by Nathaniel R
Better late than never. If you've been wondering why your TFE host has been so in and out of the proceedings this season, let's just say life has proved significantly challenging offline: the end of a decade-plus relationship, homelessness (not the dramatic kind but the sleeping on friend's couches kind), a long bout with the flu, a new side gig, etcetera). So this list carries a bit of melancholy with it as 2017 was one of the hardest years of my life. (If you also had a rough year: I feel you. Hugs in solidarity). Due to all of this I didn't see as many films as is my preference and couldn't rewatch the key films I usually would have before "voting".
But in the end you have to move forward. Time changes everything... and time changes all top ten lists also! Some of these placements that you scratch your head about now, you'll either understand in ten years time OR I'll join you in scratching my head about them with a "what was I thinking?" blush. Top ten lists are but time capsules.
People change for better and worse. Circumstances shift dramatically or perception does. The movies of 2017 helped me understand all this, many of them zeroed in on definitive months in someone's life, others hopping around in time, and still more juxtaposing the past with the present...
HONORABLE MENTIONS
The following fifteen films had significant strengths that I admired (and, yes, in some cases weaknesses that I had trouble setting aside) or they just got me square in the heart or eyeballs in some way. In other words these pictures took up plentiful mental real estate and the cinematic year coalesced around them. Consider them the films that wouldn't leave my inner multiplex.
the color and guitar strums (and tears) of Coco
that muscular flamboyance within the stuffy genre-casing of Darkest Hour
the bewitching elegies of A Fantastic Woman
the horrifying wintry void of Loveless
and those ominous texts and curious hauntings in Personal Shopper
the lux metaphoric coupling of Phantom Thread
the fascinating triad of Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
the austere genre-mashup named Thelma
yes even the aggressive ugly provocations of Three Billboards...
the unique spirituality of the Israeli romcom The Wedding Plan
that four-hankie family drama Wonder
...and the zeitgeist smash of Wonder Woman!
And three runners up to the top ten...
the elegant mystery of Frantz
that psyche-slipping social media headspace of Ingrid Goes West
...and two men at odds and in deep within God's Own Country
TOP TEN LIST 2017
*some minor spoilers follow*
Princess Cyd
(Stephen Cone)
Wolfe Releasing. November 3rd
96 minutes
It's a shame that this feature barely saw theaters and must fend for its little self in the noisy streaming marketplace where people are likely to but sample it briefly and flit away to something louder. Its power is in the cumulative, the film being more akin to a good book than a flashy scene-by-scene entertainment. Princess Cyd understands this, one of its leading ladies being an author and a bookworm.
One pivotal scene before the final act between an aunt (Rebecca Spence) and her niece (Jessie Pinnick) illustrates the movie's profound empathy best. The young woman, infinite in knowledge as young people (think they) are, has been quick to judge her aunt throughout the movie. The older woman has just had it with her niece's jabbing advice, however well-meant. She dresses her down righteously. The beauty of the scene is in the eye of the beholder; sympatico audiences will realize that both women, in subtle ways, are correct despite their conflicting points of view. You want nothing more than for them to gently come together in the space between them.
mother!
(Darren Aronofsky)
Paramount. September 15th
121 minutes
My initial grade for the year's weirdest movie was "ABCDF". I stand by it... but also suspect Time will do a ABCDF to mother! I want to have been with it on the ground floor, shaking a glass of spiked lemonade in one hand. The next time Aronosfky convinces his actors to rip their hearts out for the camera (this isn't the first time... at least not figuratively) or the next time he finishes a creation and I place it on my bluray shelf, I will remember this desperate, vulgar, wild, outrageous, earnest and winking portrait of the artist fondly.
Battle of the Sexes
(Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Feris)
Fox Searchlight. Sept 29th
121 minutes
The title is sadly ageless. In 1973 when Billie Jean King and Bobby Briggs were having their epic tennis match before a mammoth television audience, the culture was grappling with combative gender politics, pay disparity, and its patriarchal problem of not taking women seriously. AKA the same things the culture is grappling with right now. Steven Spielberg's The Post, set even earlier than BotS, has some of the same feminist concerns but is weirdly proud of its perfect hindsight. Battle is content to just tell its story and it falls in love with every character along the way, the personal being political. What was it that kept this graceful, funny, and even-handed match from connecting with audiences? I normally want movies to be shorter but I could have sat through an entire miniseries version of this one.
Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd)
Roadside Attractions. July 14th.
89 minutes
When I learned that this was a debut feature, I went as mute as the Lady Katherine's traumatized servant Anna (Naomi Ackie). Unbelievable! Oldroyd's exceptionally promising drama moves with the bold entitled confidence of a master. It's so visually confrontational (all that centered looking-back-out-at-you framing) and emotionally severe that it might be unbearable if the running time were indulgent but there's not an ounce of fat on this nasty drama. What will Oldroyd do for an encore? I keep thinking of that slender cat staring at Lady Katherine (?) the camera (?) the audience (?) at the dining table. Its shape mesmerizing, its mind unknowable, its soul amoral. Like the lady it deigns to share its home with, it will do as it pleases with no concern for others.
[DOUBLE FEATURE TIE]
Atomic Blonde (David Leitch)
Focus Features. July 28th. 115 minutes
Baby Driver (Edgar Wright)
Tri-Star Pictures. June 28th. 112 minutes
They used to call them Motion Pictures. Theatrical feature, today's term, is so dull in comparison! These Movie-Movies deserve the earlier title. They've got PICTURES with beautiful color and lighting, and compositions worth freeze framing. They've obviously got adrenaline-pumped dizzying MOTION and they've got it from start to finish. The latter is achieved in different ways, though. Baby Driver ties every image rigidly but non-clumsily to the sound (even acting gestures). It's like a musical without the singing or dancing. Atomic Blonde focuses less on the editing (though it does that well, too) and achieves its mastery through jaw-dropping choreography and stunt work as in the movie's climactic continuous shot setpiece in a vacant building.
There are those who claim that one or both of these movies are 'all style and no substance,' a familiar dismissive shorthand. My articulate rebuttal is "So what?" Numerous motion pictures have been lauded every year in history for 'all substance and no style'... look it up!
And my "Best Picture" nominees...
The Florida Project
(Sean Baker)
A24. October 6th
111 minutes
Most movies choose to pinpoint a specific defining moment in their protagonists's lives. You get the sense very early on in Baker's beautifully constructed drama about poverty and childhood, that any day would have done for Moonee (complete natural Brooklynn Prince) every day being essentially the same. Her looping structureless adventure will one day become adolescent monotony. Despite its gleeful childish nonsense and seemingly erratic wandering, The Florida Project is one of the most schematic movies of the year. The final genius image, a rush of dubiously jubilant chaos and manufactured escapism, incinerates everything you've seen before. This motel/project's happy fresh paint of color and Moonee's total freedom are as illusory as Disney World. Suddenly those railings she shouts from, hangs on, and spits through look like prison bars.
Call Me By Your Name
(Luca Guadagnino)
Sony Pictures Classics. November 24th
132 minutes
Whenever you hear a book is unfilmable, don't believe it. Just call James Ivory by his name. The legendary director of complex literary adaptations was an incisive choice to resculpt the indulgent diary-like first person novel into something cinematic. Luca Guadagnino, an Italian sensualist attuned to minute details, beautiful actors, and tactile gestures, was the perfect choice to film it. The end result is both mundanely intimate and emotionally epic; nothing much happens but everything changes. What's most impressive is the feeling that it's both fixed in stone and ephemeral... like the experience of repeatedly replaying those defining memories from the cusp of adulthood, first love, and sexual discovery.
Get Out
(Jordan Peele)
Universal. February 24th
104 minutes
Everyone heard that spoon scraping against the teacup, like some kind of subliminally resonant message of our precarious social contracts. Who can forget the tears and slack jaw of Kaluuya as he entered the Sunken Place? Or the impotent haunted "Nononononononono" which worked on every level simultaneously: character-based drama, traditional horror scare, and weirdly funny pop culture bullseye. Jordan Peele's smash hit has so many indelible moments, and it's all so smartly acted. People will be unpacking its brilliantly elastic Sunken Place metaphor, wickedly funny dialogue, and unique scares for years to come.
BPM (Beats Per Minute)
(Robin Campillo)
The Orchard. October 20th
140 minutes
Dreamy artful touches punctuate this French drama -- sensual abandon with abstractly dissolving interludes, dreamlike visions as fantasy or memory -- but BPM is grounded first in mundane reality. It continually returns to contentious ACT-UP meetings in what looks like a college classroom where a whole slew of activists mingle, collaborate, argue, flirt, and speechify. To express solidary with a thought or plan, the characters finger snap; it's quieter than applause but sends the supportive message.
Filmmakers interested in making historical civil rights dramas (and we know there are a lot of them) really ought to study BPM. This sprawling bloody messy sexy despairing joyful tear through the AIDS epidemic and ACT-UP's response in Paris is truly cinematic and gets the heart racing. Like all civil rights dramas based on reality, it uses facts and events and political happenings for its narrative, but BPM does so in the way people actually process these things: as messy complex witnesses with their own full lives to lead. The vivid characters move erratically in and out and in and out of the public and the personal spheres, through dance floors, bedrooms, offices, schoolyards, and streets. They burn so bright that it's no surprise when the light flickers out. In the absence of applause and a standing ovation (too stuffy) or a moment of silence (too joyless), I finger snap furiously in BPM's honor.
Lady Bird
(Greta Gerwig)
A24. November 3rd
94 minutes
Lady Bird ends suddenly with a seemingly innocuous shot of freshman college student Christine MacPherson (Saoirse Ronan) alone on the streets of New York. She takes a breath. Cut to black. Greta Gerwig memorably stated in an interview that the exhale would be a different new chapter. It's this kind of emotional precision that makes Lady Bird such a masterpiece of both the high school comedy and the coming-of-age drama. And you can feel that attention to detail from the first reel, as the movie charts both Christine's restless fantasies of escape, her irritable relationship with her mother (the extraordinary Laurie Metcalf) and her messy head-first romantic dives. It's great. And it's hilarious! We'd normally weep when a great actress abandons her gift to retreat behind the camera, but Greta Gerwig's inimitable spirit and fresh voice transfers. She's just begun her new chapter. Time to fly.
And, yes, this means the Film Bitch Awards have finally begun!