Perhaps you are wondering — or maybe not — what it’s like to watch and write about these 30 movies.
I found it to be a mix of solid triumphs, incomplete potentials, and withering disappointments. Maybe I'm describing the films; maybe I'm describing my reviews; maybe I'm describing my cinema soul.
The first review appeared January 19, 2017 — Split, a psychological thriller with James McAvoy playing split personalities. And the last review, a bit over twelve months later, live today (but written in 2017) — I, Tonya, a docudrama with Margo Hammond as Olympic skater Tonya Harding.
And in between came the rest. By genre: two comedies, five thrillers, seven biopics, five historical fiction, one documentary, eight dramas, one western, one live-action-formerly-animation. I don't usually do science fiction, horror or fantasy.
All films were new releases in 2017, mostly seen on the big screen, though there were a couple of at-home streaming screeners.
All were feature films with the exception of one documentary — Rat Film, an exploration of rat-ridden and race-haunted Baltimore.
All were English language films with two subtitled exceptions: Frantz — a film in German and French and The Student — a dark beast in Russian. Another foreign language film was Menashe — this time in Yiddish, English and Spanish, but you were on your own, no subtitles.
All films were in color except for the aforementioned Frantz — a dazzling and poignant black-and-white evocation of idyllic lives cut short by war.
There were a couple of sequels: The Trip to Spain (preceded by The Trip and The Trip to England) and Kingsman: The Golden Circle (preceded by Kingsman: The Secret Service). And of course, Disney's Beauty and the Beast was originally animation, now live action.
Some had screenplays based on books. If so, I tried to read the book before viewing the film and did read Lost City of Z, The Zookeeper’s Wife, Victoria & Abdul, and also the novel The Dinner by Dutch author Herman Koch. Certainly it made for richer viewing having the book under my belt before seeing the movie, but surprisingly for me, all four of these films surpassed the original book in terms of the aesthetic experience.
Other films had original screenplays that were ostensibly based on true events: Megan Leavey, A Quiet Passion, Marshall, A United Kingdom, The Post, Stronger, The Promise, The Ottoman Lieutenant, The Post, and I, Tonya. The operative word is ostensible for “historical fiction” can veer more fictional than historical.
In a last look at 2017, I ranked the films as my Top 10, Middle 10, Bottom 10. Yes, I agree, this is a ham-fisted bludgeoning of 30 different films.
Film reviewing, after all, can be a rather subjective pursuit as you sit alone in the dark viewing the film, and later alone at the computer writing your response. You juggle quantifiable aspects (lights, camera, action) to determine worth along with a qualitative personal barometer (feeling, impact, look) to declare value.
Below is a concise plot blurb in the parentheses and a brief trenchant observation lifted from each of the original 30 film reviews (all still online, by the way, if you want to read the entire piece). I still stand by the reviews.
One way or the other, this year of viewing the movies and writing the reviews had its effect on the soul. Let's start at the bottom and work our way up.
My Bottom 10: SOUL SUCKING — dispiriting disappointments that made me regret the hours I spent in the dark.
•Beauty and the Beast (bloated live action of original charming animation) — Nobody does sensory overload better than Disney. Beauty and the Beast is loud and nonstop with no time for nuance or reflection till we move on to the next big scene. Audiences cheer and applaud at the end of the movie. Young and old alike connect and chatter about their favorite scenes. Some leave the theater smiling, happy, humming the score. I left exhausted with a diabetic reaction to the excess.
•Brimstone (Western with heavy dose of God, Guilt and the Lutheran Apocalypse)––What method of torture and death do you prefer? Throat slitting? Rape? Sodomy? Hanging? Tongue cut out? Bullet to the head? Bullet to the heart? Eaten by pigs? Knifed? Horse whipped? Iron mask over face? Aborted farm animals? Burned alive? Defenestration? Self-flagellation? Stillbirth by skull crushing forceps? Choked with your own intestines? All of these are here. Spoiler alert: There is no cannibalism in this movie.
•Kingsman: The Golden Circle (star-studded sequel about secret spy organization) — It’s replete with an all-star cast, but frankly, it's an all-star waste; with few exceptions, most are just video game pieces to move around at a hyper-frenetic pace. There's plenty of techno-wizardry, with tiresome gadgets, meaningless contrivances with lots of CGI-saturated weaponry and assaults. Let's add a studio simulation of a Cambodian rainforest, silly and nonsensical talk about Doomsday Protocol, and hoary spy tropes from James Bond 007, Get Smart, Man From Uncle, Spy vs Spy, Mission Impossible, ad nauseam.
•My Cousin Rachel (period thriller about sex, power and mystery with bodices ripe for ripping) — This familiar story has darkened a bit with 21st-century sensibilities added to the 19th-century setting. It really does become a psychological thriller about romantic love, infatuation and powerful women who take unapologetic pleasure in their own sexuality. Jane Austen and Daphne du Maurier, meet Dr. Freud, Dr. Ruth, Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz.
•Split (thriller of man with split personalties) — The best thing about this film is the showcase it provides James McAvoy as he manages to convey if not all 23 of the personalities, then certainly a good number of them. Surely this single role will let casting directors see the range he’s capable of delivering, whether a lispy, whispery child, a fey costume designer, a stern mother figure in severe pencil skirt and black stilettos, even a roid-raged, bone-popping, blood-sucking beast.
•The Comedian (DeNiro as aging and soured stand-up comedian) — Apparently everybody wants to work with DeNiro, so geezer sex and geezer bowels have never been funnier. Did this production company get any Florida tax benefits for filming in the state? If so, taxpayers should demand their money back. I watched much of this film through my fingers in front of my eyes, alternately grimacing, flinching and wincing, hating myself for laughing when I did. Humiliation and self-hatred sure are poor reasons to see a comedy.
•The Dinner (dark psychological thriller and family showdown in an upscale restaurant) — Their unhappiness is for sure a product of dysfunctional dynamics — parents who are at once over-protective and hands-off, brothers vying for bigger dick prominence, raw political ambition, and vicious criminal activity — as reported through the eyes of an increasingly unreliable, mentally unstable narrator.
•The Hero (aging film cowboy searches for redemption via pot and pills) — What purports to be an existential film about the cowboy’s search for purpose and identity instead drifts and dwindles into a rather tepid exploration of a once-hunk who has become an always-drunk. His much younger girlfriend is a 30-something who talks like this: “It went viral, dude! TMZ. Jezebel. Trending on Twitter. Oh My God!” A woman who is a stand-up comic. A woman who says she likes old men, though she jokes that their testicles hang like golf balls in tube socks. Hilarity ensues.
•The Lovers (squirmy, awkward look at marital fatigue) — Read this next sentence closely and carefully: This film makes us wonder whether a paying audience exists for a romantic comedy about a long-married couple knowingly cheating on one another, each with a partner of his and her own — requiring four cellphones in nonstop use — who decide to rekindle their fading marital passion, thus necessitating a double betrayal in a turn-about-is-fair-play ploy by now having to cheat on the extra-curricular lovers. It’s all a rather cheerless, dreary romantic entanglement that requires the balancing act of navigating marital (dis)bliss while armed with a Venn diagram, nautical depth chart, and telephone tree. No wonder everyone is perpetually exasperated and exhausted.
•The Promise (messy love triangle helps us overlook Armenian Genocide) — But it's hard to develop any empathy or sympathy for the proceedings when the glossy images and surround sound effect create a barrier to true emotion. I will admit to more than once thinking this historical melodrama has morphed into a new genre of Genocide Porn.
My Middle 10: SOUL SEARING — gratifying and indelible, but could have been/should have been more.
•A United Kingdom (true story of biracial romance between white British office clerk who marries the black African man who will be King of Botswana) — Africa is the home of the original Homo sapiens and ancient cultures as accomplished as Europe and Asia. And it’s a world of fantastic landscapes, an imperial playground, a colonial house of horrors, filled with rampant corruption and greed, and noted for the barbarism of the slave trade and apartheid. So many stories, so little time.
•Beatriz at Dinner (Hispanic and holistic masseuse is invited to stay for dinner) — It’s simply delicious watching this ensemble do their work around the dinner table, not so heavy on talk— though there’s plenty of that — but we have to marvel at the nuances of body language and facial expressions as they all respond to Beatriz: sidelong glances, the eye rolls, the smirks, the bitten tongues, the disbelief and distaste conveyed in pinched mouths and furrowed brows, silent intakes of breath and puckered moues of annoyance and dismissal.
•Last Flag Flying (Three Vietnam veterans reunite decades later to travel to Arlington) — As this film unfolds, we have the time and the permission for slow revelations, for expansion and compression like a lung or like a heart, so the film breathes and beats like a living being — in and out, up and down, deep and broad, close-up and wide, raucous and silent. It both telescopes with extravagant sweep and microscopes with intense detail, all through talk with the power of a human voice to conjure memory and a human face to convey experience.
•Megan Leavey (true story of Marine K9 trainer and Iraqi War veteran who bonds with her dog) — This is not necessarily a pro or con military film. Again, the reason for this movie is to celebrate — without bombast, without God-Bless-the-USA first-ism, without battlefield gore and foxhole glory — the love between soldier and K9, the bond that transcends the animal and redeems the human.
•Marshall (biopic of Thurgood Marshall, first African-American to sit on Supreme Court) — Considering the incendiary circumstances of the charges and the contemporary reverberations — both racial and sexual — for our own politically-fraught and identity-fragile times, this film is surprisingly conventional. It's likable enough, but a ho-hummable and unconvincing look at one of the most accomplished jurists to ever sit on the Supreme Court. The ingredients are there but they never gel into a coherent, aesthetic whole that connects or transcends these granular pieces. Thurgood Marshall is the forgotten one here. He deserves better than he got in this film.
•Rat Film (documentary on rats and racism in Baltimore) — In another remarkable piece of filmic whiz-bang from the documentary filmmaker’s arsenal, he provides a virtual reality simulation of what the city must look like from a rat’s perspective — the city as maze — reminding us, of course, of all those lab experiments with mice and rats trying to find their way to the cheese. It’s a brief step from rats-in-a-maze to overpopulated rats-in-a-maze to overpopulated humans-in-a-maze.
•The Ottoman Lieutenant (WW1 as Harlequin romance with empty calorie eye candy) — It’s a lush, evocative, music-swelling, aerially-photographed movie. So you let the 100 minutes of film sweep across your eyeballs, asking no questions, seeking no answers, just enjoying the trip. It’s not unlike a visit to EPCOT where it’s so much easier, safer, cleaner to tour the theme park than encounter the actual country and all those unwashed people.
•The Trip to Spain (deadpan bromance comedy with Spanish food and travel) — I suppose it’s worse if a comedy is not funny at all, but when a comedy is nonstop gags, jokes, celebrity impressions, cruel imitations and earworm singalongs, with just an occasional nod to real-world banality and tourist-postcard views, then your fingers itch for a remote control so you can slow it down and absorb everything. My fingers itched a lot.
•The Wall (based on true event of conflict between American soldier and Iraqi sniper separated by a wall) —Imagine a vast, undifferentiated desert landscape where sand and sky blur, where camouflaged soldiers look no different than scrub brush and boulders. The only relief from this implacable claustrophobic sameness is a crumbling stone wall than can mean the difference between life and death. Indeed, this faceless — but never voiceless — Iraqi sniper soon gets under the viewer’s skin too. Each slick question, each existential suggestion, each insightful connection is straight from the playlist of psychological warfare, and if the soldier is in a weakened, vulnerable state already, the brainwash is as deadly as the bullets.
•Victoria & Abdul (true story of Queen Victoria and her obsession for her Indian servant) — There are more than a few entanglements as these star-crossed companions have their friendship thwarted by less-convivial forces bearing down upon them. After all, she’s old and he’s young, she’s white and he’s brown, she’s Christian and he’s Muslim, she’s widowed and he’s married, she’s English and he’s Indian, she’s the Queen of England and he’s a common uneducated clerk. To put it bluntly, she’s his superior and he’s her inferior.
My Top 10: SOUL SOARING — coherent aesthetic approach to cinematic narrative and form, elevating film to art
•A Quiet Passion (biopic 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson) — A word or two about the visual and aural style of this film. Remember we are in the 19th century. There is no electric light. There is no recorded sound. On the surface, it’s unrelentingly grim and severe and rigidly symmetrical. But then comes Dickinson’s poetry that supplies astringency and ambiguity, precision and paradox to enliven these restrained, inhibited times.
•Beach Rats (Coney Island teen tormented by his closeted desires) — Instead of plot what we have here is a lyrically photographed, poetically realized, moody and atmospheric film that explores Frankie’s internal battles — and they are ferocious and unrelenting — with his same-sex attractions. The cinematographer is a master of light and mood, filming in gritty, grainy 16mm that shows the stunning beauty of water, night, neon, darkness, shadow, hair, sunlight, smoke, skin, sweat, eroticizing even the very air the boys breathe.
•Frantz (French soldier with guilty secret in WW1) — What follows is a surprising exploration of these characters as they wrestle with their swirling, conflicting feelings. This lost generation must contend with its own rage, guilt, impotence, disaffection, and nihilism in the face of the war’s carnage. Yet they must find a reason to be happy again, a reason to resume any semblance of sexual, romantic, familial normalcy.
•I, Tonya (biopic of Olympic skater Tonya Harding, all from Tony’s viewpoint) — It’s a daft and dark comedy of our American celebrity-drenched-and-stenched culture. It’s a Tonya-centric, irony-free, wildly contradictory mockumentary based on true events. It’s a cluster-fuck of unreliable narrators from here to Lillehammer.
•Lost City of Z (true story of Victorian archeologist discovering a lost city in the Amazon) — At one point Fawcett's wife Nina quotes Rudyard Kipling's The Explorer to her husband (wouldn't more troubled marriages be salvaged if spouses read poetry to one another?): "Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges — Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!" For Fawcett, this something is the Amazon with its vast unexplored and unmapped jungle, its magnitude and profundity, its silence and its overwhelming screech, its nature red in tooth and claw. This Edenic green Hell is a character of its own here.
•Menashe (Hasidic man conflicted by faith and fatherhood) — What could be off-putting about the sect's esoteric insularity is, in fact, a remarkable testament to the life-affirming bond between father and son. In the midst of a closed, absolutist culture threatened by any hint of unorthodoxy, the man and boy try to find their own way. It is bittersweet, funny, engaging, and occasionally infuriating. As is life, no matter your tribe.
•Stronger (true story of Jeff Bauman, Boston Marathon bombing victim) — It is a film about resilience and resolve, about survival and the need for hope, all delivered in raw and gritty gallows humor. Bauman recovers with the help of his smart-assed, f-bombing, loud, raucous, volatile, Stella-Artois-drinking, cigarette-smoking, Boston-accented, clannish family — warts and all. There are a lot of warts. And for sure there is a hell of a lot of resilience and resolve.
•The Post (The Washington Post defends the First Amendment by publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971) —Daniel Ellsberg makes the Pentagon Papers clandestinely, and illegally, available to the press. The government shit hits the First Amendment fan.This crisis of constitutional proportion came just weeks before Watergate and the subsequent cover-up of that. More shit, more fan. Publish then perish was the all-too-real fear, but The New York Times and The Washington Post persevered. And thus a movement and a movie were born.
•The Student (Russian high schooler addicted to religion) — His next role should be Hamlet, a character equally torn between his worlds of enlightened reason and medieval superstition. The actor has the perfect face, body, and demeanor to portray Hamlet’s brooding countenance and gloomy interior, and here he adds full frontal glory to the religious fanaticism.
•The Zookeeper’s Wife (true story of Warsaw couple hiding Jews during the Holocaust) — A screenwriter or director who sets out to make a mere two hour feature film about Nazis, ethnic and religious cleansing, German responsibility, and the world’s culpability must by necessity narrow the scope. Tight, tighter, tightest until the focus achieves a limited, precise, minimalist, small story inside the big picture.
Up next? 2018, with the state of my cinema soul to be continued….
This article appears in Dec 28, 2017 – Jan 4, 2018.