Top 10: 2017

7 min readFeb 16, 2018

My first reaction after being reminded it was time to start drafting a ballot for this year’s Muriels was “Oh, are we still doing it this year?” Not that I don’t always look forwards to my fellow voters’ contributions; celebrating Hollywood just seems a little hollow this year. At one point, I thought of making my top ten list just the red carpet clip of a silently furious Uma Thurman and nine blank spaces, but I couldn’t bring myself to make Paul Clark, the Muriels’ co-founder, gently explain to me why the clip isn’t eligible.

Though I ultimately had no problem putting together a ballot — there were plently of great and very good movies this year — I don’t have the energy for the kind of retrospective introduction these pieces usually demand, at least not if I’m honestly going to take account of the year in film. Making my own movies (and working on others in minor ways) has made it more difficult to separate the films from their production; this year, that means it’s best to celebrate the bravery of people who’ve risked their careers to call out predators, reiterate (as many others have said) that this cultural moment is painful but necessary, and leave the back patting about what the movies contribute to society to less complicated years.

A quick story about my favorite moviegoing experience this year. My son asked to see Wonder on its opening night; I was surprised, because he’s more interested in YouTube celebrities these days, and his tastes usually run more towards the same superhero and family fare as most kids his age. If anything, I would’ve expected him to ask to see Justice League, which opened the same day. But no, Tom told me the DC product rollout which had been engineered to appeal to his demographic could wait for cable; he’d seen ads for Wonder and was interested in the premise. Encouraged by Tom’s rare interest in a human-scale story without explosions or talking animals, my wife and I took him and his sister to the local cinema pub. We were excited to find a packed theater of families; by the looks of it, this modest family movie about empathy had the kind of word of mouth among preteens that Justice League’s massive P&A spend couldn’t buy.

The movie itself was pretty good, and subtler than expected. Director Steven Chbosky — who’d previously adapted and directed his own book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a touchstone of my own adolescence — opted for an understated approach to a story that could’ve easily been maudlin and melodramatic. The whole cast was good, with Julia Roberts giving a more layered performance as the main character’s mom than such roles usually demand. Plus, any time a movie lets Mandy Patinkin be a hambone with a big heart (and a bigger beard), I’m happy.

But what made a Friday night at the movies in a modest theater that smelled like beer and wing sauce more special than a pristine 35mm print of Phantom Thread, or even an October double feature of Alien and The Thing, was the audience. I’ve been to a lot of family movies in recent years, and I can’t remember another where the kids were as quietly absorbed in the story. The whole thing was quietly remarkable; witnessing the launch of a word-of-mouth hit powered entirely by kids who were responding to a simple story about walking in other people’s shoes. It was feeding their souls in the same way that a movie like Lady Bird or Call Me By Your Name can for older audiences. Roger Ebert wrote that movies are “a machine that generates empathy”; looking around, it’s clear that’s what these kids (and their parents, too) needed, and it made me feel hope for the next generation and the storytellers it’ll produce. When the studio system largely collapsed in the 1960s, the industry was saved by turning it over to the movie brats for a beautiful moment; as we wrestle with the crimes of the patriarchy and try to move towards a cinema that is more representative of the world we live in, it couldn’t hurt to let the kids lead the way.

Top 10 Films

Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
The Florida Project
Logan
Get Out
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Dunkirk
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
The Big Sick
Blade Runner 2049

Honorable Mention: Twin Peaks

I’m not interested in the debate over whether the new Twin Peaks is TV or film, and it’s grating how much of the discussion of this show among critics has revolved around this question. It’s enough to say that, near the end of its run, I found myself debating whether I preferred it or Blue Velvet, which, either way, means I like it more than most of the movies I’ve seen. Of course it would be David Lynch who would speak to the current moment more than any other filmmaker.