Nathaniel's Top Ten of 2017

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...

Click to read more ...

FYC: Best Editing, Baby Driver

by Tim Brayton

If you know one thing about Baby Driver, surely it's that the film was conceived from the ground up to move in perfect time to music. Every aspect of the film that could be tied to the rhythm of the soundtrack was: the movement of the camera, the blocking of the actors, and the cutting between shots.

Perhaps that sounds like an impressive trick. But "impressive" hardly starts to cover it: love the film or not (I was a little cool on it, overall), Baby Driver is indisputably one of 2017's most audacious piece of film craftsmanship, a high-wire act of choreographing every element of the film production process into one steady flow. And by no means the least of this craft came in the form of the editing done by Paul Machliss and Jonathan Amos.

The editors' work on this film began unnaturally early...

Click to read more ...

ACE Editing: Big Little Lies, Best Picture Hopefuls and More...

by Nathaniel R

The guild nominations are here already? Oh, yup, it's January now. (Funny how the calendar keeps happening even if you're in bed for a week plus with the flu!) Hollywood's editors have spoken and here are the cutting and shaping jobs they loved best this year on screens  big and small. Curiously they have a hodgepodge of category sizes (3,4, or 5 nominees depending) and voting practices. In some categories the final voting for winners happens between January 5th and 18th and in others (within the TV side) there are blue ribbon panel voting situations where the screenings happen on the 14th. This always leaves us wondering what their prizes would be like if they were consistent. Would awards season have more surprises if those voting were forced to watch everything as they are in very few select categories within various organizations... often somewhat randomly? We think it might and wouldn't it be super exciting to try with the consistency and with the mandatory screenings?

One of the most notable things on their TV list is that Big Little Lies has been bumped from competing in miniseries (where it's competed at most every other awards shows) and is competing in regular drama series (where it surely belongs since they've announced a second season with the same characters/actresses).  Nominees in all categories after the jump...

Click to read more ...

"Shape of Water" way way out front at the Critics Choice Awards

by Nathaniel R

As always, full disclosure: I am a member of the Broadcast Film Critics Association. So this award announcement is always filled with anxiety for me because I want to be heard. We all want to be heard. Nevertheless most of the longer shots I rallied for didn't make it, he said, pushing away a single tear. The Shape of Water led with 14 nominations... and it was so far out front it nearly doubled the nominations afforded to its nearest rivals (a clump of them jammed together with 8 nominations each:  Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird, Dunkirk, and The Post).

As ever I'm disappointed that the nominations double so heavily as "general Oscar pundit predictiveness" but here they are in their fullness with very immediate and perhaps too impulsive commentary after the jump.

Click to read more ...

John Waters Annual Top Ten List

by Nathaniel R

Everyone's favorite weirdo kitsch and camp-loving auteur has released his annual top ten list. Though we really wish he'd make one last movie (A Dirty Shame was a weird thing to end on 13 years ago!) at least he's still with us as a cultural voice. His lists are always so fun to read because they're reliably eclectic with a little bit of every type of movie and usually one thing we've never heard of (this time that's I, Olga Hepnarova... a black and white docudrama about a chainsmoking lesbian in Prague). Topping his 2017 list is Edgar Wright's Baby Driver. He writes:

 The best movie of the year is a popcorn thriller, an art film, and a gearhead classic that grossed over $100 million. It deserved to! Watching the star turn of Ansel Elgort was like seeing John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever for the first time.

And he gets sassy to the nation's moviegoing parents about Wonderstruck:

Want an IQ test for your cinephile children? Just take them to see this beautifully made, feel-good kids’ movie about the hearing-impaired, starring a little girl who looks exactly like Simone Signoret. If your small-fry like the film, they’re smart. If they don’t, they’re stupid.

He also likes Wonder Wheel, Lady Macbeth, and the HBO film Wizard of Lies. Check it out.