Eddie's Top 20 Movies of 2017

Last year, I fretted over a lot of things, but one of those was the state of the movie industry—the death of mid-budget movie, the age of blockbusters too big to fail, and the rise of Netflix as the new VOD. Now I find myself no longer worrying. It seems undeniable that Hollywood (and culture writ large) is at a turning point. The "Me Too" Movement of 2017 continues into 2018. The huge success of films made by and for people of color is very noteworthy, as is the Academy's voter changes leading to the most exciting, unknowable Oscar race in years.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe this isn't the dawn of a new age of American cinema, but instead a blip in the system. I mean, systems are very difficult to overturn, as we've seen throughout 2017 in all aspects of culture. But it starts with people willing to say something. Looking back, people speaking truthfully is what defined 2017. In turn, my favorite movies of 2017 were about those upcoming voices speaking out as well. Deeply personal movies full of fresh voices and pushing for new truths.

I'm a firm believer that movies have souls. Like all art, we imbue them with life and humanity and allow them to speak in ways that we can't. 2017 was about a lot of things, but the rise of people willing to speak out was weaved through all of it. And if early 2018 is any indication for what's to come, the rise of passionate fresh voices isn't going to stop any time soon.

Here are my Top 20 Movies of 2017. As always, this isn't a ranking of quality. Art is largely subjective and personal. These are the movies that affected me most in 2017.

1. Get Out

Writer/director Jordan Peele did something incredible with breakout hit Get Out. He took the cinematic language we use for social discomfort, and realized how naturally that could be translated with the cinematic language for horror. Get Out adapts the story of 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, but instead of a story of acceptance or tolerance, Peele uses it to tell a story of a young man trying to survive. Here, though, his survival isn’t from a man with a chainsaw or machete but from losing his sense of identity and personhood to nonviolent oppression. Get Out makes this very clear: Daniel Kaluuya’s Chris isn’t afraid of being killed by these seemingly sweet, tolerant people. He’s afraid of being trapped in “The Sunken Place,” a place where your sense of identity is co-opted by people who don’t think they’re hurting you but rather improving you.

Coincidentally, in 1968 George Romero made a horror classic called Night of the Living Dead. Night was a zombie movie wherein a black man is trapped in a house with strangers and has to fend off zombies from the grave. He stays firm and somehow survives through the night. The next morning he steps outside when he think the cavalry has arrived, only to be mistaken for a monster and shot dead. Night was a social commentary for a lot of American culture at the time, but its inspirational throughline to Get Out is undeniable. Peele is an obvious student of classic horror and instills Get Out with a sense of formalism and abundant semiotics that horror nerds like me live for. Remind yourself of the ending scene of Get Out, when he’s on the side of the road and the police lights drive up and that tension you feel in your stomach. Immediately as an audience, you know what Peele is “trying to say,” whether that affects you or doesn’t. You have your quick assumptions about how that scene will play out. That feeling—infused with politics, culture, horror tropes, etc—is a triumph of what good drama is, and Peele handles it like a master.

Get Out is an achievement of a directorial debut and everything cinema should be. What may seem simple from the outside is actually an exercise in economic storytelling elegance. Peele crafted the most tight social thriller in years. And for once I get to put a horror movie at the top of my movie list that other people have seen and that has officially entered the public consciousness and lexicon. If that’s not a victory for the movies in 2017, I don’t know what is.

2. World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts

“The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” I read this quote from legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky years ago, and it always stuck with me. As I continue to watch the short films from animator-turned-filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt, that quote makes more and more sense.

Hertzfeldt has been making minimalist animated movies for years, but his World of Tomorrow series is special. He records candid audio from his niece, Emily, as she grows up and explores the world around her. He then writes a science-fiction story around the dialogue featuring Emily and a series of Emily clones from the future. The story appears to start as a pseudo-letter to her about the difficulty of growing up. However, similar to the heartbreaking documentary Dear Zachary, letters to children often become more about the adults making them. Hertzfeldt uses this story to explore his own mortality and place in the cosmos. His science-fiction is abstract but in the truest ways that explore real human concepts.

World of Tomorrow Episode Two is 15 minutes long. It jumps around ideas with lightning speed and is full of infinite questions and thoughts about who and what we are. It’s funny and beautiful how similar that is to the wonderful mind of 6-year-old Emily. She just enjoys the questions and lack of answers more than we do.

3. The Shape of Water

It’s no secret that director Guillermo del Toro loves monsters. His 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth is a feast for monster designs. Even his action fare (Hellboy, Pacific Rim) cares more about creatures than it does heroes. But it’s clear that gothic fairytales are where his talents shine the most. The Shape of Water is so idiosyncratic and specific to del Toro that I find it his most personal film. His love letter to monsters translated directly to screen.

The story is simple: a mute janitor falls in love with a merman. But that romance is almost beside the point. It only serves as a way for del Toro to get to the romanticism he craves. A caricatured view of 1960s Americana—its oppressiveness and toxic machismo all wrapped in Mad Men swagger and pseudo-decency. Side characters are given full backstories and side plots to show their humanity or villainy. The Shape of Water is also delightfully self-aware, full of dance numbers, meta-reverence to manicured, uninclusive pop culture and a world design immaculately crafted from a dream.

Del Toro has crafted my favorite of his monster movies. A simple story of outsiders of every kind whom the world deems as monsters, banding together in hope and solidarity against the real monsters who are driven by their own fear. That’s the kind of fairy tale we all know and love.

4. The Florida Project

In 2015, director Sean Baker made a movie called Tangerine that was one of my favorite movies of that year. Tangerine was shot on an iPhone and had an energy that is rarely seen in movies I watch. The Florida Project has that same energy, now sans the iPhone gimmick. The Florida Project follows a mother, daughter, and landlord as they get into trouble on the outskirts of Disney World. We follow Moonee, played by a wonderful child actress, as she lets her childhood id flow. Like many children, she is as detestable as she is lovable, and this is most felt by the always exhausted landlord, here played by Willam Dafoe in a tender role that blew me away.

The Florida Project juxtaposes its cinema verite style with the artifice and obnoxiously colored world surrounding the "Most Magical Place on Earth." It is both ironic and biting. It allows the movie to always feel truthful. Even when things have to come to an end in the most realistic of ways, The Florida Project does one last trick and gives us the ending that its characters deserve, even if it's the one the world doesn't believe they're owed.

The Most Magical Place on Earth, indeed.

5. Columbus

Columbus is a movie about a young man who returns home to take care of his architect father in a coma. Columbus is also about a young woman trapped in this small town full of exquisite architecture taking care of her recovering drug-addict mother but desperate to find purpose. Actually, I’m lying. Columbus is really about two strangers staring at building for two hours and talking about life.

Academic-turned-filmmaker Kogonada has made a movie full of conversations but very little dialogue. Like someone explaining architecture to you, this movie is full of little details you have to stare at and appreciate. It’s full of characters giving beautifully stoic performances, reflecting the pride and stoicism of the buildings around them. Haley Lu Richardson puts in one of my favorite performances of the year, full of delicate notes that should put her on everyone’s map. This movie decidedly isn’t for everyone, but it was totally for me.

6. Lady Bird

I wrote about my feelings on Greta Gerwig’s career here. Suffice to say that Gerwig made perhaps the most delightful, easily loveable movie of the year. Lady Bird is a universal coming-of-age story full of characters that feel whole and honest to themselves. Its cast is so stacked of people you should probably keep your eye on: the child actor prodigies of Saoirse Ronan, Lucas Hedges, and Timothee Chalamet, as well as recent character actor standout Tracy Letts who had a huge year in 2017.

Lady Bird deserves a shot. I can’t imagine anyone hating this movie. Maybe you don’t think it’s perfect or worthy of all the attention, and that’s okay. Just like its protagonist, it’s just trying its best and I just want to give it a hug.

It also has a perfect use of Dave Matthews Band, which is kind of my favorite scene of any movie this year. So yeah, I love it.

7. Baby Driver

It’s admittedly hard to talk about Baby Driver now that the Kevin Spacey news has come to light. Your feelings on this movie and any movie featuring him are entirely justifiable, and I’m sure there will be a lot of artistic reevaluations of movies like this going forward. That said, I can’t deny the feelings I felt leaving this movie. Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) makes such intricately designed movies full of easter eggs and stylistic movement that I left the theater on an adrenaline high. Like a good car chase, Baby Driver is unwieldy, frenetic, and unwavering in its goals. It’s also just a ton of fun.

8. Brigsby Bear

Saturday Night Live’s Kyle Mooney has made a movie that is my kind of twee and meta. Kyle Mooney uses his awkward character persona he popularized on SNL to perfect use here. I hesitate to spoil anything and believe the best way to watch this movie is going in knowing absolutely nothing. Still, to defend my love for this movie I have to say that I thought The Last Jedi would be the only movie to make me re-examine my relationship to nerdom, pop culture, and Luke Skywalker. Brigsby Bear asks a lot of really hard questions about our addictions to these cultural monuments that are almost written into our collective DNA. But it also answers them in a way that is hopeful and never cloying. In a current pop culture landscape that can feel really manufactured, cynical and pandering, Brigsby Bear gave me hope that we have control over our own cultural destiny. And we can make something beautiful and honest from it together.

9. Good Time

You know that feeling when you’re watching a police chase live on TV? You know there’s something enticing to it but also kinda makes you feel icky because you know this is all likely to go really, really bad in a few minutes? Good Time is that feeling distilled into 99 minutes. Robert Pattinson plays a perpetual criminal screw-up trying to save his brother and making mistake after mistake. The most energetic movie of the year, Good Time is not for the faint of heart or easily queasy. Not because of violence or gore but because it is as thrilling as it is anxiety-inducing. I can’t guarantee that anybody will like this movie, but I can guarantee that people directing crime dramas going forward are closely watching what the Safdie brother-directors are doing and viciously taking notes.

10. Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Who would have thought that Star Wars could cause this much division? (I’m not sure if that question is sarcastic or not.) It’s no secret to many that my love for writer-director Rian Johnson goes back quite a while. I’ve said for years that he is maybe my favorite artist in Hollywood and the person I’d most like to meet and have lunch with. When I first heard he was making a Star Wars movie and then his own Star Wars trilogy, I knew someone was listening to my nightly prayers. While I wouldn’t have anticipated this much debate about a Johnson-made Star Wars, I think so much of the discussion is wonderful and necessary to have for this franchise to survive.

Johnson wields theme like a hammer. He is not a subtle filmmaker and is keen to let narrative pace and tightness suffer in order to fill every part of the screen with the themes he’s trying to get across. Every character, choice and arc in The Last Jedi is full of hope, learning through failure, and passing on the truth of the past to the children who can learn from it going forward. It’s the story my parents taught me from a very young age: “Learn from my mistakes. Build a better future for yourself. Always remember where you came from, but build something on your own that you can be proud of.” In the first ever epilogue in a Star Wars movie, The Last Jedi gets this entire ethos across. A lone child, full of a mysterious potential looks up to the skies. He’s heard the stories of his heroes, Luke and Rey, standing up to evil, and he wonders what his place will be in this complicated world.

George Lucas mistakenly made a generation of nerds into textualists—people beholden to strict lore and a rote adherence to the “Hero’s Journey.” Rian Johnson reminded us that stories of myth-making don’t have to be just about hero worship or chosen ones. They’re about thematic truths to inspire and teach every kid that the world is always a mess, but maybe one day you can make a difference just like those heroes who inspired you.

11. Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King

I was hesitant to put what one might consider “stand-up comedy” on here, but I think the rise of the One-Man Show is something to pay attention to. Comedian Mike Birbiglia has been doing these for years now. His show My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend is one of my favorite bits of narrative storytelling from the entire decade. The Daily Show’s Hasan Minhaj has followed suit and made a show that is entirely theatrical. He tells his story of being raised as an Indian-American in a really rough time in American history. He uses his stage and cameras to enhance his story as confessional. He tells a story of his culture and often speaks directly to those from it, right past people like me. This never felt alienating, but enlightening. Learning of who he was and how he was raised.

The line between Stand-Up and Movies has always been kind of blurry, and lots of comedians have toyed with it over the past few years. Hasan Minhaj’s film is the time I felt compelled to admit that these aren’t just jokes. This is true cinematic storytelling, as honest and full as anything else on this list.

12. The Disaster Artist

The Room is considered one of the worst movies ever made, but along with that title it serves as a cult classic. What The Disaster Artist gets right is teaching people why fans of bad movies flock to midnight screenings. They watch these movies not just to mock them but to take a communal joy in their honest awfulness. The Disaster Artist follows the path of two struggling actors who try to make their Hollywood dreams come true to terrible results.

The movie isn’t afraid to deal with director and star Tommy Wiseau’s mysteriousness and unempathetic awfulness. It actually uses this as an example to show the struggle young actors experience as they put up with abuse for a chance at stardom. It shows how when making a film, it often becomes impossible to tell if what you’re making is good or bad. Trapped in our creative bubble, a type of Stockholm Syndrome sets in.

Tommy Wiseau is still a fascinating, if icky person, and his movie is one of the worst passion projects ever made. But The Disaster Artist is probably the best movie about bad movies since Ed Wood, and the one I can point toward to finally explain why watching bad movies can be so joyous.

13. Phantom Thread

Phantom Thread is gorgeous and devilishly weird. This description is actually pretty apt for its protagonist as well, played by the retiring(?) Daniel Day-Lewis. A quick watch of the trailer will prepare you for the story of a dominating, emotionally reclusive artist and his young ingenue muse. But then the movie swerves halfway through and becomes something even more odd—a film about the masochistic aspects of relationships, a chamber piece battle of wits, and a black comedy.

I can’t guarantee anyone will like this movie or come out of it with any other feeling than, “huh?” Esotericism is literally weaved into the plot of the film, so its off-putting tendencies seem almost by design. But watching three great performers verbally and non-verbally fight it out on screen is my kind of way of spending two hours.

Paul Thomas Anderson remains the most gifted auteur of his generation, and this weird, delectable movie shows he has no signs of slowing down.

14. Personal Shopper

I’m a big Kristen Stewart fan and have written about her and this movie before. Personal Shopper continues her work with director Olivier Assayas, and while this is a lesser film than their great Clouds of Sils Maria, it is still affecting and mysterious. A ghost story about the ghosts we leave behind, and another fantastic performance by the underappreciated K-Stew.

15. Wind River

Writer-director Taylor Sheridan continues his trend as the king of “Movies my dad would love.” Sicario, Hell or High Water, and now Wind River are movies full of rural machismo and pride. But they’re also just really solid, if brutal stories. I hope Sheridan continues to make these movies. It’s cool to have good, tender, manly movies to watch with my dad so he doesn’t have to hear me rave about Kristen Stewart again.

16. Wonder Woman

The "DC Cinematic Universe" continues to be a corporate, unfocused mess, but at least we have Wonder Woman to show us that these heroes still have a place. Wonder Woman does a lot of great things. The action is exciting, the leads are fun, the No Man’s Land sequence is one of the best of the year. However, my favorite part of the movie remains how Patty Jenkins made the literal villain of the movie war itself. Jenkins and Gal Gadot used this to craft the best Superman movie in recent years: a god-like outsider horrified by the tragedy mankind inflicts on one another, questioning whether we’re worth fighting for, only to find herself moved by our hope and support of each other and willing to embrace her role as hero.

17. Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan made an impressionist film into a blockbuster. That’s kind of insane.

Nolan has made movies about two things: obsessed, driven men and the effects of time on those men. Here, Nolan decides to forgo the men, literally giving us characters without names, and focus solely on the effects time has on us. Three narratives interwoven purely based on emotion rather than plotting, Nolan finally takes his love of ticking time bomb editing and his obsession with IMAX to make the first movie where you kind of have to say, “Watch this on the biggest screen possible.” I hope Nolan goes back to making small character stories again soon, but Dunkirk serves as a great, distilled thesis statement of the kinds of movies he wants to make.

18. Split

I’m kind of in love with M. Night Shyamalan’s unique filmmaking style. While Shyamalan became kind of a joke following his superb first three films (Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable), I still found his bad movies intriguing. With The Visit and now Split, Shyamalan has reemerged as the entrancing horror director he always was. Now, however, most people have moved passed the jokes and we just get to enjoy his movies as the fun, idiosyncratic, very problematic little movies they are.

Also, Unbreakable is one of my favorite superhero movies ever, and now having Split and James McAvoy playing in that same universe is the best thing.

19. The Big Sick

I’ve been following Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon since discovering their video game podcast, The Indoor Kids, some time around 2012. I even have a small audience cameo in Kumail’s taping of his Stand-Up special, Beta Male. The story of their meeting is one I’ve known for years and watching them put in on screen was really great. The fact that they did it with an amazing cast, and quite possible the best 9-11 joke ever told, made it all the better.

20. Blade Runner 2049

My feelings on the original Blade Runner are fairly complicated. I find its universe irresistible but everything about the movie itself boring. Its philosophical nature admirable but ultimately cold and undramatic.

When I heard director Denis Villeneuve was teaming up with Ryan Gosling, I thought that finally I'd get a Blade Runner that connected with me. Turns out I was only half right. Blade Runner 2049 has so many incredible ideas running through it, and a world as immaculately grimy as the original. Its desire to also deconstruct the monomyth is one I wholly support and handles it in a pretty affecting way. It's just too bad that so much of this movie still serves as a sequel to a movie I don't entire care about.

Call me when they announce Blade Runner 3, though. I'm hopeful third time's the charm for me.

Honorable Mentions (alphabetical)

Call Me By Your Name - A movie built around gilded romanticism. Two young men live in a fantasy novella and fall in love. It would seem impossible not to fall in love in the most idyllic Italian summer vacation imaginable. Michael Stahlberg being the loving father is just icing on the cake.

Gerald’s Game - Mike Flanagan continues to prove himself a talented horror filmmaker in a movie that is so good until it remember it’s a Stephen King adaptation and goes off the deep end in the last 20 minutes.

Girls Trip - A raunchy comedy that understands the key to a story about friends is just letting us hang out with those friends. Also, Tiffany Haddish is a revelation. We haven’t had this level of star-making in one role in quite a while.

I, Tonya - A Scorsese-lite movie done well. While I wasn’t on board with everything this movie did and said, there was also Scorsese-style audience indictment that I wasn’t expecting. An interesting take on an interesting story.

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 - I liked this one more than the first. A great, personal villain and a genuinely emotional finale.

Lego Batman - Maybe the best superhero movie this year and a perfect deconstruction of the best and worst parts of Batman.

Logan - Kudos to James Mangold for elevating the genre and Hugh Jackman for going out on top. I didn’t adore this movie as much as others did, but I did love every second Patrick Stewart was on screen. Out of everyone in the death of this X-Men universe, I’ll miss Stewart and Ian McKellen the most.

Spider-Man: Homecoming - Maybe the Spider-Man movie full of the most quintessential Spider-Man moments. A great villain by Michael Keaton as well. As a Spider-Man diehard, I’m happy to get solid Spider-Man movies again. Spider-Man.

The Post - I’m a Spielberg fanboy. Even his average movies have moments that really work for me. I knew what I was getting going in and got it. Also, what a cast.

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