach the important middle ground. The problem, at least for Coco, is the plot machinations to get to those points is a little sloppy, even granted the relative lower bar set for animated movies (and the expository nature of musicals). The lessons are a little too easy to figure out for the characters, the journey toward self discovery a little too convenient. One of the major plot points is telegraphed in a manner that remains inexplicable, relying on a character making an incredibly dumb admission of guilt in a fictional format. The narrative can’t be this pointed to work as effectively as it could; being too blunt about the process lessens the effect of the lesson shared to the character, and to the audience as well.

It’s a frustrating problem, but forgivable for how wonderful the rest of the movie is. Coco is really, really easy to get lost to, the visuals complementing the music, which adds brightness to the morbid story. This movie is a reminder of what Pixar is capable of when it isn't chasing Cars money, providing joyous and heartfelt viewing experiences for children and adults. It's hard not to bob one's head along to the addicting songs and laugh at the gallows humor and enjoy Miguel’s family run by his Abuelita (Renee Victor). And it's especially hard not to sob uncontrollably in the third act when Miguel plays a heart-wrenching song to his great grandmother, the eponymous Coco. The build up to that moment is brilliant, the moment plays out gorgeously, and the movie earns every tear that will cascade from your eyes.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG

Run time: 109 minutes

Genre: Animation

Ask Away

Target audience: Families and Pixar junkies.

Take the whole family?: Coco is appropriately morbid given the subject matter, but it's bright enough to not scare off kids much younger than 7.

Theater or Netflix?: Totally worth watching it in theaters with the kids, especially after a long day of Black Friday shopping.

How's the soundtrack?: Pretty great, actually. Inspired by the Mexican milieu and its themes of memory, the music oscillates between fun and cheerful to mournful and heartbreaking. They're catchy, but in a quality way that doesn't make replaying the music for two days straight feel regrettable.

Watch this as well?: Most of the Pixar library is some variation of good to excellent. This one fits alongside Inside Out and Up in the break your heart category.

Waiting for Superman

Ezra Miller, Ben Affleck, and Gal Gadot in Justice League. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

What makes the generally dire Justice League somewhat worth watching is Wonder Woman. Gal Gadot's fiery, intense warrior remains a delight to watch as she charges headfirst into a fight, sword and shield in hand ready to strike down the foes who oppose her. Aside from the satisfaction wrought from having Wonder Woman serve as the toughest character among a collection of super powered folks – a trait shared with the great Justice League animated show from the 2000s – Gadot gives the character a little charm to add a touch of humanity to her character. Some adaptations, for example recent video game entries, have centered her character on the character's warrior spirit they lose touch of the humanity that allows a god to embrace life among humans. DC has a good thing going with Wonder Woman, so it totally makes sense for the company to add a male version of her in the form of Jason Momoa's Aquaman. They’re effectively mirrors of each other, one serving to make the other moderately redundant. Because having a unique, distinguished female character is a step too far for DC, and Aquaman needs to do something besides speak to fish.

One way or another, DC can't get out of its own way when adapting its comic properties to film, which is the driving force of Justice League's failures. The decisions made in the filmmaking process by director Zack Snyder and writers Chris Terrio and Joss Whedon are more often than not wrong, resulting in a disjointed, slight movie instead of the powerful blockbuster the company needs. This was DC's shot at a franchise centerpiece, and it fell remarkably short of achieving that goal.

The most fundamental flaw with Justice League is a story that feels incomplete, as if key components were removed to keep the run time at around two hours. The movie brings back Wonder Woman and Ben Affleck's Batman (who spends the movie being fairly useless among his powerful friends) from, but takes time out for the origins of new heroes Aquaman, Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and Flash (Ezra Miller). All three will get their own movies in the next few years, but they are new to this DC Cinematic Universe, and Justice League has to take time to introduce all three from scratch. The process is clunky, stealing time away from the save the world narrative while missing opportunities to understand the team dynamic. DC would have been better served properly introducing Aquaman, Cyborg, and Flash in separate movies ahead of this one, as almost a third of this movie is devoted to introducing those three.

Cutting down on the new character introduction would then provide more time to focus on the aforementioned save the world story audiences came out to see. Justice League would benefit from additional time to flesh out an uninspiring, rote plot. Part of the issue is from the choice of villains – the alien Steppenwolf (voiced by Ciarán Hinds) is not a major DC villain, certainly not as intimidating as Darkseid or even a deranged Lex Luthor. Once the team of beings with godlike powers (and Batman) assembles, Steppenwolf's inevitable defeat becomes clear and anticlimactic. The build up of a grand battle to save the earth ends in an blasé fashion, concluded with neither of the movie’s two proud warriors, Wonder Woman and Aquaman, ending the battle with the killing blow.

If the plot feels a little familiar, that’s because Marvel already did it in The Avengers, although Marvel did a much more competent job. And it doesn’t take too close of a look to see where Snyder and crew lifted from other sources with small to no traces of shame. A flashback to a previous battle with Steppenwolf is formatted like a Lord of the Rings rip off. The bits about Lois Lane (Amy Adams) and the world losing hope after Superman's death (Henry Cavill) has elements of Ghostbusters II to it, and there’s a rather blatant rip off of Frankenstein. Throwing these elements together just makes the story feel weak, as if the writers weren’t confident in the path they chose for their superhero team.

The overarching vibe for Justice League is disappoint. Is this all DC has to offer for the most memorable superhero team of all time? A recycled plot with poor characterization is the best this company has to offer fans who've already been stuck with Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad and murderous interpretations of otherwise pacifistic heroes? None of this bodes well for the impending Justice League sequel and the rest of the onslaught of DC movies, so strap in for a bumpy ride.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 120 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: People who love DC Comics.

Take the whole family?: There's a lot of violence with minimal amounts of human blood, so for parents who are good with that this won't be too much for kiddos.

Theater or Netflix?: Really, really don't pay the extra money to see it.

What about the little things?: What irked me the most was how the little things kept getting messed up. Most notably is how every superhero calls each other by their real first names, no matter how close they are to, say, a group of cops or Bruce Wayne's employees. These heroes hide their identities for many, many reasons, and there's no way Batman would allow anyone to call him Bruce in open quarters.

Watch this instead?: Wonder Woman is the best of the recent DC Comics movie adaptation, although it still isn't that great. The Justice League cartoon from the 2000s is excellent, and the ongoing Justice League Action is pretty fun. If you do want to go out, just hit up Thor: Ragnarok and enjoy the madness that ensues.