2017 At The Movies

I post to this blog relatively infrequently. This is mostly because the posts here tend to be about creative work that I do in my very limited spare time, and lately I haven't had enough time to make enough progress to be worth posting about. So, as an experiment, I am posting my thoughts about the movies I saw last year. If people find this sort of thing interesting, I may decide to post about my other interests as a way to fill in the very long gaps between major project updates. In other words, I am considering adding more filler!

In many popular discussions about the movie industry in 2017, there was a theme about how people are not going to the movies any more. Certainly, this summer was one of the least attended in recent memory. And movies continue to be a much smaller industry than video games. A lot of the discussion about the poor summer box office seemed to focus on the role of TV streaming services and other changes in the way people like to see movies.

This is probably true to some extent, but I think a far more important factor is that there was a huge hole in the big studios release schedules. I like to go to the movies a lot, and for a period between mid-July and November, there was no new movies released that looked particularly appealing.

Disney, the box office leader for 2017, released zero movies between Cars 3 (June) and Thor (November). The number two studio Warner Brothers, released a few genre pictures in that same time frame and did quite well with 'It', but mostly had an unimpressive slate. The US Domestic Box Office was down by the equivalent of only two or three moderately successful movies. And the overcrowded holiday period probably is hurting some of the current releases that may have done better earlier in the year when there was less competition.

In particular, I feel like this year was lacking in medium-scale comedy films. The only pure comedy movie I saw this year was Fist Fight, which left theaters before I got a chance to see it. But usually I see more than one of this type of movie. And it just felt like there weren't any made that stuck around.

Below is a list of movies I saw in 2017, listed approximately by how much I liked them and scored on a scale of zero to four stars (although I apparently don't see zero star movies).

**** Wonder Woman
**** Baby Driver

***1/2 Thor: Ragnarok
***1/2 Star Wars The Last Jedi
***1/2 Shin Godzilla
***1/2 Logan Lucky

*** War for the Planet of the Apes
*** The Boss Baby
*** Murder on the Orient Express
*** Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2
*** American Made
*** Despicable Me 3
*** Beauty and the Beast (2017)
*** Dunkirk
*** The Mummy (2017)
*** Fist Fight

**1/2 Star Trek Beyond
**1/2 The Lego Batman Movie
**1/2 Logan

** Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
** X-men Apocalypse

*1/2 Kong: Skull Island

* Hot Pursuit

You may notice a few movies from 2016 or 2015 on this list. I saw them in 2017, so sue me.

Also, note that there are a small handful of movies that I wanted to see but so far have eluded me. I have not yet had the opportunity to see the following:

Coco
The Disaster Artist
The House
Goon: Last of the Enforcers
The Little Hours
The Post

I decided on my movie ratings on the day I saw the movie. As I compiled the list, I allowed myself to adjust the ratings based on how well the movie aged in my head. For instance, Shin Godzilla went from a *** movie to a ***1/2 movie, because the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated the movie and liked how it was partially about the difficulty of making coordinated decisions about group actions. Likewise, Baby Driver and The Boss Baby got better the more I thought about them.

Not all movies got better with time. War for the Planet of the Apes, Kong Skull Island, and Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2 went down in the ratings the more I thought of them. Of course, movies that I saw very recently like Star Wars The Last Jedi and Dunkirk may not stick in my mind either. So I guess I am less confident about my thoughts about them.

So, am I a monster for liking Fist Fight better than Logan? Did I miss any other movies that I didn't list here that I should see? And why didn't you go see Logan Lucky?