Here is my list of the top 10 movies I watched in 2017, There are also some of 2018 already in there because I watched them already.
But now let's start with this 20 minutes video.
The Movieclips team decided to look back on the year in trailers and
pick the 10 best ones. This is our countdown! What are your favorite
trailers of 2017? Let us know in the comments below.
Watch more Trailers:
The Fandango MOVIECLIPS Trailers channel is your destination for hot new
trailers the second they drop. The Fandango MOVIECLIPS Trailers team is
here day and night to make sure all the hottest new movie trailers are
available whenever, wherever you want them.
From master storyteller Guillermo del Toro comes THE SHAPE OF WATER, an
otherworldly fable set against the backdrop of Cold War era America
circa 1962. In the hidden high-security government laboratory where she
works, lonely Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is trapped in a life of isolation.
Elisa's life is changed forever when she and co-worker Zelda (Octavia
Spencer) discover a secret classified experiment. Rounding out the cast
are Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Doug Jones.
The general's ribbon bar is upside down. The Silver Star and
Distinguished Service Medal were his highest honors, and should be on
the top row, not the bottom. His WW2 Victory Medal is much lower in
precedence and should be on a lower row, not the top. See more »
Quotes
Giles:
He's a wild creature. We can't ask him to be anything else.
See more »
In James Whale's 1935 film "The Bride of Frankenstein," the monster (Boris Karloff)
says mournfully, "Alone: bad. Friend: good!" That's what Guillermo del
Toro's latest film "The Shape of Water" is all about, the loneliness of
those born before their time, born different. "The Shape of Water"
doesn't cohere into the fairy tale promised by the dreamy opening. It
makes its points with a jackhammer, wielding symbols in blaring neon.
The mood of swooning romanticism is silly or moving, depending on your
perspective. (I found it to be both.) The film starts in a wavering
green underwater world, with a woman floating in what looks like a
drowned Atlantis. The image is otherworldly, magical, and Alexandre
Desplat's score is wistful and bittersweet. Richard Jenkins
narrates, asking helplessly, "If I spoke about it, what would I tell
you" about what happened to the "princess without a voice"?
The "princess without a voice" turns out to be the mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins),
who mops floors in the cavernous underground tunnels of a
Baltimore-based corporation (the word OCCAM—as in razor?—in towering
letters over the entrance). Working alongside Elisa is Zelda (Octavia Spencer),
who provides constant running commentary through the day, responding to
Elisa's sign language with a torrent of words. The year is 1962, the
background is the space race and the Cold War. The head honcho at the
company is a sadist racist named Strickland (Michael Shannon),
who swaggers around carrying a cattle prod (which he calls an "Alabama
howdee-do"). Whatever is done at the corporation is top secret, and
everyone is paranoid about the Russians, especially once "The Asset"
arrives in a portable tank. The Asset is the Amphibian Man (Doug Jones),
discovered in the Amazon, once worshiped as a god and now contained in a
tank, enduring occasional torture via Strickland's howdee-do. The
scientist Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) pleads for mercy on the creature's behalf. The Amphibian Man should be studied, not destroyed.
Meanwhile,
Elisa is drawn to the "monster," and begins a secret campaign to gain
his trust. She offers him hard-boiled eggs. She plays him Benny Goodman
records. She teaches him sign language. The courtship sequence is the
most successful in the film, calling to mind the stunning first half of "The Black Stallion"
when the shipwrecked boy attempts to tame the wild horse, or the early
sequences of "E.T." when the child and the alien start to communicate.
Monster movie references abound throughout "Shape of Water": "King
Kong," "Creature from the Black Lagoon," "Starman," and—most of all—Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," with one scene in particular an explicit homage.
Production designer Paul D. Austerberry
has a field day, creating multiple atmospherically rich worlds, so real
you can smell the dank rot in those basement corridors. Elisa's
apartment is green-tinted, with green bathroom tiles, green water in the
tub. (Green, as we are told multiple times in different contexts, is
"the future.") Even more symbolically, her apartment hovers over a huge
movie palace, and she lives amidst the echoes of the fantasy world
below. Strickland's suburban home is a psychotic "Mad Men" set, so
yellowy-bright it's clearly not "the future" but the delusional
complacent past. Cinematographer Dan Laustsen
creates a clammy wet mood, windows streaming and swirling with
raindrops, shadows wavering on the walls, the overall feeling being
submersion into the underwater world of The Asset. The film looks like a
dream.
Elisa teeters on the edge of being "twee," and there are moments
when Hawkins crosses the line into self-consciously adorable spunkiness.
When she stares starry-eyed at a pair of red shoes (i.e. ruby slippers)
circling in a shop window, it's really pouring it on a bit too thick.
What's refreshing about the character is her courage and
resourcefulness, and her brisk matter-of-fact attitude about her sexual
needs. (She masturbates every morning after setting an egg timer so she
doesn't get behind schedule). She looks at Amphibian Man—his nictitating
membrane, his 12-pack abs, the Ken Doll mound between his
legs—overwhelmed by attraction. She confides in Giles, her gay neighbor
(Richard Jenkins, in the best performance in the film) who is tormented
by unrequited love for a young guy who works at a diner. Giles'
television is always tuned to old movies, so he can revel in Betty
Grable, Alice Faye, Bojangles and Shirley Temple tap dancing up a
stairway.
"The Shape of Water" shows over and over again the
demonizing of the "Other," the heartlessness of denying living creatures
dignity. The film is on certain footing when it's focusing on the
brutal treatment of the monster, the "voicelessness" of Elisa, the
lonely pre-Stonewall gay man. They all come from "the future," before
their time. But when the film portrays contemporary real-life events—the
African-American couple told they can't sit at the counter,
Strickland's racist comments to Zelda, the news footage of fire hoses
turned on actual civil rights marchers—the fragile fabric of the film is
broken. There's something unsettling about using these things as
"atmosphere," even as the moments dovetail with the overall theme. At
its worst, using these real-life events feels like a shorthand, a
too-obvious pointing out of the similarities between the real world and
the fairy tale, in case we didn't get it.
As Elisa, Giles, and
Zelda team up to try to save the Monster, the film jerks away from the
single-minded energy of the dreamlike courtship sequence. The second
half of the film—choppily episodic, drawn-out—is noticeably weaker than
the first half. The film feels much longer than it is. There are
elements that work beautifully and elements that don't work at all.
A
good artist doesn't necessarily set out to please the audience. A good
artist sets out to please himself. Sometimes the two things merge, and
in the best of del Toro's films, they do. His is an enthusiastic and
passionate mind. The devotion of an artist—whether it's Leonardo da
Vinci, The Troggs, John Cassavetes, Chantal Akerman,
whoever—to what turns them on is catching, and audiences feel it. In a
corporate-run franchise-driven industry, del Toro's movies are
refreshingly personal. All of this is true of "The Shape of Water," but
still, something's off.
FINAL RATING: 10/10 FOR THE GENRE AND 10/10 OVERALL
A group of men get stranded in a jungle with a beast of whom they do not
speak. One by one, they go missing and skinned bodies are found in
trees. Then, when the only survivor of a previous beast encounter
appears, they realise they are in worse trouble than they thought...
When a doctor looking for her missing child awakens
to find herself in an abandoned school, she must survive the
supernatural terror and face her own demons if she is to find the truth
about where her son is.
Having taken her first steps into the Jedi world,
Rey joins Luke Skywalker on an adventure with Leia, Finn and Poe that
unlocks mysteries of the Force and secrets of the past.
Having taken her first steps into the Jedi world, Rey joins Luke
Skywalker on an adventure with Leia, Finn and Poe that unlocks mysteries
of the Force and secrets of the past.
In the original trilogy, Mark Hamill received top billing in all three
films. In "Star Wars: The Force Awakens", Harrison Ford had received top
billing while Hamill was second to be billed. Hamill will receive top
billing once more in "Star Wars: The Last Jedi." See more »
Goofs
When the hospital ship runs out of propellant, it gets slower and starts
tilting to the back without any apparent outside influence. This would
not happen to any object in space that simply stops being propelled - it
would continue on its exact trajectory until stopped by reverse thrust
our outside force. See more »
Writer/director Rian Johnson’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is a sprawling, incident- and character-packed extravaganza that picks up at the end of “Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens” and guides the series into unfamiliar territory. It’s everything a fan could want from a “Star Wars”
film and then some. Even the sorts of viewers who spend the entire
running time of movies anticipating every plot twist and crowing “called
it!” when they get one right are likely to come up short here. But the
surprises usually don’t violate the (admittedly loose) internal logic of
the universe George Lucas
invented, and when they seem to, it’s because the movie has expanded
the mythology in a small but significant way, or imported a sliver of
something from another variant of Lucas’ creation (Genddy Tartakovsky’s
magnificent TV series “Clone Wars” seems to have influenced the last
act).
The first part of “The Last Jedi” cross-cuts between the remnants of our heroes’ ragtag fleet (led by the late Carrie Fisher’s Leia) running away from the First Order, aka the next-generation version of the Empire; and Rey (Daisy Ridley) on the aquatic planet Ahch-To (gesundheit!) trying to convince the self-exiled Jedi master Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill,
whose sandblasted face becomes truly iconic in close-ups) to overcome
his grief at failing a group of young Jedi trainees and rejoin the
Resistance. The New Order's Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis plus CGI) has grand plans for both Rey and his Darth Vader-obsessed apprentice Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).
The leathery old coot may not be a great bad guy—he’s too much of a
standard-issue deep-voiced sadist, in a Marvel mode—but he is quite the
chess player, and so is Johnson.
I’m being vague here
on purpose. Suffice to say that, despite being comprised of variations
on things we’ve been experiencing directly (in “Star Wars” films) and
indirectly (in “Star Wars”-inspired entertainment) since 1977, “The
Last Jedi” still manages to maneuver in unexpected ways, starting with
the decision to build a whole film around a retreat where the goal is
not to win but to avoid being wiped out. Along that narrative backbone
“The Last Jedi” strings what amount to several tight, often hastily
devised mini-missions, each of which either moves the heroes (or
villains) closer to their goals or blows up in their faces. The story
resolves in lengthy, consecutive climaxes which, refreshingly, don’t
play like a cynical attempt to pad things out. Old business is resolved,
new business introduced.
And from scene to scene, Johnson
gives veteran characters (Chewbacca and R2-D2 especially) and those who
debuted in “The Force Awakens” enough screen time to showcase them at
their best while also introducing compelling new faces (including a
heroic maintenance worker, Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose Tico; a serene and tough vice admiral in the Resistance, played by Laura Dern; a sort of “safecracker” character played by Benicio Del Toro).
Johnson’s
script does a better job than most sequels of giving the audience
both what it wants and what it didn’t know it wanted. The movie leans
hard into sentiment, most of it planted in the previous installment,
some related to the unexpected passing of one of its leads (Fisher—thank
goodness they gave her a lot of screen time here, and thrilling things
to do). But whenever it allows a character to cry (or invites us to) the
catharsis feels earned. It happens rather often—this being a film
preoccupied with grieving for the past and transcending it, populated by
hounded and broken people who are afraid hope will be snuffed out.
Rey’s anguish at not knowing who her parents are and Kylo Ren’s
trauma at killing his own father to advance toward his "destiny"
literally as well as figuratively mirror each other. Lifting a bit of
business glimpsed briefly in “The Empire Strikes Back” and "Return of the Jedi,"
Johnson lets these all-powerful characters telepathically “speak” to
each other across space as easily as you or I might Skype with a friend.
This gimmick offers so much potential for drama and wry humor that you
might wonder why nobody did it earlier.
Sometimes "The
Last Jedi" violates our expectations in a cheeky way that stops short of
telling super-fans to get over themselves. There’s a touch of “Spaceballs”
and “Robot Chicken” to some of the jokes. Snoke orders Kylo to “take
off that ridiculous helmet,” Luke chastises an old friend for showing a
nostalgic video by muttering “That was a cheap move,” and an early gag
finds one of the heroes calling the bridge of a star destroyer and
pretending to be stuck on hold. This aspect adds a much-needed dash of
self-deprecating humor (“The Force Awakens” was often a stitch as well,
especially when Han Solo, Chewbacca, BB-8 and John Boyega’s
James Garner-like hero/coward Finn were onscreen), but without going so
meta that "The Last Jedi" turns into a smart-alecky thesis paper on
itself.
The movie works equally well as an earnest adventure
full of passionate heroes and villains and a meditation on sequels and
franchise properties. Like “The Force Awakens,” only more so, this one
is preoccupied with questions of legacy, legitimacy and succession, and
includes multiple debates over whether one should replicate or reject
the stories and symbols of the past. Among its many valuable lessons is
that objects have no worth save for the feelings we invest in them,
and that no individual is greater than a noble idea.
Johnson has made some very good theatrical features, but the
storytelling here owes the most to his work on TV’s “Breaking Bad,” a
playfully convoluted crime drama that approached each new installment
like a street illusionist: no matter where you decided to fix your eyes,
the source of delight was always in the hand you weren’t looking at.
There are points where the film appears to have miscalculated or made an
outright lame choice (this become worrisome in the middle, when Dern’s
Admiral Holdo and Oscar Isaac’s
hotshot pilot Poe Dameron are at loggerheads), but then you realize
that it was a setup for another payoff that lands harder because you
briefly doubted that “The Last Jedi” does, in fact, know what it’s
doing.
This determination to split the difference between
surprise and inevitability is encoded in “The Last Jedi” down to the
level of scenes and shots. How many Star Destroyers, TIE fighters,
Imperial walkers, lightsabers, escape pods, and discussions of the
nature of The Force have we seen by now? Oodles. But Johnson manages to
find a way to present the technology, mythology and imagery in a way
that makes it feel new, or at least new-ish, starting with a shot of
Star Destroyers materializing from hyperspace in the sky over a planet
(as seen from ground level) and continuing through images of Rebel ships
being raked apart by Imperial cannon fire like cans on a shooting range
and, hilariously, a blurry video conference in which the goggle-eyed
warrior-philosopher Maz Kanata (voiced by Lupita Nyong'o) delivers important information while engaging in a shootout with unseen foes. (She calls it a “union matter.”)
There’s
greater attention paid here to color and composition than in any entry
since “The Empire Strikes Back.” Particularly dazzling are Snoke’s
throne room, with its Dario Argento-red walls and red-armored guards,
and the final battle, set on a salt planet whose flat white surfaces get
ripped up to reveal shades of crimson. (Seen from a distance, the
battlefield itself seems to be bleeding.) The architecture of the action
sequences is something to behold. A self-enclosed setpiece in the
opening space battle is more emotionally powerful than any action
sequence in any blockbuster this year, save the "No Man's Land" sequence
of "Wonder Woman," and it's centered on a character we just met.
There are spots where the film can’t figure out how to get the
characters to where it needs them to be and just sort of shrugs and
says, “And then this happened, now let’s get on with it.” But
there are fewer such moments than you might have gone in prepared to
forgive—and really, if that sort of thing were a cinematic crime, Howard Hawks would have gotten the chair. Most importantly, the damned thing moves, both in a plot sense and in the sense of a skilled choreographer-dancer
who has visualized every millisecond of his routine and practiced it to
the point where grace seems to come as easily as breathing. Or
skywalking.
FINAL RATING: 9/10 FOR THE GENRE AND 8/10 OVERALL. THE MOVIE IS STILL A GOOD ONE AND FANS LIKE I AM WILL LOVE IT AND WATCH IT SEVERAL TIMES BUT IT TRULY HAS IT'S WEAKNESSES AS POINTED OUT WHICH I DID NOT EXPECT.
Loïe Fuller was the toast of the Folies Bergères at
the turn of the 20th century and an inspiration for Toulouse-Lautrec and
the Lumière Brothers. The film revolves around her complicated
relationship with protégé and rival Isadora Duncan.
There was nothing in her background to prepare Loïe to become the toast
of the Folies Bergères in Paris and stages across the world. Then she
created the 'Serpentine Dance'... 1887. After the death of her gold
prospector father, 25-year-old Marie-Louise leaves her life in the
American West to join her mother in New York and pursue her heart's
dream - becoming an actress. One night on stage, becoming tangled in her
long dress, she avoids falling by spinning the fabric in a graceful,
magical gesture: the "Serpentine Dance" is born. The audience - shocked,
then overwhelmed - calls out for more. Marie-Louise has become Loïe
Fuller. She embarks on a new, hectic life, leaving New York, where
imitators try to steal her radical innovations, for Paris. At the Folies
Bergères, she dazzles the capital, and illustrious admirers fall at her
feet. Toulouse Lautrec, the Lumière Brothers, Rodin... the Electric
Fairy becomes an icon, the blazing symbol of a generation. But fame
isn't all. An encounter...
Loie first performed at the Follies Bergere in the early 1890s, but the
director of the Follies Bergere is driving an "olde tymey" car from
perhaps 2 decades later when Loie ambushes him in his carpark in order
to present an impromptu audition. See more »
When it comes to pioneers of modern choreography, most are familiar
with Isadora Duncan. The American-born dancer, who embodied Greek ideals
and a bohemian lifestyle, was memorably portrayed by an Oscar-nominated
Vanessa Redgrave
in the 1968 biopic, “Isadora.” She would die in 1927 after one of her
signature scarves caught in the wheel spokes of an open-air car and
caused her to be ejected. That tragic variation of being hung by one’s
own petard helped to solidify her status as a terpsichorean legend.
But the name Loie Fuller, the subject of “The Dancer” who was an
early supporter of Duncan, did not ring a bell—at least, for me. Born
Mary-Louise in 1862, she was a Chicago-area native and innovator of a
brand of free-form performance art known as Serpentine Dance. Her act
consisted of a costume designed from massive swatches of silk attached
to long bamboo rods being whirled and twirled while Fuller circled about
on an elevated stage. She also invented multi-hued dramatic lighting
techniques, many now commonplace, to enhance the undulations of her
voluminous fabric.
However, after checking out the famous Art
Nouveau posters by Jules Cheret that stylized Fuller’s allure and then
realizing that the silent-era filmmakers the Lumiere brothers had
featured Fuller copycats in their work, I discovered I did know of the
existence of the so-called “La Danseuse de la Belle Epoque.”
This
unique artist, who packs plenty of opportunities for visual pizzazz,
seems long overdue for big-screen treatment. And given that Fuller
outwardly was more of a muscular tomboy than ethereal waif, first-time
director Stephanie Di Giusto at least has gone outside the box when
casting her lead. Her choice? A French singer-songwriter turned actress
known as Soko, whose bobbed brunette hair and distinctly off-beat
features suggest a not-unappealing blend of Erin Moran of “Happy Days”
fame and Bjork.
But despite an on-screen claim that her movie is
based on a true story, Di Giusto’s script plays fast and loose with
many of the facts of Fuller’s history—none more so than the Old West
prologue with her gold-prospecting father that involves both cattle
rustling and recited excerpts of Oscar Wilde’s
play “Salome.” When Dad is shot dead in an outdoor bathtub, Fuller
high-tails it to Brooklyn and takes up residence with her
Temperance-warrior mother (a wasted Amanda Plummer).
That is when she decides to try stage acting. When her too-large
costume begins to droop mid-scene, Fuller simply lifts her skirt and
spins around. The audience approves, and suddenly a dance sensation is
created and Loie is born.
Soon she will seek her fortune in Paris and become a sensation at
the Folies-Bergere. But not before she meets her prime benefactor and
semi-consort, the vampire-like composite character of Count Louis Dorsay
(Gaspard Ulliel),
who likes his rooms dark as tombs, his sexual partners for hire and his
mood-altering ether readily available. Most of Ulliel and Soko’s scenes
together tend to devolve into silent staring contests, including those
at his mansion in the City of Lights. The property serves as both
Fuller’s new home and her rehearsal space where she trains a chorus line
of tunic-garbed young followers.
This is where the youthful
Duncan comes in as Fuller’s seductive new student, slinky and
sylph-like, whose style is more formal than intuitive. Before you can
say “All About Eve,” Duncan—embodied by a teenage Lily-Rose Depp (the minx-like spawn of Johnny Depp and his ex, Vanessa Paradis)—is
bewitching her mentor and soon-to-be rival out of her clothes in a
garden at dusk before leaving her high and dry in more ways than one.
“The
Dancer” clearly needed a better task master behind the camera. There
are too many scenes of Fuller physically and mentally suffering for her
art as she questions if what she does actually qualifies as dance. How
many times do we need to see her soak her body in a vat of ice? Depp’s
lone dancing interlude is achieved primarily by an obvious body double
although her seduction of Soko is effective if brief. And, overall, the
editing feels weighed down rather than spritely, as one would hope for a
film about freedom of movement. Too many episodes either go on too long
or are too short—as is the case with Fuller’s climatic and triumphant
debut at the Opera House.
If there is joy to be found in this
story, it comes from Soko’s sincere commitment, the staging of her
re-creations of Fuller's astonishing routines and the subtle facial
nuances of Melanie Thierry
as Gabrielle, her ever-alert loyal assistant and protector. But if a
biopic about a dancer causes you to search the Internet to better learn
more details about its subject while yearning for more musical numbers,
that can’t be a good sign.
What is most damning is that Fuller
was anything but a brooding loner, as she too often comes off as in the
movie. Before dying from pneumonia in 1928, she would influence such
artists and writers as Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Yeats. She inspired
both Ruth St. Denis and Martha Graham. You can even sense her impact on
contemporary routines featured on the TV competition show, “So You Think
You Can Dance.” She was given patents for her staging and lighting
innovations, developed cinematic techniques and grew close to Marie
Curie and her family. If only Di Giusto more ambitiously broadened her
scope, she would have made a fleet-footed tribute for the ages instead
of stumbling over such rich possibilities.
FINAL RATING: 7/10 FOR THE GENRE AND 6/10 OVERALL. A really nice movie about a dancer with certain dreams but still some more aspects were left out, which would have made it a better one.
