Top 10 Films of 2017

It is true that Top 10 lists are by their nature arbitrary, frivolous and wholly unnecessary. If you were to wipe my memory and force me to make this list again a month from now, there's no guarantee it wouldn't be considerably different from what you're reading today.

But it's equally true that these sorts of lists are fun to write and fun to read. They spur conversations and disagreements about what is right and wrong about today's cinema. In short, they get people talking about movies, which is quite possibly the only thing I like more than watching them.

I found 2017 to be a quite good year for film. I awarded four movies my highest rating -- 4 stars, 5 Yaps or an "A," depending on where it was being published -- at the time of their release, and have since upgraded one more to that level. I consider all them masterpieces, and saw at least a dozen more I would deem only a half-step down from that.

In making my top 10 list, I had a much easier time deciding on #1-5 than #6-10, particularly in deciding what would drop off the list. That's why I always make sure to also include a list of also-rans: films I adored that that didn't quite make the top 10. This year the counting of contenders runs to 18.

You'll notice that my list(s) are dominated by smaller indie movies this year. I offer no explanation or apology for this. In deciding my favorites, I deliberately try to avoid any overarching theme or bias. I likes what I likes. For whatever reason, in 2017 it was the low-budget, the offbeat, the overlooked.

So without further ado:

1.    Blade Runner 2049

I feared this film more than any other. I thought there was no way to do a sequel to "Blade Runner," one of my favorite movies, that was narratively and emotionally logical. I was wrong. It's a brilliant, beautiful, disturbing look into a future that is very different from what we have today, yet easy to see the pathway from here to there.

2.    Lady Bird

After more than a decade cementing her place as the queen of indie films, then apprenticing as a screenwriter, Greta Gerwig forcefully announces herself as an important new filmmaker. A look at teenhood that is very specific yet universal. Smart, brave and riveting.

3.    Brigsby Bear

At first I took this to be a quirky hipster comedy about a manboy who finds himself living in a strange and frightening new world. Instead, I found the most emotionally satisfying journey of any film in 2017. It's a story of overcoming our fears and reaching out to others.

4.    The Shape of Water

"Pan's Labyrinth" is probably still my favorite Guillermo del Toro movie, but this makes a strong case for second. Sally Hawkins is great, but the film also boasts a half-dozen supporting characters whose stories are just as distinct and compelling as the heroine's. Dark, offbeat, mysterious.

5.    Maudie

The year of Sally Hawkins. She'll get her Oscar nomination for "Shape of Water," but her work in this beautiful little indie about a meek Canadian artist was the performance of the year for me. And Ethan Hawke wasn't bad, either.

6.    The Florida Project

Willem Dafoe may well win his own Oscar for this movie, but for me it's one of the best examples of a terrific ensemble cast. An unflattering portrait of the underside of my hometown of Orlando, it resonates with strength and truth.

7.    Patti Cake$

Danielle Mcdonald wowed me as a girl who's been degraded her entire life, and spits back her resentment in the form of vicious volleys of rap lyrics. An audacious debut by filmmaker Geremy Jasper.

8.    Wind River

This bleak drama looks at two Caucasian protagonists working a murder case inside an insular Native American reservation. It's a story of outsiders and aliens, belonging and frontier justice.
 

9.    Baby Driver

By turns funny, jazzy and dangerous, "Baby Driver" is tonally all over the map -- yet somehow it all works. Ansel Elgort enhances his acting credentials as a young getaway driver with a few twists.

10.  The Post

Steven Spielberg's historical drama examines the bravery of Washington Post maven Katharine Graham and a few others in defying the White House to publish the Pentagon Papers, detailing the country's shameful history in Vietnam.

 

Other contenders

Any one of these films had a real shot at making my top 10 list. If you twisted my arm and made me pick a #11, it would have been "A Ghost Story," which I had on the list until the very end. "Stronger" or "Dunkirk" would be next. Listed alphabetically.

The Ballad of Lefty Brown -- Very offbeat Western in which Bill Pullman essentially plays the classic Walter Brennan "incompetent old coot" character, who takes over the story when the John Wayne type bites it.
Coco
Crown Heights -- The male performance of the year for me by Lakeith Stanfield as a wrongfully imprisoned man.
Dunkirk -- A different sort of war picture; not about individual heroes but the concept of heroism.
A Ghost Story -- Slow, deliberate, haunting. Not the sort of picture I usually go for.
Goodbye Christopher Robin
The Hero -- It looks like Sam Elliott's greatest role is being forgotten during the awards race. Pity.
Hostiles -- There is dour. Then there is grim. Then there is bleak. Then there is despair. Then there is "Hostiles." 
It Comes at Night
Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992
Paris Can Wait
The Promise
Stronger
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri -- Frances McDormand is amazing. So is Woody Harrelson, though it's Sam Rockwell who's being pushed for awards.
Tommy's Honour -- A drama about fathers and sons, Scotland and the history of golf. Another picture I didn't expect to adore.
A United Kingdom
War for the Planet of the Apes
Wonder Woman -- The superhero movie of the year.

The Underwhelmed

These are films that were widely praised, often by people whose opinions I respect, yet I found them on some level disappointing. Many I still liked, just not crazy about them. If there was one unifying theme in movies that let me down this year, it's that they were too long. I saw so many 140-minute films that could've been 96.

Get Out -- Yes, it's a smart horror film that also boasts snappy humor and social commentary. A pillar for our times? Please.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi -- I've liked all the Star Wars movies, though this is easily the weakest. I mean, an entire plotline set off by illegally parking your starship?
The Meyerowitz Stories -- Clever portrayals of people you don't think for a minute could exist in the real world. Also, I'm still confused: was the inside joke supposed to be that they're all actually shitty artists?
Call Me By Your Name -- The last 40 minutes or so packs an emotional punch. The first hour-and-fifteen should've been edited down to about 20.
Good Time  -- Chase, chase, chase, why, why, why? All existential peril with no interior life. 
The Big Sick -- Ray Romano and Holly Hunter were the best things about this.
Mudbound -- As depressing as "Hostiles," without anything compelling to make it worthwhile. During all the different characters' narration, I kept hearing Mr. Mackey from "South Park" droning, "Cuz racism is bad."
The Disaster Artist -- A funny movie with a spot-on impression by James Franco. And nothing more.
IT -- At least it didn't end in a preteen gangbang.
Lucky -- Harry Dean Stanton can act the hell out of anything. David Lynch cannot act, other than doing that one hard-of-hearing speech pattern he always does. As someone who's hard-of-hearing, I was offended.
Beats Per Minute
Marjorie Prime
Happy End -- "Hi, we're French and rich and awful, come spend two hours with us."
Thelma
Blade of the Immortal -- Martial arts movies are like baseball movies: they're better the less actual baseball/swordfighting it has. There's a great 84-minute flick in there somewhere.
Novitiate
Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

Review: "Maudie"

With every one of Sally Hawkins' endearing, deeply etched film roles, we fall a little bit more in love with her.

Hawkins' performance as Maud Lewis is essentially a portrait of pure love. Maud was a woman from Nova Scotia who was racked by crippling rheumatoid arthritis from childhood. She spent most of her life in a tiny shack without electricity or running water, living in abject poverty with her husband, Everett, a fish peddler who was gruff and ornery on his best days, a much worse on his worst.

Despite this, Maud became a renowned artist whose work was collected far and wide. Her paintings were bright, bold sweeps of unmixed colors, flowers or other nature scenes. She painted on almost everything: cards, pieces of scrap wood, virtually every single surface of their cottage. Today Maud's entire house is a work of art enshrined inside a museum.

Directed by Aisling Walsh from a screenplay by Sherry White, "Maudie" focuses not on the tiny, disabled body but the titanic soul contained within it. Hawkins portrays Maud's disease without fetishizing it, a slightly crooked, awkward woman who becomes more bent and bowed with the passing of years, her little hop of a limp turning into a tremulous stagger.

But that's not what the movie is about. Indeed, I don't think the word "arthritis" is even spoken aloud until near the end.

Like nearly all of Hawkins' other roles, even the most tragic of circumstances cannot bury her character's joyful essence. Maud smiles and twinkles, even when she is ignored or treated ill, always finding a way to carry on and hope for better.

Among those failing to give Maud her due are her Aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose) and brother Charles (Zachary Bennett). They view Maud as a naive invalid, someone to be looked after and kept inside tight bookends of their own proscription. After Charles sells the family home to fund his business schemes, Maud is forced to live with Ida, under her strict rules -- a kept woman with no lover.

Certainly, Maud is not very smart in the traditional sense. She's a simple woman of simple tastes and desires. She wanders down to the local club to have a beer and do a little dance by herself, which Ida finds scandalous.

Then Maud spies a disheveled man coming into the local five-and-dime store to advertise for a housemaid. The man is obviously simple-minded, prone to outbursts of anger, and fiercely independent. Despite this, Maud answers the ad, seeing an opportunity to move out of Ida's place and have a piece of life that is her own.

The advertisement is for a live-in position, despite the fact the man's shack would qualify as what we today call a "tiny home," with a single walk-up loft bed. It soon becomes apparent that what the man was really advertising for was a wife to look after him.

We hear Everett before we see him, and it's hard to believe that sound could come out of Ethan Hawke. Low and guttural like a pair of stones being ground together, Everett's voice is that of a man not used to speaking, because he does not have much to say.

Everett is very particular about how things are done. He believes his home is his castle, and he the unquestioned lord. Everett is at once a very proud man and one who believes that everyone looks down upon him. Possibly there are undiagnosed mental health issues.

The arrangement causes a minor scandal in their little town -- "shacking up together" is tossed around. Maud doesn't really mind, and part of her is happy to be noticed at all, or spoken about in a romantic context.

The relationship, such as it is, gets off to a rocky start. There are outbursts, controlling behavior, even some physical violence. Everyone expects Maud to crawl back to Aunt Ida's. But she stays, the wavelength and intensity of Everett's rages become wider and smaller, and they settle into something like a routine, which finally becomes a marriage almost by default.

There's not much house to clean, so Maud passes the time painting little flowers here and there to brighten up the place. One of Everett's fish customers, a sophisticated woman from New York named Sandra (Kari Matchett), notices one of Maud's doodles and offers 25 cents for it.

Soon others buy them, painting becomes a regular source of income, and eventually people from all over stop by the little house to purchase a Maud Lewis original. Newspaper reporters and TV camera crews come calling.

Everett begrudgingly takes over the chores so Maud can have more time to paint -- which is as close to an overt expression of love a man like him can utter.

In its own plain way, "Maudie" is an incredibly beautiful movie. The photography by Guy Godfree has an unornamented charm, and the sweet strings of Michael Timmins' musical score sing a lullaby of humble passion.

Walks are used as a visual representation of Maud and Everett's evolving relationship. At first she walks behind him while he pushes his cart of goods about town; later they walk together, then she sits in the front of the cart facing away from him, and finally she rides nose-to-nose with her husband.

I think these are among the finest performances of both Hawkins' and Hawke's careers -- and that's saying something. Theirs is a duet of troubled love, expressing how two people with fierce challenges and emotional limitations can find contentment and a sense of permanency together. Both should remembered come time for Academy Award nominations.

"Maudie" is a quiet, candid movie that reminds us that beauty is not just found, it often must be made.