Jamie's Non-Competitive List Of Really Good Movies (2017)!

by Jamie Marshall  

I don't think there's any argument at this point that 2017 is going to go down in history as one of the most important years in film. In a year that seemed dead-set to kick us in the teeth at every possible juncture, where the box office tanked and Hollywood lost its last remaining shred of glamour, we watched more interesting, uplifting, confusing, questionable, unforgettable movies than have hit us in a good long while. Even the bombs seemed to have a certain game-changing magic to them, with Ghost In The Shell finally turning the issue of Hollywood white-washing from thinkpiece fodder to a national conversation, The Mummy burning itself alive as a warning of everything that could possibly go wrong with a modern blockbuster, and Justice League proving just how much money a studio is willing to throw away to prove a point. So here I am, about two months late on the draw, with my top however-many-I-ended-up-putting-on-here movies, assembled in no particular order because movie fans have gotten a bit crazy about their favorite film beating up all the other films, and this shit is supposed to be fun. (Disclaimer: There are plenty of smaller-release movies missing from this list that would probably be on here if I had been able to see them, notably The Disaster Artist and Lady Bird, and plenty more I don't even know about yet and will discover in the years to come.)

Between Anger And Rage: On THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

"We're all dying", says Frances McDormand as grieving mother Mildred Hayes, at the start of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.  She's told by nearly everyone she knows that besmirching the good name of a man with terminal cancer is shameful and petty.  After putting her teenage daughter in the ground, burned to death and sexually assaulted, in that order, she has little regard for the sob stories of authority figures.  Her town's dying police chief, the priest who begs her to find forgiveness in her heart, even the local news team, they're all complicit in the same system . The system that failed to find her daughter's killers.  That created men who could commit such heinous acts on a fellow human being.  That led to her daughter walking alone on that particular road, on that particular night, under just the right circumstances where one could get away with murder.  To hell with any God who would set up so perfect a tragedy.

BOP REVIEWS: Star Wars - The Last Jedi

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS was a film that ultimately re-ignited my long dormant love of a galaxy far, far away, and it didn't really disappoint whenever I walked out of the theater two years ago. Despite the plot feeling very familiar, I'd always been keen on the idea of the Star Wars saga as the ultimate nostalgia trip - keep in mind, I was never a big fan of anything related to the Expanded Universe, got no real enjoyment from the prequels to the point that I consider them outside of the canon of the original trilogy, and basically considered the original films where my interest lived and died. The most I could say that I got into the series beyond those original three - A NEW HOPE, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, and RETURN OF THE JEDI - was that I had played a couple of the games, and not even the ones everyone else holds dearly. I stuck to admittedly poor side games like Bounty Hunter and The Force Unleashed, because honestly, Star Wars was more of a thing I had liked as a kid, when Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker had been engaged in a battle of familial wits and The Force was something still elemental and vaguely magical in nature. That ended, so I moved on.

BOP Revisits: Halloween (1978)

Or, "The Shape Of Horror: What John Carpenter's Halloween Still Has To Teach The Genre"

I thought we outgrew superstition. True, stating that is mostly a riff on a line spoken by Jamie Lee Curtis in one of the most iconic horror films of all time, John Carpenter's 1978 "Halloween", but there's a quality about the film that actively works towards keeping the idea of what superstition can be fully and vibrantly alive - and it's fascinating that, all these years later, there's still a natural element to be found in what basically amounts to a story about an asylum escapee randomly targeting a bunch of teenagers against the backdrop of a holiday. On paper, it sounds relatively dull and overly simplistic. Definitely not what you'd consider "horrific" or even intrinsically scary. And when you learn more about the movie, you find all of these elements that really shouldn't work. It was made for just over 300 thousand dollars by a studio that didn't really believe in it. It was written by a couple of twenty-somethings who only had one film to their credentials. It was made in the late 1970's, well beyond the point of becoming outdated and losing it's impact. The point is that when you think about it on a basic conceptual level, nothing about Halloween should be considered worthy of the praise that's still heaped upon it very nearly 40 years since it's release.

And yet, Halloween stands above a myriad of successors, imitators, ripoffs, and pretenders to the throne it never intended to build for itself. Much like Steven Spielberg's Jaws or James Cameron's The Terminator, Carpenter's Halloween is among a select few of horror movies - or hell, movies in general - that transcend their own limitations built on by time and the advancements of how to make movies, how artistic interpretations and tastes change, and ultimately what makes a horror film scary according to modern sensibilities. Halloween is a slow burn build to a night of realistic horror that can't be achieved with ghosts or demons, yet it's got a subtle infusion of the supernatural that keeps it from playing like a docudrama. It features believable protagonists that aren't stereotypes, aren't played to be unlikeable and worth killing off, and really develop naturally over the course of the film. In most cases, the characters don't even feel like characters. You feel like you're watching people go about their day only to have this nightmare scenario unfold and entrap them before they can even be made aware of it. You don't get the "sting" that's been played out a hundred times of every character reacting to a scare, you just get it once, maybe twice in total.

But... why is that so effective?

BOP Reviews: Godzilla (2014)

When the new Godzilla roars, he freaking roars.

Ever since the debut of the film's astonishingly well-crafted teaser trailer late last year, I had an unexpected surge of excitement running through me - all in anticipation of a movie that, by all accounts, I should have had no interest in. Despite being intrigued by the trailers, I was never one of the many that ran out to see 2013's Pacific Rim, another recent kaiju action movie slugfest that had similarly accredited talent behind it. Not for any particular reason, but merely due to a lack of familiarity or direct association with the genre to appeal to me on a profound level. I hadn't even seen Jurassic Park since I was a toddler. My experience with movies about giant monsters hitting other giant monsters, terrorizing innocent civilians and wrecking everything in their path began and ended with a certain movie in 1998 that I'm not going to talk about, even though you totally know which one it is - it shares this movie's title and little else. But unlike that hilarious blot on cinema history, the trailers for this new Godzilla awakened an inner kaiju fan that I never even knew I had. Something indescribable had taken hold, whether it was the bleak and dead serious scope of the thing, the gorgeous effects and what I liked to call "apocalypse cloud syndrome", or the first glimpse of the big lizard himself and the fact that he now towered over entire modern skyscrapers instead of quaint outskirt villages. Or maybe it was just Bryan Cranston. Yeah, probably Cranston.

"You're goddamn right."

Either way, 'Zilla fever had hit me along with most of the cinema-viewing public, and I couldn't wait to see this movie on opening day. In my excitement, I even went back and, through the magic of Netflix, watched a couple of the movies I'd missed out on to get a feel for what I was in for: specifically, the original American-dubbed version of 1954's Gojira (or "Godzilla, King of the Monsters!"), and one of the subsequent sequels, Godzilla Vs. The Thing (or "Weird-Ass Movie About Tiny Women Singing To Giant Moth Creature"). With those two whetting my appetite for some monster-fueled chaos courtesy of modern special effects, I sat back and waited for my chance to feast eyes on 2014's version of the King of the Monsters. Finally, the day came. But did it live up to the hype? Many critics are torn on that, and I went in fully aware of the consensus. Despite this, I remained determined to see if they were right while not allowing it to cloud my judgement.

BOP Recommends... VERSUS

Across the Earth there lay 666 portals, all of which connect this world to the next. In Japan exists the 444th portal; a place called The Forest of Resurrection. This is the exact spot where a group of Yakuza are picking up two escaped prisoners. When one of the prisoners -- a mysterious man known only as Prisoner KSC2-303 -- offs a Yakuza thug after discovering they've kidnapped a girl -- things start getting complicated in the Forest of Resurrection...

BOP Reviews: Evil Dead 2

A symphony of madness.

It's been about 24 hours since I first watched Sam Raimi's now famously cult classic follow-up to his breakout film and the movie that cemented him as a horror king. EVIL DEAD 2 was a movie I had long been anticipating my first viewing of, going back to years before I had ever seen a frame of Raimi's work outside of the Spider-Man movies and Darkman. I had heard about the legend of Ashley J. Williams through countless internet praises and friends who had grown up with the gutsy gorefests that made Bruce Campbell a household name, but as far as my exposure to the actual Evil Dead brand went, I was pretty scarce. The only film of the three that I had seen in full was ARMY OF DARKNESS, and that was definitely not the film to start off on. Not because it was lacking anything - quite the opposite, Army of Darkness is immensely entertaining and one of the best horror comedies ever made - but because in that movie, Ash was already established as the badass that he inevitably became. He'd gone through the hurdle of two entire movies that built him up to be the face (or chin) of demon slaying debauchery and the best cheesy one-liners imaginable. So as a film, Army gave me great entertainment, but it did nothing to improve my experience with the Evil Dead franchise. It was simply the spark.

BOP Recommends... The Woman

Directed by cult favorite Lucky McGee, of May and The Woods fame, the premise of The Woman may not inspire much confidence at first glance.

Set deep in the American south, it focuses on the Cleek household, a tight-knit family led by its affable, smiling patriarch, Chris. While on a hunting trip, he finds a woman wandering through the woods, wounded and foraging for food. Realizing that she's feral, Chris does what any good citizen would do: Knock her unconscious, chain her up in his basement, and tell his family that it's their Christian duty to teach her the ways of civilization... whether she wants it or not.

BOP Reviews... The Wolverine

It's appropriate that the first time we see Hugh Jackman's Wolverine way back in the first X-Men film, is during a vicious cage fight where the announcer introduces him as "The Wolverine". And now, over ten years later, a film titled THE WOLVERINE has given us a definitive portrayal of the character, both from Hugh Jackman (who continues to carve himself into the role more than even any James Bond actor has been able to manage), and from a story that attacks the core of who Logan is. Comic fans, and the movie going public hasn't grown tired of seeing Wolverine quip and slice his way through the bad guys for the greater good. After all, he's the best at what he does, and what he does isn't very nice. But after those he's loved have died, after suffering through wars, and fighting the good fight like any soldier would... what if Logan has grown tired of being Wolverine? 

BOP Review: Kick-Ass 2

As an avid comic book reader, I've rarely - hell, probably never - put down a comic or refused to finish it based off of one scene. That changed whenever I read the second issue of Mark Millar's Kick-Ass 2, the comic that this movie is somewhat loosely based off of. There was a scene in it that I found to be so incredibly tasteless and so unnecessarily cruel that I just decided I'd had enough right then and there, put down the title, and never read any of it's subsequent issues or the sequels that followed - including Kick-Ass 3, currently out, and the Hit-Girl miniseries that the film is also supposedly based off of. For the film adaptation of Kick-Ass 2, which is as much a sequel to the Matthew Vaughn original as it is a straight adaptation of the comic, I'll give it this - unlike my experience reading the source, I never had my "I'm done" moment.

But this film goes a long way to prove that even if you necessarily manage to improve on the source material, that doesn't always make it good.

BOP Review: Elysium

So I saw ELYSIUM the other day. Before going in, I had read some dismissive reviews that seemed a little hypercritical.  The consensus seemed to be that ELYSIUM didn’t come close to touching DISTRICT 9. I hate the idea of judging this film off of its predecessor, considering these movies are not connected story-wise.

That said I went into the movie with tempered expectations. I still left the theater feeling underwhelmed.

BOP Reviews... Only God Forgives

"Julian, a drug-smuggler thriving in Bangkok's criminal underworld, sees his life get even more complicated when his mother compels him to find and kill whoever is responsible for his brother's recent death."

A rather simplistic synopsis for a film that's anything but. One that's not even entirely accurate. To start off, I'd like to say that I'm honestly not even entirely sure whether or not I like ONLY GOD FORGIVES. I really don't. I think the ideas and story presented in the film are greater than the film itself, unfortunately. But, I appreciate the hell out of it. And you should too.