The New Classics - The Florida Project

Michael C. here. When I started this column I made a rule that anything less than two years old was too recent. So for the season finale let's go with a first round draft pic. 

Sean Baker and Willem Dafoe on the set of The Florida Project

Scene: Child Predator
There’s nothing that he can do about it. That’s the guiding principle that drives Willem Dafoe’s Bobby throughout Sean Baker’s heart-rending The Florida Project. He maintains the boundaries he needs to keep up the pretense that he is operating a motel and not a lilac-colored homeless shelter, but we can intuit that he would help more if he could. It’s all in the unnecessary helping of kindness and humor around the edges when he’s laying down the law... 

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National Ice Cream Month is Sweet Torture.

by Nathaniel R

You put that ice cream in your mouth and you are in very very very big trouble.

You guys. I recently gave up dairy for health reasons [insert huge hangry sigh]. Well, "gave up" in this case means severely cut down. An occassional piece of cheese is allowed and I also have two pints of Nina West endorsed ice cream still in the freezer which I'm veeery slowly metering out as rewards for the good behavior of not eating ice cream. But really --what is good about not eating ice cream? NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL. 

So after the jump let's celebrate ice cream at the movies...

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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...

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Year in review: Top 5 mothers and daughters of 2017

A few more year in review list pieces coming (since we know the film year doesn't really end until awards seasons wraps). Here's Lynn Lee

If 2017 was a banner year for fathers in film, it was just as much the year of Complicated Mothers—from Frances McDormand’s justice-seeking Mildred in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, MO to Holly Hunter’s tart-tongued but soft-hearted Beth in The Big Sick to Mary J. Blige’s stoic Florence in Mudbound.  Within this trend was another that spoke especially personally to me: the even more complicated relationship between mothers and daughters.  We saw all kinds of mother-daughter relationships in 2017—tender, fraught, hostile, sometimes all of the above—portrayed with a depth and complexity we don’t get nearly enough of in relationships between women in movies. 

It’s hard to choose favorites, but the following were the mother-daughter screen pairings this year that I found the most compelling...

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Does Woody Harrelson spell trouble for Willem Dafoe?

by Nathaniel R

A police chief and a hotel manager, both overwhelmed and sympathetic and arguably the moral center of their movies.

It's been a long time since we had a double-nomination situation in Best Supporting Actor. The last time it happened was 26 years ago when Ben Kingsley and Harvey Keitel were nominated together for Bugsy (1991) - a curious event since Keitel was so much stronger in another Oscar nominated classic from that year. Given the rise of Woody Harrelson with that Screen Actor's Guild nomination and the overall assumed strength of Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri in the Best Picture race, it could well happen again. His co-star Sam Rockwell, already felt locked and loaded for the same movie in a (somewhat) larger part. 

But does this spell trouble for Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project? Consensus was beginning to form that Dafoe, who became famous in the mid 80s and has worked ever since, would easily walk away with the Oscar this year...

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