For all of the shit that's been slung at us over the course of 2017, it's been an absolutely incredible year for cinema, and it was nearly impossible to whittle the over-175 movies I've seen this year down to 10 favorites. Normally people put phrases like that at the start of a year-end list, but it's not just bullshit. From The Disaster Artist to Logan to Mudbound to Dunkirk to Professor Marston and the Wonder Women to Star Wars: The Last Jedi to Blade Runner 2049 to Stronger and plenty more, there were some great fucking movies that I left off this list and I'm so grateful to have seen them all. But here's 10 that I think are the truly essential and interesting films of the year, and are my personal favorites from 2017.
From my interview with Good Time directors the Safdie Brothers, here’s one of my favorite moments of the year professionally, courtesy of Josh Safdie:
“I had some weird exchange with some guy out in like Ipswich. I had a friend who lived there, and I remember getting into some exchange with a guy, and I was like driving — actually, it wasn’t Ipswich, it was Swampscott. No, not Swampscott, it was Sharon, Massachusetts, which was where a lot of ‘Eddie Coyle’ takes place. I was working on weekends as an art director for this movie that was happening in Sharon, and me and my buddy Sam Lisenco, who’s the art director for ‘Good Time’, we were working as the art department, and we were in a car, and, being a New Yorker, I was just like ‘this guy [in front of us] is being extra slow,’ so I was laying on the horn and throwing my brights on. Then the guy pulled over to the side, and I was like, ‘Great, finally,’ and then he decided to follow us, and we got in a high-speed chase in Sharon, Mass., which is a suburb, turning left, turning right and, you know, [makes braking noises].
They kept trying to pull up next to us, and at some point we realized it was a car full of these big jocks, who were yelling ‘We’re gonna fucking kill you,’ screaming insanely racist shit towards me, and then they were trying to steer us off the road. Eventually, I was like ‘Fuck, what the fuck are we gonna do?’ And [Sam’s] just like, ‘Let’s just go back to this guy’s Steve’s house.’ So, eventually, we got to Steve’s house, and they just pull in behind, right? And we’re in the car they’re in the car, right? And we knew that the door wasn’t that far, and we were like ‘What do we do? They now know that we’re staying here.’ So we open up the door, and they open up [their] door, and we close [ours]. And we saw all of them getting out, and they all had fucking bats in their hands. And we were both like, ‘Fuck.’ So, what I did was I put it in reverse, and as they were out of the car, I peeled out and went around the car, and they were like, ‘Oh, shit!’ and I kept pulling out. And we kept driving for like an hour going left, right, left right, left, left. And we were like, ‘Shit, now we have to go back.'”
So, yeah, Good Time is a lot like that, and it’s a heartbreaking blast.
