The First (and possibly annual but probably not because this was fucking exhausting) Dixon Movie Awards

Originally posted at http://dixonsbl0g.blogspot.com/ on March 3, 2018

I watched way too many movies last year. Perhaps it’s my way of escaping the Trumpocalypse terrorizing every aspect of life not shielded by the dark walls of the movie theater. Perhaps it’s just my antisocial way of passing the time. I’d like to think these films have made me a wiser, less judgmental person, unlike the worthless hacks that came up with these Oscar nominations. After witnessing the horrific job The Academy has done in honoring the year’s best films, I decided to bless the world with my own shitty opinions. If there’s anything this country needs right now, it’s another privileged white man dishing out unsolicited hot takes. Anyway, here goes nothing.

Best Films of 2017

1. The Florida Project
2. Call Me by Your Name
3. A Ghost Story
4. Lady Bird
5. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
6. Dunkirk
7. The Big Sick
8. Last Flag Flying
9. Your Name
10. mother!
11. Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond
12. Last Men in Aleppo
13. Phantom Thread
14. Get Out
15. Mudbound
16. The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected
17. I, Tonya
18. The Work
19. On Body and Soul
20. The Breadwinner
21. Columbus
22. The Shape of Water
23. The Insult
24. Blade Runner 2049
25. Rat Film
26. In the Fade
27. Brad’s Status
28. Personal Shopper
29. Loving Vincent
30. Fate of the Furious

…

999. getting hit by a truck

1000. Darkest Hour

Best Picture: The Florida Project

The contrast in The Florida Project is striking. Six-year-old Moonee and her single mother Halley live in a cheap motel just outside of Disney World. Their neighborhood is filled with fast food restaurants and abandoned condos. Every building is whimsically themed despite being run-down. Rich tourists pass through on their way to Disney World but never stop or notice the locals unless they’ve accidentally booked their stay at a deceptively named motel.

The film conveys the weight of poverty in the context of an American system that places almost insurmountable roadblocks in front of those attempting to improve their stock in life. While the adults at the motel are constantly struggling to get by, their children are largely oblivious to their circumstances. Moonee and her friends take advantage of their summer vacation by turning the world into their personal playground. Their carefree adventures give the movie a light-hearted tone that distracts from their humble surroundings.

The acting performances in this movie are fantastic, and I’ll talk more about those later. Leading actresses Brooklynn Prince and Bria Vinaite had never acted prior to joining the cast, but you’d never know it by watching the film. This is a huge credit to Sean Baker’s directing and casting ability. While searching for someone to play the role of Halley, Baker stumbled across Vinaite on Instagram and decided she would be perfect for the part. It’s fair to say that his gamble paid off.

Baker ends the film with one of the most emotional, surprising scenes of any movie this year. At the story’s climax, the film takes a hard left turn and goes in a totally unexpected direction, even changing from a 35mm camera to an iPhone and creating a surreal feel in the process.

The Florida Project is a very American story given the country’s ever-increasing wealth gap. It’s also a timeless portrayal of childhood and the loss of innocence. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Best Director: David Lowery - A Ghost Story

It’s amazing how much thought and emotion David Lowery is able to convey in A Ghost Story despite using very little dialogue and having a main character whose entire body is covered by a sheet for the majority of the film. Lowery’s ability to create such a beautiful, complex movie despite these inherent limitations give him the edge in this category for me. This could have easily been a disaster in the hands of a less capable director.

This movie has stuck with me more than any other film this year. Lowery forces his audience to address their own mortality and analyze the legacy they leave behind. These themes remind me of Pixar’s Coco, particularly the concept of the dead ceasing to exist after the living have forgotten them. However, where Coco emphasizes the importance of remembering one’s ancestors, A Ghost Story questions whether legacy (or anything) matters at all. A person can attempt to achieve immortality by creating a work of art or accomplishing great things, but they are only delaying the inevitable. They will be forgotten.

Somehow Lowery is able to shine a positive light on humanity’s insignificance and leave viewers feeling good about themselves. That is an impressive feat. A Ghost Story seems to have flown under the radar of The Academy and the viewing public. Go check it out on Amazon Prime.

Honorable Mentions
Sean Baker - The Florida Project
Luca Guadagnino - Call Me by Your Name
Darren Aronofsky - mother!
Christopher Nolan - Dunkirk
Paul Thomas Anderson - Phantom Thread
Yorgos Lanthimos - The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Best Actress in a Leading Role: Brooklynn Prince - The Florida Project

Brooklynn Prince is a star in the making whose charisma captivates the audience every moment that she’s on screen. In The Florida Project, she plays Moonee, a fiercely independent six-year-old girl living with her young single mother in a cheap motel outside of Disney World. For the majority of the film, Moonee is a carefree kid that makes the audience long for the innocence of childhood. The world is her playground, and she seems to be oblivious to the poverty around her.

In the latter half of the film, as Moonee begins to pick up on her worsening circumstances, she displays subtle emotions that would be impressive from an actress of any age, let alone a small child. When shit hits the fan in the final scene, Prince delivers a gut-wrenching performance that sticks with the audience long after the film ends.

Honorable Mentions
Rooney Mara - A Ghost Story
Saoirse Ronan - Lady Bird
Jennifer Lawrence - mother!
Vicky Krieps - Phantom Thread
Kristen Stewart - Personal Shopper
Diane Kruger - In the Fade
Daniela Vega - A Fantastic Woman

Best Actress in a Supporting Role: Laurie Metcalf - Lady Bird

Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut seems to resonate with audiences in large part due to the complex mother-daughter relationship between Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan. I won’t say that the movie reminds me of my own mother and sister because that would make things awkward at my cousin’s wedding next month. Both characters love each other and have good intentions, but they fail to empathize with the other. This dynamic leads to some very touching affectionate scenes, as well as some very combative arguments.

Metcalf deftly portrays the emotions of a concerned mother watching her daughter take risks and make decisions that she disagrees with. Allison Janney has won all the pre-Oscar supporting actress awards for her over-the-top performance as Tonya Harding’s terrible mother, but Metcalf gives a more subtle, complex performance that should not be overlooked.

Honorable Mentions
Carey Mulligan - Mudbound
Mary J. Blige - Mudbound
Rebecca Hall - Professor Marston and the Wonder Women
Bria Vinaite - The Florida Project
Allison Janney - I, Tonya

Best Actor in a Leading Role: Timothee Chalamet - Call My by Your Name

Timothee Chalamet plays a maturing 17-year-old named Elio living with his parents in Italy for the summer. His father is a professor who invites a grad student played by Armie Hammer to stay with them and help with his studies of ancient statues. Elio is interested in a local girl in town, but he is also intrigued by his new roommate.

Chalamet displays a wide spectrum of emotions as Elio struggles with his competing attractions and deals with his raging hormones. At times he is guarded and standoffish, and at times he is broken and vulnerable. This is an incredible performance in what looks to be a very promising career for Chalamet.

Honorable Mentions
Steve Carell - Last Flag Flying
Jason Mitchell - Mudbound
Adam Sandler - The Meyerowitz Stories: New and Selected
Adam Driver - Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Best Actor in a Supporting Role: Willem Dafoe - The Florida Project

Willem Dafoe is typically known for strange, over-the-top, often creepy roles. In The Florida Project, he turns in a subtle, complex performance as a motel manager named Bobby. Bobby is part disciplined manager, part stern landlord, and part compassionate father figure. His failures with his own wife and son motivate him to look out for his young tenants and defend them from attackers, perverts, and people looking to rip them off. Bobby is torn between his duty to collect rent and his compassion for his tenants’ poor circumstances.

Dafoe has great chemistry with co-stars Brooklynn Prince and Bria Vinaite, both of whom are first-time actresses. He displays great patience and range that may surprise casual filmgoers accustomed to seeing him play eerie villains.

Honorable Mentions
Michael Stuhlbarg - Call Me by Your Name
Armie Hammer - Call Me by Your Name
Barry Keoghan - The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Michael Shannon - The Shape of Water
Garrett Hedlund - Mudbound
Ray Romano - The Big Sick

Best Screenplay (Original or Adapted): Jordan Peele - Get Out

There is not a wasted line in Jordan’s Peele’s Get Out. Every seemingly superfluous piece of information pays off later in the film. Peele has succeeded in creating a tense, terrifying horror story that opens a window into what it’s like to be a minority in a white man’s world. He pulls this off in the confines of a tense, engrossing horror film without being preachy or condescending. It’s rare to have such a good time while learning about racial dynamics in America.

Honorable Mentions
Greta Gerwig - Lady Bird
Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon - The Big Sick
Richard Linklater and Darryl Ponicsan - Last Flag Flying
Dee Rees and Virgil Williams - Mudbound

Best Cinematography: Matthew Libatique - mother!

No film this year sets the tone with its cinematography quite like mother! This gripping horror film is shot completely from the perspective of its nameless lead character played by Jennifer Lawrence. At all times, the camera is either looking at Lawrence’s face or showing her view point of the actions in the room. This gives the film an extremely claustrophobic feel and calls into question the reliability of everything occurring on screen. The audience never knows whether the crazy events in the story are actually taking place or if they are meant to represent Lawrence’s emotional response to less dramatic incidents.

Director Darren Aronofsky chose to play no music in the film, which places almost all of the responsibility for the film’s creepy, tense tone on the camera work. mother! is one of the most unique films that I’ve seen, in large part due to its disorienting, engrossing cinematography.

Honorable Mentions
Sayombhu Mukdeeprom - Call Me by Your Name
Alexis Zabe - The Florida Project
Thimios Bakatakis - The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Andrew Droz Palermo - A Ghost Story
Roger Deakins - Blade Runner 2049

Best Score: Sufjan Stevens - Call Me by Your Name

A good score can make a bad movie bearable and a good movie great. The movies mentioned below are all ranked very highly in my best films of the year list, and that’s not a coincidence.

Call Me by Your Name entrances its audience and makes 132 minutes fly by in seemingly no time at all. The score does a lot to produce that effect with original songs by Sufjan Stevens. Mystery of Love is getting a lot of hype for the Best Original Song award at the Oscars, but the entire score deserves recognition.

Honorable Mentions
Daniel Hart - A Ghost Story
Jonny Greenwood - Phantom Thread
Alexandre Desplat - The Shape of Water
Various Artists - The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Best Documentary Feature: Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond

As a kid growing up in the 90s, I’ve watched Dumb and Dumber and Ace Ventura more times than I can count. Naturally, I was intrigued by this documentary about Jim Carrey going full-on method for his role as Andy Kaufman in the 1999 film Man on the Moon.

The film begins by detailing Carrey’s behavior on the set of Man on the Moon. Each day he would show up fully in character as either Andy Kaufman or Kaufman’s altar ego Tony Clifton. None of the cast and crew actually got to meet the real Jim Carrey even once during the entire shoot.

Carrey speaks directly to the camera in candid detail about how this experience (and being an actor in general) has affected him. He is a man who has spent so much time in his life being other people that he has no grasp of who he is. This film is an insightful character analysis that grapples with identity, fame, depression, and how to find meaning in life. It leaves us with more questions than answers.

Honorable Mentions
Last Men in Aleppo
The Work
Rat Film
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail

Best Animated Film: Your Name

Your Name is an anime film that begins as a simple body switching movie but evolves into something much more complex. Be patient through the first half hour, and you will be rewarded with an engrossing story. As the male and female lead characters switch back and forth between each other’s bodies, they begin to learn things about themselves. While living the other’s life, each character takes risks and develops new skills they would never have experienced in their own lives. At the same time, they learn to empathize with other people’s circumstances.

You don’t have to be a fan of anime to enjoy this movie. These universal themes of identity and empathy are relatable to any audience. To top it off, the film is beautifully drawn with excellent cinematography by Makoto Shinkai.

Honorable Mentions
The Breadwinner
Loving Vincent

Best Foreign Language Film: Your Name

I’ve already talked about Your Name in the Best Animated Film section above, so I want to use this section to talk about Last Men in Aleppo, which received an honorable mention for both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Documentary.

Last Men in Aleppo is a gripping documentary about a group of Syrian heroes that rescues civilians from the bombings of Bashar al-Assad. This film is not for those with weak constitutions. It is filled with shots of rescuers pulling both live and dead bodies from the wreckage. While their friends leave for better lives in other parts of the world, these men stay in Aleppo because of their intense ties to their city and their people. They can’t imagine leaving the place they’ve lived all their lives, regardless of how dangerous it has become. This is an incredibly moving film that will knock you on your ass.

Honorable Mentions
Last Men in Aleppo
On Body and Soul
The Insult
In the Fade
A Fantastic Woman

Best Comedy: The Big Sick

Kumail Nanjiani’s true story of finding his own path and rejecting the life that his family planned for him resonates with anyone who has failed to live up to parental expectations. This deeply personal film delves into serious family and relationship issues but manages to be funny and light-hearted. Nanjiani and director Michael Showalter manage to deftly walk the line between drama and comedy, successfully achieving both.

Best Horror: The Killing of a Sacred Deer

Yorgos Lanthimos’ second English language film is a gripping horror family drama shot in the cold Kubrickian style of The Shining. Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman star as the husband and wife of a family terrorized by a mild-mannered teenager played by Barry Keoghan. The film is incredibly tense and benefits greatly from its score and cinematography. Keoghan gives a stunning performance as one of the nicest, most even-tempered villains ever put on screen.

Strange events occur that go unexplained, but the audience is not supposed to try to understand why these things happen. At its core the film is an analysis of guilt and the human tendency to blame others for one’s own mistakes.

Best Sci-Fi: Blade Runner 2049

Despite having a different director, Blade Runner 2049 shares the mood and visual style of Ridley Scott’s 1982 original. Denis Villeneuve succeeds in creating a beautiful film that analyzes what it means to be human in an age of advancing technology. Hans Zimmer’s score sets a tense, eerie tone that adds to the movie’s suspense.

Best Action: Dunkirk

Christopher Nolan is a brilliant director who tends to focus more on the technical and intellectual aspects of filmmaking, rather than crafting an emotionally connecting story. Dunkirk embodies these qualities perhaps more than any other Nolan film. Rather than focusing on the emotions of war like many movies do, Nolan throws the audience right into the shit. Soldiers in the heat of battle don’t have the luxury of mourning lost friends, missing loved ones back home, or questioning the governmental authority that put them in this situation. They only have time to react and survive. The film is essentially just one long battle scene. It doesn’t worry about the emotional state of its characters. It’s only worried about avoiding the next bullet flying by.

Kenneth Branagh’s performance, seemingly yanked out of a very different, much cheesier movie, distracts from the film’s tone, but that’s a minor criticism. Nolan has managed to put together one of the most technically impressive films of all time.

Best Romance: Call Me by Your Name

It’s difficult to explain the brilliance of Call Me by Your Name. A story of two privileged white people falling in love without encountering any obstacles isn’t exactly an enticing plot summary. All I can really say to someone who hasn’t seen it is that it’s one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. The breathtaking cinematography and beautiful score put the audience under a spell. Director Luca Guadagnino encapsulates what it feels like to have a crush on someone without knowing if the other person feels the same way.

Call Me by Your Name also has perhaps the best cast of any film this year. Timothee Chalamet, Armie Hammer, and Michael Stuhlbarg turn in three of the year’s best performances. The film keeps the audience entranced from start to finish, including the best ending credits sequence I’ve ever seen.

Best Super Hero Movie: The Fate of the Furious

Make no mistake — this is a super hero movie, and it is glorious. There is no way you can convince me that these characters aren’t superhuman. None of them could still be alive otherwise. They’re the Avengers with cars. While the other super hero universes use the same tired formula to shit out boring dreck that’s shot almost entirely in front of a green screen, the Fast and Furious series continues to outdo itself with each new movie.

Tired of this “cars driving on land” bullshit? Not to worry! Dom and his team will find perfectly rational reasons to drop their cars out of planes, jump them between skyscrapers, and race them across a frozen lake with a massive submarine chasing underneath. I have no doubt that they will find a reason and a law of physics to take their cars into space in the near future. They will do absolutely anything to protect their family, even if that family member is not related to them, used to be a villain, and murdered their best friend Han. Anything except drink a beer that’s not a Corona. Because there’s nothing more important than family, except Corona.

In all seriousness, this franchise has become the gold standard for practical effects. It’s incredibly refreshing to see real stunts shot in a real place with real explosions. These guys kick Marvel and DC’s asses. However, I’m not entirely certain that these are separate universes. I’m pretty sure that Wonder Woman is just a prequel to Fast Five. If VD and The Rock show up in Infinity War, I will lose my shit.

Best Live Action Short Film: The Eleven O’Clock

This fast-paced clever short is about a psychologist who meets with a patient that thinks he is a psychologist. Hilarity ensues as both men attempt to examine the other while the audience tries to decipher which man is the real doctor.

Best Documentary Short Film: Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405

This film tells the inspirational story of Mindy Alper, a talented artist with mental and emotional issues stemming from an abusive childhood. Some days she is barely functional, and other days she is able to create beautiful paintings and paper mache sculptures. It is fascinating to watch her discuss her artwork and realize on camera that many of her pieces are likely inspired by suppressed memories of terrible childhood events.

Best Animated Short Film: World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts

Don Hertzfeldt is an incredible short film maker who is able to convey complex ideas through poorly drawn stick figures. World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts is a highly intellectual sci-fi about a young girl and her time-traveling clones from the future. It’s difficult to explain Hertzfeldt’s brilliance to someone who hasn’t seen his films. This is one of the smartest, best things I watched this year.

Most Underrated Film: Last Flag Flying

I had the privilege of seeing a rough cut of this film about a year ago at a test screening and again at the premiere at the Austin Film Society. Last Flag Flying tells the story of three Vietnam veterans played by Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Lawrence Fishburne, who reunite thirty years after the war. Carell is dealing with the recent loss of his son in the Iraq War, and he asks his friends to help him with the burial.

Richard Linklater is a master of portraying believable male friendship. His characters constantly talk shit, but their love for each other is obvious. Linklater criticizes government and war while simultaneously honoring the soldiers forced to fight it. Despite its focus on grief and war, there are light-hearted funny moments sprinkled throughout the film as the characters attempt to deal with their depression by laughing at each other’s expense. I’m not sure why this movie hasn’t gotten the critical acclaim of others discussed in this article. You should watch it.

Worst Picture: Darkest Hour

This movie suuuuuuucks. It’s about a crazy right-wing warmonger who refuses to listen to anyone that thinks differently from him and is proven right in the end. Is that really the movie we need in 2017? I know the historical context is Hitler’s European conquest, but still. In a world led by Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, this movie really bothered me. I’m not downplaying Churchill’s historical significance or saying that England shouldn’t have fought Hitler. I’m just saying that this movie is really stupid and tone-deaf.

To make matters worse, it’s boring as hell. Almost nothing happens. No action, no character development, just a bunch of boring parliamentary conversations filled with politicians telling Churchill to consider making peace. Churchill repeatedly and adamantly refuses to entertain peace talks until a brief conversation with his wife late in the movie. He confesses his doubts, and she responds by saying that he is wise because of his doubts.

This refreshingly insightful line from one of the movie’s only female characters got my hopes up that things were turning around. And then Churchill gets lost and accidentally wanders onto a public subway car. Drunk and disoriented (as always), he decides to ask the common folk whether they want to fight or make peace. Of course, they all want to personally punch Hitler in the balls themselves.

A reassured Churchill somehow finds his way back to parliament and tells all his political adversaries that England has to fight Germany because twenty people on a subway car said so. Any reasonable human would laugh at this as evidence for going to war, but these motherfuckers change their minds on a dime and give Churchill their full support. Clearly, screenwriter Anthony McCarten needed a reason for parliament to come around to Churchill, so he used the laziest, most idiotic plot device imaginable to accomplish this.

I have no idea why Gary Oldman seems to be a shoe-in for the best actor award at the Oscars. The makeup did 90% of the acting, and Oldman’s Churchill impression wasn’t interesting. There was no character development in the movie, and Churchill rarely experienced any emotions other than the unquenchable thirst for war.

Perhaps the biggest problem with the movie is that it couldn’t have more white people in it if Adolph Hitler cast it himself. There are 59 actors credited in this movie, and 58 of them are white. Just because it’s set in the 1940s doesn’t mean you have to shoot the film as if you’re living in the 1940s. It’s not as if London, a global trade hub at the center of an empire, was 99% white at that time.

Fuck, I hated this movie. If this steaming pile of garbage wins Best Picture, The Academy should never be allowed to host an award ceremony again.

Conclusion

Well, that was incredibly long. That’s all I got. I’m too tired to wrap this up in a nice bow. If you have shitty opinions about my shitty opinions, feel free to dump them in the comments.

Michael Dixon is a mild mannered accountant by day and a mild mannered movie watcher by night. He will not do your taxes for you. He lives in Austin, Texas with his lovely television and collection of fine whiskies. You can’t purchase his book anywhere because it doesn’t exist.