Perspective: 2017 in Review

Other Years in Review.

This was not my most productive year of film criticism. As always there are several reasons; I had a busy and artistically active middle of the year, for one. I barely caught any movies during that period, let alone had the stamina to write about them.

Beyond that, though, there were many times throughout the year when I struggled to find purpose in my writing. In a year of cultural upheaval, sending out rarefied opinions about art into the void felt especially inessential. Trying to confront one’s privilege involves listening, and it’s hard to listen while speaking. There were even moments in which I questioned my motivations and considered putting this project to bed.

Yet for all that, I continue to receive lovely encouragement from folks in my life that would be wrong to dismiss. So I have ended up spending a lot of time considering the role of the critic. What is film criticism beyond building up or tearing down the art we consume?

All this crystallized in the cultural impact of the new Star Wars movie. The vehement backlash smacked of outrage for all the wrong reasons, making clear an important truth. If we spend all our time listening, the most misguided voices will always be the loudest. Futile or not, criticism is an opportunity for action in at least one key sense: it provides a platform for discourse. And when criticism is well done, that discourse sets healthy terms like rigorous argumentation and a baseline of empathy.

Perspective is crucial to explore, and it cannot be boiled down to “well this is what I think and you can’t tell me I’m wrong!” I hope that this platform will be generative, not destructive, and only ever combative for the right reasons. It may feel indulgent to air my thoughts for all to see, but it’s a way to actively engage with the art I care about. I will try to keep improving and learning with each passing year.

Anyway, here are some stats:

This year Post-Credit Coda featured a total of 42 blog posts, including 39 movie reviews, 23 reviews of 2017 films, 1 top ten list, and 2 Oscars posts.

Of the 39 movie reviews, the average score was a 7.3 out of 10.

The highest score was a perfect 10, the first since 2015, for Alien.

The lowest score, a measly 2, belongs to Resident Evil: The Final Chapter.

The breakdown is as follows:

Score - Number of Movies with that Score

10 - 1
9/9.5 - 10
8/8.5 - 8
7/7.5 - 8
6/6.5 - 6
5/5.5 - 2
4/4.5 - 1
3/3.5 - 2
2/2.5 - 1
1/1.5 - 0
0/0.5 - 0

The total number of hits for this year: 90,115. The total number of hits for each 2017 post adds up to 13,166.

Of the 42 eligible posts, the average number of hits per post was 313.

The highest number of hits: Resident Evil: The Final Chapter with 749.

The lowest number of hits*: Justice League with 95. (hahaha)

*not posted in the past day

I'll see you next year.

THE SHAPE OF WATER: Fish Love

Director: Guillermo del Toro
Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Cast: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones
Runtime: 123 mins.
2017

Guillermo del Toro's American movies have tended to be feasts of design and concept that leave lingering questions in terms of execution. His strengths as a filmmaker are specific and his weaknesses are vague. Every time he puts out a movie, though, it's worth paying attention; it's clear the man is a visionary.

With The Shape of Water, it's especially difficult to ding the movie for being worse-executed than its peers, because as far as I can tell it has no peers. Shape is, after all, a comic drama romance sci-fi horror fairy tale thriller. Some of those categories might be a stretch, but perhaps Shape is ill-used by categorization in general. The plot involves a mute cleaning woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who befriends a Creature from the Black Lagoon-esque fish monster who has been contained in the facility where she works. As usual, though, del Toro has little interest in foregrounding the plot, so neither will we.

DUNKIRK: Stress/Disorder

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Mark Rylance, Barry Keoghan, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy
Runtime: 106 mins.
2017

Dunkirk begins with a ticking clock. British soldiers pick through rubble as demoralizing fliers float down from the sky. The quietude is suddenly ripped asunder by the deafening pop of gunshots from unknown assailants. A young boy's companions fall away one by one; these shots are the starting pistol for a narrative that will not stop. Nor will the clock.

Dunkirk is everything Christopher Nolan has been working towards for the past twenty years, the magnum opus of his career. Who would have thought that a director who so adores high concept sci-fi would find his ultimate muse in World War II history? For Dunkirk is a culmination, the purest and most precise version of Nolan's creative mechanism. Accused of cold, systematic, unfeeling narratives--he has made a film about the cold, systematic, unfeeling nature of large scale military efforts. Accused (justifiably) of fridging women to motivate his protagonists--he has excised all women to create a hell of masculinity, and done away with all personal motivations beyond that of survival. Accused of hamfisted exposition and sloppy plotting--he has made a film in which the plot and dialogue only matter insofar as they allow the viewer to understand the magnitude of danger weighing on any given moment.

MOTHER!: Wife Material

Director: Darren Aronofsky
Writer: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson, Kristen Wiig
Runtime: 121 mins.
2017

A man and a woman make a home together. Their labors do not fall equally. The man is the worker, the breadwinner, the tortured genius, the star, the hero, the subject. The woman works too, but it is a labor of love. She is the caretaker, the homemaker, the bearer of life, the vessel of inspiration, the enabler, the sustenance, the muse, the object.

These are the brigade of gender norms that make up the steel trap of the perfectly titled mother!. In this movie director Darren Aronofsky has created a... fairy tale? allegory? parable? domestic drama?... about the infinite patriarchal cycle of husband and wife. This is the kind of film to achieve an F on Cinemascore, and it has very knowingly earned its ghastly marks. I can only imagine the revolting experience mother! must have been for those more literal minded folks looking for a good scare. To give you some idea of the level of abstraction at play, the script eschews character names in favor of titles: Mother, Him, Man, Woman, Cupbearer, Consoler, Whisperer, Zealot, Defiler, Lingerer, Devotee, Novitiate, Herald.

As with every aspect of mother!, the curious naming conceit is not merely meant to inflame. Every choice has a clear, ringing purpose. In this case, not only does the namelessness boost what is being represented into a more conceptual space, but it eradicates the humanity of the film's characters, replacing identity with a mythic social role.

STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII - THE LAST JEDI: Toxic Masculinity

Other Reviews in this Series.

Director: Rian Johnson
Writer: Rian Johnson
Cast: Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Carrie Fisher, John Boyega, Kelly Marie Tran, Laura Dern, Benicio Del Toro, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Gwendoline Christie, Frank Oz, Lupita Nyong'o
Runtime: 152 mins.
2017

Spoilers throughout, though this was the second largest opening weekend of all time so I guess you've seen it?

I'm going to start by establishing some crucial context, because I'm about to be combative and I want folks to understand exactly how I mean to be combative.

A primary role of the critic is to provide a perspective and a platform that allows people to further engage and play with the art they consume. The role of the critic is NOT to decide whether a piece of art is good or bad. Any critic who believes this about himself (and I say "himself" because the ones who believe this tend to be men) is full of shit. Nobody should ever presume to tell you that your experience is wrong. Yet despite the inherent subjectivity of art, I maintain that it's not all relative. What this means is that we can have substantial discussions not only about our own experience, but about whether a work of art works or doesn't work within the context of itself. So basically, I would be a fool to ever suggest that someone should or shouldn't like something, but I could disagree about an argument they put forward concerning how the movie functions.

Which brings us to the explosive cultural phenomena shitstorm the recent release of Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. You've probably noticed that The Last Jedi has been widely divisive in a totally different way than its predecessor. The responses to The Force Awakens tended to fall into two categories: effusive praise and shrugging acceptance (of which I fell in the latter). But The Last Jedi has caused a stunning outpouring of hate, buffeted by an equal and opposite outpouring of love.

To play my hand, I liked The Last Jedi. A lot. Probably more than any Star Wars movie since Empire. And yet I very soon discovered that the internets have been aflood with fans expressing hatred, anger, disgust, sadness, and crushing disappointment. It reached epidemic proportions when fans expressed their ire by descending upon Rotten Tomatoes to torpedo the film's score, currently at 93% for critics and 55% for audiences. This swing of 38 percentage points is not unheard of. The unprecedented part is that for a blockbuster like Star Wars, the disparity between audiences and critics always goes in the opposite direction. So what's going on here?

STAR WARS: EPISODE V - THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: A Force to Be Reckoned With

Other Reviews in this Series

Director: Irvin Kershner
Writers: Leigh Brackett, Lawrence Kasdan, George Lucas
Cast: Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Kenny Baker, Frank Oz
Runtime: 124 mins.
1980

With the possible exception of Rogue One, The Empire Strikes Back is the last Star Wars film to actively try something new. In the thirty-seven years since its release, the most successful film franchise of all time has completely failed to match Empire's innovation. Maybe part of the problem is that Empire was so successful at shaping the identity of Star Wars that everything thereafter necessarily returned to the same well.

That's the double-edged sword of making something iconic: forging a memorable identity for your property also means putting it in a box. And it doesn't get more iconic than The Empire Strikes Back. Consider how many aspects of it have been canonized and remixed over and over again in the form of video games, merchandise, books, other movies. Empire defined a generation.

It's easy to see why, looking back from our perch in the middle of the newest Star Wars trilogy. Empire is the best kind of sequel in that it expands on its predecessor with seeming effortlessness, something no other Star Wars movie has managed. Everything in Empire feels more epic, grander than before. Yet it accomplishes this without artificially inflating stakes by doing something dumb like giving our heroes a newer, bigger Death Star to tangle with (they'll save that trick for Episode VI... and Episode VII).

LADY BIRD: Coming of Age

Director: Greta Gerwig
Writer: Greta Gerwig
Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Laurie Metcalf, Beanie Feldstein, Lucas Hedges, Timothee Chalamet, Tracy Letts, Jordan Rodrigues, Odeya Rush
Runtime: 94 mins.
2017

Of all its best qualities, I am most taken by Lady Bird's fantastically subtle exploration of empathy. It's a coming of age story, after all. Not only do these types of narratives pit young people against the growing urgency of external pressures like economic struggles and repressive gender roles, but they also force these young people to come to terms with the monsters inside themselves. Kids are sociopaths in a most general sense: it is impossible for them to see or feel outside of their own experience. The function of the coming of age story is to represent a character slowly emerging from solipsism into a cold social reality, as well as a warm interpersonal one.

Lady Bird does all this in a way that feels true rather than forced, which is probably the highest compliment one can give a story like this. Writer/director Greta Gerwig makes a point of eschewing cliches, or at least setting them up in order to subvert them. People's lives don't change in clean moments of catharsis. Rather, their experience shifts gradually, around the edges of their life, until one day some event throws into stark relief the long-developing tectonic shifts that have been happening all along.

JUSTICE LEAGUE: Minor League

Director: Zack Snyder
Writers: Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon, Zack Snyder
Cast: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons, Diane Lane, Connie Nielsen, J.K. Simmons, Ciarán Hinds, Amber Heard
Runtime: 120 mins.
2017

PRODUCTION

Warner Bros. and DC have been trying to cobble together a Justice League film for a decade. The twists and turns of that saga are numerous yet not terribly worth enumerating. This particular intellectual property has been a potential cash cow that Warner Bros. has been trying unsuccessfully to exploit for quite a while now.

The production of the Justice League that is currently wallowing at your local cineplex, however, began in April 2016 (though the film had been in the works for at least two years before that). With significant reshoots taking place in May 2017, that makes Justice League one of the more prolonged film productions of all time. The reshoots were in large part a course correction imposed on the film due to near-universal revulsion of its predecessor, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Clocking in at $25 million, Justice League's reshoots were around four times as expensive as a typical blockbuster's reshoots would be. In fact, Justice League was one of the most expensive film ever made, coming in at an estimated $300 million, although we can't know for sure because Warner Bros. conspicuously refuses to release the numbers.

Although Zack Snyder directed the lion's share of the film, Joss Whedon was brought on in an uncredited directorial capacity after Snyder had to leave production due to a family tragedy. So what we have is one of the lengthiest and most expensive film shoots of all time, accosted by course corrections, and containing the watered down visions of two very different directors.

If there is one perfect anecdote that sums up the haphazard slapdashery of the Justice League production, it is that of Henry Cavill's mustache. The unanticipated and Superman-heavy reshoots of this May ended up coinciding with the shooting of another of Cavill's upcoming movies, Mission Impossible 6, in which his character will be sporting quite a fashionable mustache. The MI6 shoot required Cavill to keep his mustache, but he also needed to portray Superman, so Warner Bros.' solution was to erase his mustache with some quick and sloppy CGI, making this a likely candidate for Most Expensive Mustache of All Time.