Film Reviews - The 2017 Ranking
I was lucky
enough to receive 18 DVDs for Christmas in 2016, most of them bought from
charity shops for 10p. I pledged to
watch and review each and every one of them during 2017: and I did. In alphabetical order.
One approximately every three weeks.
Here, in the
final instalment of that 20,000 word experience (I hope you’ve been keeping up)
I hazard a ranking.
Eighteen
to fifteen
Four films
were just bad – either dull or slow or silly or some combination thereof. The worst, for me, was Mr & Mrs Smith –
it was the only one of the eighteen I didn’t actually finish.
18 – Mr
& Mrs Smith
15 –John
Carter
Apologies to
Brad Pitt, whose work I generally enjoy, but who occupies two of these bottom
four slots…
Fourteen
to ten
Five good, entertaining
films that I enjoyed watching but which in some way shape or form were a little
disappointing or flawed:
14 – 9
13 – If
12 – Groundhog
Day
11 – 300
10 – Law
Abiding Citizen
No apology
here to Gerard Butler, in at #10 and #11…
Nine to
four
Six
fantastic films – funny, clever, thought-provoking; and beautifully acted, crafted
or conceived:
Interesting
to see the big war movies making it so high up the list…
And the
top three…
3 – Birdman
– perhaps just a little too clever for its own good, this is nevertheless a movie
that works, and works brilliantly, at every possible level – the narrative arc,
the characters, the acting, the music, the design, the metaphors, the message - and includes simply astonishing stuff from Ed Norton.
2 – Life
is Beautiful – this film should have been impossible – a comedy about the
Holocaust? – but it achieves a miracle.
Exquisite, compassionate, clever and very, very funny, it left me asking
really big questions about humour, communication, war, life…
1 – Casablanca
– quite how I'd not seen this film prior to 2017 is a mystery to me; but,
having seen it, I now know what the fuss was all about. Strange and brilliant, practical and
metaphysical, humdrum and sublime, almost bristling with an unfathomable
static, Casablanca is like no other film I’ve seen – and I still don’t know
why. But if there was only one of these
eighteen DVDs I’d be allowed to take to my desert island, this would be the
one.
Three
genuinely life-affirming movies, I think – and two more war-movies to bring it to four of the top six. I’m sure
this says as much about me as it does about the movies; and I’m looking forward
to finding out what that might be should these words ever be re-read by some future
me.
And
finally…
Needless to
say, the ranking above is my ranking of the movies. An alternative would have been my ranking of the
reviews.
That would
mean re-reading them all, of course, which might be a bit self-referential, or
even self-absorbed, but I went for ‘self-critical’ and gave it a go.
Turns out
the reviews themselves vary widely not only in quality but in both approach and
content; and I could see no clear
relationship between the character of a review and the subsequent ranking of
the movie.
What I did
see was five broad types of review – so here’s my favourite one of each of
those, just in case.
(Just in
case I need it later and can’t find it anywhere else, obvs.)
5 Birdman
– integrates a deep review of the film itself with an enquiry into the nature
of authenticity
4 John
Carter – a review of a truly terrible film that largely ignores the film
and tries instead to understand how such a commercial disaster could have come
about
2 Frozen
– a review that explains why these reviews happened at all and
unexpectedly reports on the endless potential for child-like delight
1 Groundhog
Day – the longest of all the reviews, this is a broad-spectrum and well-hyperlinked philosophical essay arguing that Groundhog Day provides us with a genuinely powerful and important modern myth, and that the success of the film illustrates the importance of such myths
Or something.
Anyway. That’s
it, hope you enjoyed it, enough already.
Comments
I would probably go with Platoon as no 1 but Casablanca is certainly a great film and thanks for highlighting Birdman - I would not have watched this but for you review, an excellent film.
More for 2018 please?