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.)

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.