Short Reviews Of Every Movie I Saw In 2017
NOTE: There’s going to be some spoilers for movies that came out in 2017 in this piece so I am 100% not interested in hearing any bellyaching in the comments if you read through at your own discretion and get spoiled. That’s on you, capisce?
Moana: I was intensely hungover the day I saw this movie for children, but I still managed to avoid admitting that “You’re Welcome” was my favorite song long enough for everyone I was seeing it with to do five absolutely killer minutes of pure slam dunks about how grating and awful they thought that song was, so I still came out ahead. I also liked that Jemaine Clement voiced a giant hermit crab.
50 Shades Darker: One of my friends had to repeatedly ask me to be quiet during our viewing of this film because I couldn’t stop shrieking with laughter during all the sex scenes, and during most of the regular scenes as well.
Logan: Logan sets out to answer the question, “what if our superhero escapist fantasy was just as grim and miserable as our current late stage capitalist hell reality,” and it succeeds at that admirably. Extra points for making it so all the time travel hullabaloo Logan has to do in Days of Future Past was totally meaningless in retrospect and just led to a gentler, sadder, more personal apocalypse for its main heroes. Neat!
Kong: Skull Island: I saw the director’s cut of Apocalypse Now in college and I know my first thought was “this movie would suck way less if there was a giant ape in the mix,” and I was right! John Goodman cements his position as the greatest character actor of our time by chainsawing through about 20 minutes’ worth of exposition about giant monsters and government cover ups in the space of five and Tom Hiddleston and Brie Larson are so unbelievably stupid hot in this movie you almost don’t notice they have zero chemistry. John C. Reilly is the obvious standout as an affable WWII flying ace who, assuming he was 19 in 1945 when he was shot down over Skull Island, would need to live to be at least 90 to see the Cubs win the World Series in 2016.
Beauty and the Beast: There were a bunch of children at the evening viewing of this movie my friends and I went to, so I couldn’t even get wine rowdy and rip on it Rifftrax-style like we had planned to—already off to a bad start. I don’t know why we keep casting Josh Gad in things because he totally sucks and is at best a pauper’s Jack Black; his interpretation of Le Fou is also deeply embarrassing considering Luke Evans spun pure magic as Gaston. “Be Our Guest” was physically nauseating to watch because they didn’t linger on a shot for more than half a second but I would do anything for Ewan McGregor and his horrible very bad French accent.
The Fate of the Furious: Even though Jason Statham has the best scene in the movie outside of Dwayne Johnson breaking the concrete bench in his jail cell in order to do bicep curls with it, I still don’t think Dom, Letty, Roman and Tej should have accepted Statham at all after he killed Han Seoul-Oh in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. This was the first F&F film that I enjoyed less than the one that preceded it, but it was also the first one I got to share with my friends in the theaters, which is a real “blossom/thorn” situation for me. That said—#justiceforhan.
Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2: We take Chris Pratt’s status as a boring hunk for granted now, so it stands to reason that we’d take a sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy for granted too. Sly Stallone seemed a little confused as to why he was there. Ego the Living Planet being a deadbeat dad who loved the song “Brandy” by Looking Glass was a nice touch but it was weird that at the 11th hour he just drops that he gave Peter Quill’s mom brain cancer, which seemed pretty gruesome and out of step with the rest of the film.
Alien: Covenant: I think I spent 90% of this movie screaming for David (Michael Fassbender) and Walter (Michael Fassbender doing a voice) to kiss. I don’t remember if they did or not though. I closed my eyes during all the scary parts like when a colonist gets her head and most of her neck chewed all the way off by a weird spore alien in front of a gross H.R. Giger fountain, because I’m a huge baby now. I liked Katherine Waterson’s cute mom haircut, the fact that James Franco gets immolated in his stasis pod within the first minute of the film and that Billy Crudup dies in excruciating pain after being tricked by one of the Fassbender androids. That’s what you get for treating Mary-Louise Parker badly you piece of trash!
Wonder Woman: My desire to see Wonder Woman act as a role model that young people (particularly young women and female-identifying people) can look up to is somewhat undercut by the fact that this movie is also largely relentlessly grim and dour, particularly in its last 30 minutes where Chris Pine is forced to contemplate his own mortality in a slow-mo “ears ringing” shell shocked sequence before vaporizing himself in a fiery inferno over a plot point that seemed pretty arbitrary when you got right down to it. Also probably not great to make a movie about WWI where the moral is “military interventionism always works” considering there was…a second world war not 20 years later.
Baby Driver: I think I liked this movie more than the bulk of people I know who enjoy having loud opinions about movies, and that’s okay. I liked it so much in fact I saw it twice in theaters, which is probably good considering the Kevin Spacey-shaped shadow that looms over it now means I’ll probably never watch it again. Sorry Ansel!
Spider-Man: Homecoming: Hannibal Buress was probably my favorite part of this movie and he’s only in it for two scenes. It seems like Robert Downey Jr. has to re-learn the true meaning of Christmas in every Iron Man film only to turn back into a colossal prick in every other Marvel property because he obviously hates being in them a whole lot. I didn’t really like him in this. It’s cool that Marvel decided the villain of this movie was just going to be the middle class, though.
Brigsby Bear: Come for a decent movie that can’t decide if it wants to be about ways we process trauma or about the inherent positivity of making something with your friends, and seriously contemplate leaving midway through for a scene in which Kyle Mooney, who manages to look a cool 43 in ill-fitting polos in spite of only being 33 in real life, gets a hand job from a high schooler. Mooney needs to stop jerking us around and give us the Chris Fitzpatrick movie we as a nation deserve.
Logan Lucky: This is the second Logan-centric film I saw this year, and the second film I saw this year that featured Katherine Waterson’s mom haircut, which was huge for me as you can probably guess. Sometimes you just want to see the story of two brothers who exploit the free-spinning wheels of capitalism by stealing a bunch of money from a race track so that Channing Tatum can stay close to his daughter in the wake of being let go (by Jim O’Heir of all people) from his construction job. The only sour note in the cast is Seth MacFarlane, but he gets punched in the face after Adam Driver blows up his car with a molotov cocktail so Soderbergh obviously knew what he was doing.
The Castle of Cagliostro: I have a deep affection for this movie, so I will never forgive Fathom Events for letting now-publicly outed sex cretin John Lasseter talk for twenty minutes before it started about how he used it to court his wife back in the 80s and how great of friends he is with Hayao Miyazaki. To add onto that, I found to my immense displeasure that the dub they played was the 1992 Streamline Pictures one where Lupin III is inexplicably referred to only as “The Wolf” instead of the superior 2000 Animaze/Manga Entertainment dub where Metal Gear Solid’s David Hayter voices him instead. That was some bullshit.
Blade Runner 2049: I thought Ryan Gosling’s relationship with his hologram girlfriend was nice and cute. Robin Wright didn’t have enough to do besides get all horned up over Gosling, who wasn’t even allowed to emote for the first half of the film anyway. Harrison Ford didn’t need to be in this movie at all (neither did Jared Leto, Sylvia Hoeks did all the heavy lifting villain-wise), and while the world of Blade Runner is cool, this stuck with me less than I hoped it would and I personally would have been better served rewatching some old Cowboy Bebop filler episodes instead, like “Toys in the Attic” or “Cowboy Funk,” which at least manage to have a sense of humor about their cyberpunk dystopia.
Thor: Ragnarok: My dad liked this movie so much he saw it three times, once with each member of my immediate family, which is an extremely powerful endorsement. I only saw it once, but it was refreshing to see a Marvel movie that wasn’t afraid to use colors other than gunmetal and dark red. Valkyrie kicked ass, Korg the rock man was perfect and I’m always delighted to see Rachel House get work because she deserves it. Taika Waititi has probably gotten the closest to grasping what makes comics fun in the first place, which is going to make sitting through Infinity War’s turgid bullshit this spring even more unbearable.
Lady Bird: I could have watched a whole movie about that cool nun who isn’t mad that Lady Bird writes “Just Married To God” on her minivan. I got a lot of sympathy anxiety watching Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf interact and thought Kyle could not have been more perfect if a mad scientist had constructed some kind of ur-fuckboy out of every weird guy I went to college with who did a capella. Tracy Letts was such a good dad in this film you’d almost forget he pisses and moans in real life nonstop because Chicago won’t give him a regional theater award. This movie also made me regret not being a bigger moron in high school because I was too much of a volcel idiot who spent every weekend in his friend’s basement playing Dungeons & Dragons to realize that getting in trouble is a made-up idea, which I think frankly messed me up a lot going into college and will continue to cause repercussions throughout my life.
The Disaster Artist: The real “disaster artist” is whoever the hell in makeup did Dave Franco’s abominable pube beard, because that thing looked horrible!!! A film that is much kinder to its subject matter and principal players than it has any right to be, but not enough to where you forget that James Franco starred in a movie called Palo Alto (based on a short story collection he wrote) back in 2013 where he plays a high school soccer coach who has sex with a high schooler played by Emma Roberts. Neat and normal and definitely above board! No wish fulfillment happening there!
Coco: It’s actually not impressive at all that I cried during the final performance of “Remember Me” in this movie, because all sorts of stuff makes me cry now—past memories, professional disappointments, Paul Baribeau and Ginger Alford singing Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”—so don’t go thinking you’re hot shit just because you wrung some tears out of me, Lee Unkrich. Pretty badass that skeletons can die a second, true death in the world of the film though.
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi: My feelings on the Porgs are already a matter of public record.
Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle: It must be intolerable to have standards abut what kinds of movies you’re willing to see because then you’re going to miss out on this year’s only film where an aspiring social media influencer becomes trapped in Jack Black’s body after playing a cursed video game. You can’t survive on steak alone, you’ve got to have some junk food too my friends.
The Shape of Water: Sally Hawkins could not have been any clearer about her intentions towards the Amphibious Man the moment she saw him without turning to the camera, Wayne’s World-style, and saying, “oh yes—he will be mine.” Michael Shannon’s portrayal of Strickland was despicable and foul and I simply could not get enough of him. Probably my favorite movie I saw in 2017.