Fave 5 films of 2017.
THIS IS NOT GOING TO GO THE WAY THAT YOU THINK.
MARK, we talked about this!
As always, this list represents nothing beyond my whims of what I enjoyed the most in 2017.
I am sorry if you disagree.
Here we GOOOO Honorable Mentions
Hit me with that Whitney!
The Last Jedi Okay, let's rip this band-aid off.
This isn't on the actual fave list because in a lot of ways I'm still digesting it.
I loved it, full stop, but I'm leaving it on honorable mentions for a second because
it certainly doesn't need me to elevate the conversation surrounding it right now.
Despite a lot of you wanting me to do that but I still need a minute with this one.
It's a visually stunning Star Wars experience.
The Holdo scene might be my favorite single scene all year.
I'll be talking about in multiple videos over the coming months, and speaking of, stay
through the credits because there are some changes coming to the format of this show
that I'm gonna talk about.
Definitely still digesting all of the things that happened here.
I can without hesitation say that my favorite Yoda scene in all of Star Wars is from this
movie.
Stunning.
Dunkirk This one was on the list, then it wasn't,
then it was.
Honestly I kept moving things around, but ultimately I think Dunkirk is a movie I will
revisit least, simply because of the subject matter it offers.
It is a brilliant film, just not one I want to rewatch as a lot of other stuff.
Sorry, #TophNo.
I love you.
Though, structurally, this is a victory lap on a taco starship because of its avant-garde
tap dancing on the very idea of linear time's grave.
Some storylines last days, some last a few hours, one lasts like two hours but everything
is edited together as if the stories were happening concurrently.
Dunkirk's a trip.
It's huge, it's loud, it's brash, it features a pretty damn good performance from
my boy Harry Styles, it's a stunning use of practical filmmaking, giving you real in-camera
scale, without resorting to a bunch of cheap cgi trickery.
It's great and the stand out here is the structure because editing three storyline
together than take place at three different time scales, it kind of an amazing magic trick
which I'll admit he flirted with on Interstellar but here he's saying something strange about
war at a purely thematic level—in war, time is a flexible concept.
Christopher Nolan has wild control over how a film is constructed.
It's wild.
We never quote have a firm grasp on what exactly he's going to deliver.
Blade Runner 2049 Yes, Blade Runner 2049 also didn't make
my fave list, and like the previous two movies, that's more of a measure of liking some
other films more it's not really a big deal because I just allowed myself to say more
things about the honorable mentions so really I'm giving a Fave 8 but that screws up my
branding.
Blade Runner 2049 is a brilliantly structured, mind-pulverisation that will leave you pondering
the nature of existence and what it means to be alive.
I have some wild theories about this movie and leave it to the master Denis Villeneuve
to construct a world that so readily allows them.
Ryan Gosling is a level of measured powder keg that he hasn't really been given the
chance to play before, no not even in Drive.
Not like this.
He's teetering on the brink of existential meltdown for the entire film, which means
that his acting needs to be a touch unpredictable to sell us that.
He does.
It delivers.
It also happens to feature the some of the best miniature work in a mainstream film since
… the first one.
Onto the main list!
Get Out Get Out, to my personal experience, feels
to be the one thing that everyone universally liked this year—and I mean that specifically
within cinema circles.
(Cuz I don't think the bad people liked it very much.)
Oh, sit down.
It's 2018, you can't not address the fact that, not only was Get Out a shocking, brilliant
horror film down to its very marrow, it's also a film that has a lot to say about what
it feels like to be a black person in America since like … forever.
Our current state of affairs is built into every facet of this film.
The micro-aggressions, the super-chill belittlement, the loss of agency, all illustrated by a single
change in perspective, without doing anything but illustrating our actual current reality.
Get Out is an important horror film.
A phrase I'm having trouble replicating a second example for … wow, um wow… cuz,
like brilliant films have been horror movies.
But stuff like The Exorcist really just taught us not to get possessed by demons, which feels
like a pretty useful life-skill to have without the help of a cinematic aid.
Don't … eat a demon.
I started this section in an effort to jump Get Out right to the front of the class, but
now I'm lacksidasically wondering if Get Out was the first horror movie to clock a
perfect 180 on the LSAT and people didn't really notice.
That's a law joke.
There's—see there's layers.
Most horror movies use often-cheap horror shorthand to exemplify why a certain small
town, or a certain creepy murder hill folk are often disgusting and not all together
human-feeling.
Get Out uses what appear to be normal, everyday people to show us a terrifying world to find
yourself caught in: ours.
We are in the Sunken Place.
I still haven't thought of another horror movie that had so much value as a resource
for finding and pinpointing way to help everyone understand a minority perspective, while being
this damn entertaining and clever.
I think Get Out might be the first horror masterpiece.
The Shining doesn't have the same kind of moral compass.
I was not a better person after watching it.
Don't attack your family with an axe after being possessed by a hotel.
Good tip, got it.
Thumbs up.
Psycho, Let the Right One In, Rosemary's Baby, Cabin in the Woods, The Thing.
They're all about something they don't appear to be on the surface, they're all
megaton successes on the theatrical stage as well as the artistic achievement – but
mean something, they really don't.
And if you type Room 237 in the comments, so help me, Voltron.
Here's food for thought: artistic symbolism is only as meaningful as an audience is able
to understand it on their own.
If no one gets your art, it's probably not as brilliant as you think it is.
As your art cannot function if a requirement of it is your standing next to it and explaining
it to everyone all the time.
Huh.
I think my point is that Get Out won horror forever.
I made a comment back with Cabin in the Woods akin to "how do you make a horror movie
after this?"
Jordan Peele answered my question and punched my face out of my face.
First-time writer/director/genius/and apparently, curve-buster: Peele knocked this out of the
stadium and into the Blimpie parking lot next door.
More like Get … in here and watch this awesome movie.
We need another take that was terrible—
Lady Bird Hey, speaking of geniuses: Greta Gerwig wrote
and directed an instant teenage-comedy classic with the purest heart of an aged silver sporting
a healthy patina.
A period piece taking place entirely in the somehow already nostalgic time period known
as 2003.
The year we went to war with Iraq, Homeland Security came into existence, and Americans
shoddily renamed French Fries to "Freedom Fries" because we are … the most insecure
nation on earth.
Some movies are too clever.
This movie is a problem-child in a nutshell: it's clever enough to get itself in trouble.
This film and its characters are way, way, way, way, way, way, SEVENTEEN MINUTES LATER,
way, way, way, way, way clever.
I sort of want to invent a special award for Saoirse Ronan and Lori Metcalf who are both
worlds better than I thought they were, and bear in mind I thought they were already fantastic,
also bearing in mind that I love Scream 2, but my goodness, this is an acting clinic.
And the writing gives them a gigantic area to create in.
The characters in this movie are shockingly imperfect, often carrying their flaws around
like a science fair project.
It can be hard to find your place in the world.
This is sort of a movie about me in a weird way.
I too was struggling to find my place in the universe around this time period and close
to Lady Bird aka Christine.
What is an identity?
We're all trying to figure that out.
Class of 2000 represent!
Oh god This film is currently sitting at a perfectly-imperfect
99% on Rotten Tomatoes.
And that fits.
Lady Bird fits into that space of perfectly-imperfect.
It's about that time period where we're still inventing who we are supposed to be:
a time of upheaval within ourselves.
That's a tough moment to capture with any real authenticity, but Greta Gerwig captures
it pretty effortlessly.
The grandiose confidence we have on the cusp of college age, thinking we're ready to
flip the world on its head – and the slowly-cracking fragility that comes with that.
Scene one feels as fresh as scene seventy.
This story isn't about just the beginning and the end because the middle is straight
up knuckled pancake (yeah, I brought that one back.)
Give it a go if you haven't because … damn.
-- Three Billboard outside Ebbing, Missouri.
Hey, this is going to be difficult to talk about and I'm gonna walk on some excessively
delicate egg shells here because there is some serious anger following this movie around
and I totally understand what it is you are saying about undeserved redemption.
However, I think this movie a great deal more subtle
than the outrage surrounding it allows.
Specifically because of one reason: no one is redeemed in this film.
We meet the characters in (not a spoiler) what feels like the last stage of their life,
in that you can sort of tell they're done evolving.
They all turned into terrible people that are beyond saving.
With the protagonist, we are given a reason, with everyone else in the film, we are not.
We know that tragedy has hollowed the soul from one person, it isn't the most egregious
stretch to believe that it hollowed other people out in increasingly disturbing and
off-putting ways.
It isn't a nice movie but any stretch of the imagination.
Trigger warning: EVERYTHING.
Easy things to get out of the way: the performances across the board are career defining work
from a cast whose careers have multiple standouts, standouts where they're the rosey-cheeked
gentle souls who must overcome impossible odds.
These are their hollowed remains.
To me, it's an important piece of art.
But I fully understand if you don't want a film to cross every line in the rule book.
I totally get it.
I can't even say I enjoyed watching it.
But it does have something to say about revenge stories: aka the cheapest stories in film.
Yeah, I said it.
Revenge is cheap and it is a short cut around character development.
To wit: this is the only time a revenge story ever made sense to me.
I watched Francis McDermott do a host of heinous, deplorable things and every step of the damn
way I was right there with her, understanding each decision, while staring in horror at
them.
If you love it I support you, if you don't love it I support you.
Okay, onto to another movie on my list with a disclaimer.
Baby Driver So, Baby Driver has ***** ******* in it.
Whoa, is that how we're handling it? ***** *******--huh, okay fair deal.
I'm not sure there is gonna be a whole hell of a lot of surprise about an Edgar Wright
movie being on Movies with Mikey, but I feel like there is still an ocean of depth in front
of us.
The music layers into the scene, the visuals layer on top of the music, the sound effects
then layer back on the music and all someone edited by an angel with magic pixie dreamboat
fingers.
The script is incredibly thin on characterizations for our two budding love birds, and yes I
said two, because I think it being both of them and not just Debora.
Baby's dialogue, is almost, if not all recycled from what other people say.
He is a dude constantly remixing his own life, in much the same way that the film is portraying
it.
It's not reality, it's enhanced movie reality.
Their romance is communicated almost entirely visually, never communicated verbally, just
sort of referred to here and there.
For lack of a better way to say this, we're supposed to feel their love through the music
because that is the medium they are communicating to each other in from moment one.
And I think that's important because this is a 1960's saccharine movie musical, where
true love can exist at first sight, remixed with a 70s car chase movie, through the lens
of a modern action movie.
And the rest of it is everything I've ever wanted to love in this world, including the
way sappy simple romance.
Because it doesn't end simple.
Because at some point reality will enter your reality.
It's why Baby's shirt is darkening over the course of the film, ergo, so does his
fairy tale life and romance outside of the crime stuff.
He's practically Fred Astaire at the beginning and by the end of it he's Snake god damn
Plisken.
I think Edgar did a phenomenal job.
The Big Sick Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon wrote a fantastic
semi-autobiographical piece on the nature of surprise debilitating illnesses and the
creative process—you know, my brand.
The Big Sick is perfect.
Nah, that doesn't seem big enough.
The Big Sick is BABY BOK CHOICE It's all at once a beautiful love story
written by the two people who lived that particular love story and all of the tribulations that
came with it.
The most emotionally satisfying movie of the year, endlessly clever, and dare I say it,
emotionally satisfying in ways that romantic comedies just generally … aren't.
It's emotionally honest, which is in shorter supply on the artistic scene then you'd
think.
Here's a fun way to illustrate this.
Ray Romano delivers a performance that stands up to his partner in fake movie marriage,
Holly Hunter.
I'm not trying to belittle Ray Romano or anything, he's great but she's Holly Hunter
who has been nominated for an Oscar four times, something Emily and Kumail can now also say
as they were nominated for best Original Screenplay for this.
For good reason.
It's brilliant.
The cast is perfection.
Oh, and before I get too sappy because I related to this film on another plane of existence,
it's also funny as hell.
Like movies don't come around this often where the jokes all just work this well – in
a movie that's sort of about comedy, but more the life of a person who does comedy.
You feel it.
Which might be why this movie is so disarming.
You come to laugh, but you just aren't expecting a movie to get so much about extended hospital
stays so unrelentingly honest and right.
I mean, they lived this so it makes perfect sense, but it's worth pointing out there
is a lot to learn from this movie.
People aren't at their best when a loved one is in the hospital.
For fear of someone else, people are often short with each other and blow things wildly
out of proportion.
Small drama becomes big drama real quick.
It's perfect.
I love it.
Make this your next rainy day blankets and tacos movie, you'll be glad you did.
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