Since I’m not a professional film critic, I only saw like 12 movies this year, so I’m more ordering my ten favorite of the twelve than really picking ten favorites. Since I’m not a professional film critic, I can be subjective and biased about what goes on my favorites list, so it’s full of terrible genre movies and pretty devoid of the stuff that professionals usually put on their top ten lists.
There won’t be a bottom ten list because I only saw one movie this year that I disliked, The Dark Tower, which was previously discussed.
Spoilers abound for all of these, obviously.
10. Star Wars: The Last Jedi
I don’t know if I’ve ever written about my history with Star Wars. It’s a bit complicated. I used to be a huge, huge, massive fan of the original trilogy when I was kid. I was old enough when the prequels came out that I considered them inferior to the original trilogy, and they, along with a few escapades in the EU, made me pretty cynical about Star Wars. I liked The Force Awakens, but I couldn’t see past the story flaws of Rogue One. The modern way of making blockbuster movies tends to produce films that, despite slapdash storytelling and thin characterization, leverage external factors for unearned emotional payoff: the thrill of seeing the Justice League team up, the rush of watching Batman fight Superman, the nostalgia of recreating the part in the first Star Wars where the guy with the lumpy face says “He doesn’t like you”. The response to these movies is starkly divided; one side protests that the story is barely coherent and the characters are all just a costume and a weapon, while the other insists that it made them feel things. The thing with feelings is that you can’t argue against them with logic, because they’re personal; but there are also limits to how much of an argument you can hang on them, because they’re personal. So arguments between these two sides get very heated.
The Last Jedi produced in me the most complicated set of emotions I’ve ever felt in a Star Wars movie. Its themes are amazingly subtle. Its characters are rich and, when the script isn’t deflating them with out-of-place gags, layered and human while also representing modern deconstructions of the high-minded mythical themes that the original trilogy took on. Even more than Empire Strikes Back, The Last Jedi established what a small and ragtag outfit our heroes are, and as the Resistance fleet dwindled, a real sense of fear and hopelessness set in. Mark Hamill brought us an old, gritty, broken Luke Skywalker ripe for a triumphant Dark Knight Returns-style finale, then gave it to us in a totally unexpected way. Old gritty Luke Skywalker doesn’t cut down waves and waves of First Order Stormtroopers like the Jedi did in the prequels, and he doesn’t use awesome Force abilities to wreck AT-ATs by himself (even though I really wanted him to), and he doesn’t take on Kylo Ren in an epic duel to the finish, but he does kindle a final spark of hope for the galaxy, leaving it to Rey to help it grow into a fire. Instead of Luke teaching Rey, he learns something from her, and Rey learns something from him, but not what anyone expected. (It’s how to squeeze gross green milk out of weird upright-sitting elephant cows. That’s what Rey learns.) The many shocking turns the story takes sometimes left me unsatisfied—I really did want to see old gritty Luke’s bad-ass feats of Force mastery, and I didn’t need Snoke to be someone we knew, but I did want to know like, who the hell is this guy?—but I always appreciated how daring and unexpected they were.
On the other hand, large parts of the Rose and Finn story felt meandering, pointless, clumsy, and sometimes just downright dumb. Why didn’t they just park somewhere else and not have the police after them? Wasn’t there some other more subtle way to add nuance to the conflict than Rose’s clunky monologue about arms dealers? Why did they think that releasing a bunch of space horse ostriches to run through and smash a casino was some giant F-U to the evil rich arms dealers? They presumably don’t own the casinos, so it just amounts to a minor inconvenience for them, and the amount of damage was so small that the casinos will probably have it cleaned up in two hours. It felt as if Matilda had plunked in a very serious monologue by the title character about child neglect and abuse, then showed a bunch of kids throw food at the evil principal until she runs away, and treated that as some big blow to child abusers everywhere. Actually, it had even less impact than that; at least the kids in Matilda got rid of their principal and ended her abuse of them. Finn and Rose just freed a few space horse ostriches and gave a poor abused stable boy a ring.
Those flaws brought Last Jedi down to #10 for me, even though I liked it more than The Force Awakens and a lot more than Rogue One.
9. Your Name
It was novel seeing an anime movie in a theater, but Your Name is also a good movie. Mitsuha and Taki feel real and flawed, and by the time their slowly unfolding love story reveals itself, it seems natural that they would have feelings for each other. Body switching and time travel romances have been done before (The Lake House, for instance), but Your Name executed its plot with unusual skill, and in its final scene, where a lesser story might have assured us that Taki and Mitsuha would end up together, it left things ambiguous—Taki has lost his memories, so there’s no guarantee he and Mitsuha will hit it off. Never mind that it’s similar to what Angel Beats did in its own final scene—it was great there, and it’s great here too.
Sadly, I have to be a bit of a downer on the animation. It got a ton of critical praise, but I didn’t think it was that much better than Clannad most of the time. But otherwise, Your Name was a strong reminder that anime can still deliver a well plotted and emotional story.
8. Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man is probably my third favorite superhero after Batman and the X-Men. (Uh-huh, you guessed it—I never really read comics growing up. My exposure to superheroes was all through 90’s cartoons, and those were the three best ones.) Though if you made me separate out individual X-Men, it’s hard to say where he’d ultimately fall.
Spider-Man: Homecoming is probably the closest the MCU will ever get to “cute”. It’s very warm and fuzzy and innocent. It does a great job showing the relationships Peter has with his friends, with Tony Stark, with his Aunt May (modernized from kindly old lady to cool mom), and even with Michael Keaton’s Vulture, who’s probably the best villain in the MCU so far aside from Loki. (It’s a low bar.) It does a great job showing how those relationships help Peter grow up a little and become a little closer to being the hero he, to my knowledge, never really becomes in the comics, but hopefully will become in the MCU. Tom Holland plays a perfect dorky Gen-Z Peter Parker. The smaller story focuses on character development and lets his Spider-Man grow from the fun treat he was in Civil War into a character with a real presence in the universe.
The tone of Spider-Man: Homecoming makes the Venom movie Sony is doing even more of a mystery. If they want to put it MCU-adjacent, how can they possibly square the Todd McFarlane darkness of a character like Venom with the sunniness of this movie? Hopefully Marvel will stick to their guns and keep Spider-Man lighthearted, though. Let Captain America deal with the dark stuff.
7. The Shape of Water
Surreal, strange, erotic, visually and thematically beautiful. Whenever people ask me what The Shape of Water is about, I tell them it’s a mute woman’s romance with the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s also a good old fashioned fairy tale about being an outsider, like Edward Scissor-Hands, but instead of a single supernatural outsider coming into a homogeneous world, the human characters are also outsiders who connect with the creature because they sympathize with him on some level. They’re marginalized by early 1960’s America because of their race, sex, sexual orientation, or disability. The villain, Michael Shannon’s character, has all the benefits that early 1960’s America can offer–a nice house, an expensive car, a sexy wife, two kids, carte blanche to treat the outsiders however badly he wants. But in the final act, when he stands to lose it all, he lashes out, becoming even more brutal in his desperation to protect his lifestyle.
6. Thor: Ragnarok
I watched the other two Thor movies the day before I saw this (Thor for the third or fourth time, Thor: The Dark World for the first time). Both were fine, but Thor: Ragnarok blows away both of them in every way. It has the same kind of grandiose story that The Dark World tried for, without the confusing structure and muddled delivery of The Dark World. It has the same kind of epic family drama as Thor. But it also has amazing, colorful visuals; great new characters like Valkyrie, Hela, the Grandmaster, and Korg; and tons of the same silly humor that Taika Waititi brought to What We Do in the Shadows. Both of the previous Thor movies, in my opinion, were victims of where the MCU was when they were made. Thor is an early MCU standalone, so it had to hew closely to the same formula as Iron Man and Captain America: The First Avenger. Kenneth Branagh is an acclaimed director who brought as much Shakespearean grandeur to the movie as he could, and I wish we could see what he’d do now with the kind of freer rein given to Taika Waititi. As for The Dark World, it was made around the same time as Age of Ultron when the MCU seemed to be going the same direction as the DCEU, towards convoluted stories and a grim tone. Neither movie is bad, but both were heavily restricted in what they could be by the editorial mandate, and couldn’t flourish like Thor: Ragnarok was able to.
5. Coco
As with Wonder Woman further down, I’m not Mexican, so I couldn’t take part in the thrill of seeing my culture represented on screen in a major Pixar film, but the movie is so good that you can appreciate it no matter what culture you come from. Coco is steeped in Mexican culture in its visuals, themes, and the lilt of its dialogue, which simultaneously helps outsiders understand that culture and adds a fascinating perspective to its universal themes about family, personal history, and identity. As usual with Pixar, it’s also wonderfully animated, funny, and heartwarming. The plot is so well constructed that I was nonplussed as I watched, wondering how you even write something that packs in all these themes, emotions, jokes, set pieces, and surprises and still fits into a two-hour movie.
4. Wonder Woman
Wonder Woman has two distinctions among the movies on this list: it’s the only one I saw in the theater twice, and it’s the only one that actually made me cry. (Both times I saw it, same scene: No-Man’s Land, of course.) Coco and Lady Bird both made me tear up, but only Wonder Woman made me straight up weep.
Since I’m not a woman, the power of Wonder Woman for me didn’t come from seeing a woman superhero on screen, though it was a nice change-up from the status quo, I’m happy for everyone who did feel that power, and I hope it will lead to more female-led superhero movies. (Gimme my Squirrel Girl, Spider-Gwen, and Kate Bishop Hawkeye movies now!) I’m still not entirely sure what was so powerful about Wonder Woman for me. My current working theory is that Wonder Woman is the first superhero movie we’ve seen in a while about a character genuinely trying to do good and save others in a real-ish world where that’s not always easy. The Avengers save people, but they save people from gigantic alien and robot invasions. In most of the other MCU movies, the heroes are fighting in personal conflicts, or they’re saving people from alien and robot invasions, or the tone of the movie is just too lighthearted and silly to give the kind of weight to a threat that makes you relieved to see random civilians rescued from it. Superman in Man of Steel saves like one family, and it’s solely to illustrate a point about his aversion to killing. Plus he’s fighting a personal conflict against an alien invasion.
Whereas when Wonder Woman charges into No-Man’s Land, we know from everything we’ve read about the horrors of World War I what she’s saving those people from. She’s saving them from slavery and rape and brutal treatment and death by machine guns and poison gas. Those are real, horrible things that happened to real people, some of whom were our own grandparents and great-grandparents. And she’s not saving them because it’s convenient or helps her accomplish her goal or because they just happen to be in the way while she’s fighting and her conscience won’t let her leave them; Wonder Woman goes out of her way and endangers her own mission to save those people, because she knows it’s the right thing to do and she can do it. She doesn’t fight the Germans because they’ve got the alien doohickey she needs, or because they’re Nazis (‘nuff said); she fights them because they’re doing something wrong. In 2005, when Christopher Nolan started his Batman trilogy, that was too simplistic to be interesting. In 2017, the shittiness of the real world made it inspiring.
Aside from that, Wonder Woman is well paced and plotted, and has a good message about why people fight wars and how you can’t just kill one bad guy and be done with it, which it just slightly undercuts when Wonder Woman kills one bad guy and then in the next scene the war is over. (Just slightly, because the Allies and Axis were already on the cusp of signing the armistice when the movie started, and the one bad guy was more impeding an inevitable peace than inexorably grinding on the war.) I only know the Wonder Woman character from the Justice League animated series from the early 2000’s, but the broad strokes are the same here: she’s a powerful, well-trained fighter who is guided to be a hero by a strong love and compassion for others, but doesn’t quite fit in with modern society, leading to some humorous culture shock as well as commentary on how our society views women.
3. Lady Bird
Whenever I get around to finishing it, I’ve got an upcoming post where I talk about Lady Bird. In that post, it will sound like I don’t like it. That’s because I’m using it to contextualize a discussion about what a “good” movie is, and purposely downplaying how much I liked it.
Lady Bird connected with me on a personal level like nothing else on this list. The main character is a teenage girl pursuing some rickety vision of grandeur she’s built in her head and decided her life, her hometown, her house, her friends, her family, all don’t fit into. She’s confused, but not in an aimless way. She’s confused in a very directed way; whatever she’s decided she wants, she desires with all her being, and pursues as hard as she can. The movie follows her through her last year of high school as her confusion leads her to desire and pursue different things she thinks fit into that vision in her head. Then she starts to recognize the real value of what she has, what she thought didn’t fit her vision of the life she imagined, even as she starts to gain some of the pieces of that imagined life.
Lady Bird is an excellent character study. This character is so real and richly drawn that I understood almost everything she did, even her oddest actions, as natural outcomes of her feelings and worldview. In that upcoming post, I will complain about Moonlight being overly verité and documentary-style for me to connect with, but Lady Bird is actually shot in a similar way. Yet here, it somehow added layers to the character, and every time I peeled one back and connected something she said or did to something I’d thought or felt, I understood her a little bit more, and my appreciation for the movie grew.
Even as I was writing this list, I wasn’t sure where I was going to put Lady Bird. I knew it was above The Last Jedi and Your Name for me. I started to slot it in after Spider-Man: Homecoming, but as I wrote the first paragraph, I realized I liked it more than that too. I realized I was trying to put it where I thought I should put a movie like this—a coming-of-age dramedy with Oscar buzz—based on what kind of movies I usually like. Clearly, I had implicitly thought, even if I liked this coming-of-age dramedy with Oscar buzz, I can’t possibly have liked it as much as Wonder Woman or Thor: Ragnarok. But when I started to really directly compare it with the other movies on this list, I realized the truth: there really were only two movies this year that I enjoyed more than Lady Bird. It feels weird and gross to like an Oscar movie that much, but I can’t deny it. I really connected with this movie.
2. Blade Runner 2049
Blade Runner is a slow, depressing, ambiguous movie about a really complicated set of philosophical and ethical issues brought about by technology. This sort of sci-fi was common back in the 60’s and 70’s and then started to go out of fashion in the 80’s with Star Wars and ET and was mostly gone by the 90’s with Stargate and Independence Day and Men in Black. Blade Runner is also visually stunning, strange, and thought-provoking.
Blade Runner 2049 is also a slow, depressing, ambiguous movie about a really complicated set of philosophical and ethical issues brought about by technology. It’s also visually stunning, strange, and thought-provoking. It does this without retreading the first movie, and it does it in 2017, when the bar for a visually stunning movie has raised drastically, and when technology has advanced and changed in ways no one in 1982 could have imagined.
I don’t want to write too much more about this movie because I’ve only seen it once. When I see it about five times, maybe I’ll feel more able to get into the weeds on it.
1. Logan
What can I say about this that hasn’t been said? It’s the Wolverine movie we all wanted: dark, violent, bleak, thrilling, with a great exploration of what makes Logan tick and his relationships to others. It carries the dark tone and bleak world of X-Men and X2 to their logical conclusion, culminates the troubled relationship between Logan and Professor Xavier, and starts a new troubled relationship between Logan and his “daughter”, Laura, that plays out over the course of the movie. It’s a small story that hangs its tragedies on people and their flaws, and gets across the hopelessness of its setting through small details, like the cruelty of the agents pursuing Laura and the thugs that menace the farming family, unlike the over-the-top opening of Days of Future Past with its M-shaped scars and mutant body garbage dumps and murdering robot squads. The slow unfolding makes the few bright moments–the stay at the hotel, the dinner with the farming family—all the more tragic in how brief they are and how catastrophically they end.
I have a feeling people in a few years will look back on Logan with the same respect they now hold for The Dark Knight. Logan might even come to hold higher regard; it’s a more accessible movie, shorter, easier to follow, more minimalist, with more true to life dialogue and more focus on human relationships. It’s not simply that the Wolverine movies started from X-Men Origins: Wolverine and managed to come to this. This is a great film regardless of the other X-Men films. It’s an even better film if you’ve followed the arc of Logan’s character up to this point, but it’s great regardless, and it’s notably unlike any other comic book movie we’ve had so far. Logan changed the conversation around comic book movies from “Who else can we stuff into this universe?” to “How can we make stories that feel fresh from these properties?”, and even Marvel seems to have taken notice by choosing to let Taika Waititi put his stamp so thoroughly on Thor: Ragnarok.
On to 2018…
There are nowhere near as many movies I’m looking forward to scheduled for 2018 as there were for 2017. This is unfortunate.
Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War look pretty cool. So does Annihilation. A Wrinkle in Time looks…eh, weird. I don’t like Oprah. It also looks, from the trailer, like the movie’s scenes on Earth won’t have that rainy day New England coziness that the book had. The visual style is very different from what I’d imagined. It looks good enough that I’ll go check it out, though.
I made a foolhardy statement that I would not go see Solo: A Star Wars Story, which I may still keep. I’ve had low expectations for that movie from the beginning—the premise is straight out of a terrible EU novel—and now the movie was thrown out and reshot six months ago and is coming out six months from now. That sounds uncomfortably like what happened with Justice League, and Justice League was a total mess. I still had some fun with it, but that doesn’t mean I want more movies with that level of disjointed storytelling and bargain basement visual effects in the world.
I don’t know what to expect from Ant-Man and the Wasp. The first one was fine. I didn’t think it was nearly as hilarious as everyone said, but it was good enough. Unless the reviews are awful, I’m going to see it, though.
I have actually never seen The Incredibles all the way through, so I have no feelings on The Incredibles 2. I’ll probably go see it, though.
I’m really hoping for a couple surprises, movies that swoop in from the film festival circuit and really captivate me, like The Shape of Water and Lady Bird in 2017.
One meta-item for 2018: I have no idea how much time or interest I’m going to have in updating this blog, at least for the first few months of 2018. So, my gentle spambot readers, you may suffer a dearth of new material to crawl and attempt to post spam on.
That’s it! Goodbye, 2017.
