The end of 2017 turned out a number of very good movies.
The Oscar nominees for Best Picture include some exceptional examples
of creative visual storytelling, thought-provoking messages
and themes that reflect our world
on a deeper level than we might even realize at first.
So let's dig in and take a look
at what's most innovative and striking
about some of the year's best pictures.
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Now, back to the Oscars.
Director Guillermo del Toro has said Shape of Water
is his personal favorite out of all the films he's made.
[It's the movie I like the most that I've ever made.]
[I think it's the best movie.]
It's also one of his most popular --
adult audiences might find it revitalizing to be spoken to
in the cinematic language of fairy tales, but about mature themes.
[It's a fairy tale for troubled times.
It's an adult fairy tale.]
So this is not an escapist fairy tale --
it's a fairy tale that reflects history
and the present with brutal honesty.
[Some of the best minds in our country-]
[peeing all over the floor in this here facility.]
[There's pee freckles on the ceiling!]
[How do they get it up there?]
Del Toro is exposing the fact that many classic fairy tales
are actually pretty disturbing when you look at them closely
Here instead, del Toro is choosing to lean in that darkness and complexity.
Underneath his pristine early 60s setting,
Del Toro is revealing that our nostalgic images of that era
tend to be idealistic fantasies that gloss over the wickedness
and conflict in our country's past.
Meanwhile, Del Toro's showing us that you can talk about these
serious adult themes through beautiful cinematic forms --
imagery that expresses the magic and wonder
that are also part of our lives.
Just because we're all grown up,
our stories don't all have to look like Office Space.
And Del Toro's earnest love of cinema, and what the medium can do,
is evident in every frame.
The director has said that as a kid when he watched
Creature From the Black Lagoon, he was surprised and sad
that the creature didn't get the girl in the end.
[I hoped they'd end up together, but they didn't.]
The Shape of Waterâ€˜s joyful interspecies romance makes us
look back at some of those older movies with new eyes.
The film urges us to ask if some of these â€œmonstersâ€ of the past
were actually misunderstood or wrongfully demonized.
So it's sending a larger message about
how marginalized people in our society get villainized
by our collective stories written by the â€œwinnersâ€ of history.
[The thing we keep in there, is an affront.]
[And I should know I've dragged that all the way here.]
And the story's subtly empowering those characters who are different,
it's framing them as agents of progress -- on the right side of history.
One pattern we can see in a lot of Oscar-winning movies
is that they often feature characters who refuse to fall in line with
society's expectations.
Even more importantly, those characters surprise us.
They don't fit neatly into the character types and repeat the same clichÃ©s
that we might expect going into a movie.
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has this suprise quality in spades.
The surprises in Three Billboards come from within people, within ourselves,
and it's thanks to really nuanced performances from Frances McDormand,
Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson that we buy such extreme turnarounds
from these characters in the relatively short length of a movie.
We're surprised that Mildred's badass fury is really a very tender grief.
And we're surprised when we see in flashbacks
that her anger also preceded her daughter's death,
and complicated her ability to show love all along.
[I hope I get raped on the way!]
[I hope you get raped on the way too.]
Chief Willoughby surprises us (and Mildred)
by responding to her personal attack on him with compassion and humor.
[I thought it'd be funny, you having to defend â€˜em]
[a whole nuther month after they've stuck me in the ground.]
Meanwhile, Dixon is the biggest surprise of all,
when he proves that underneath the total numbskull,
there's a potentially good person.
[I'm sorry I got your hopes up.]
[It's alright.]
Throughout the film also shocks us in how it uses edgy, daring humor,
which many people feel is one of the best things about it.
[Hey, (bleep)-head!]
[What?]
[Don't say â€˜What', Dixon, when she comes in calling you a (bleep)-head.]
The lesson of the film again catches us off guard
in how positive it is -- the glimmer of hope we see
is that the characters are finally learning to be more compassionate
and to accept kindness from those around them.
[Be nice to her, Charlie.
You got that?]
They come to understand that when we fuel our anger,
we end up distancing ourselves from the connections we crave.
Director Martin McDonough named the fictional Missouri town â€œEbbing,â€
which makes us think of ebbs and flows,
and in the film we see anger gradually ebbing or recedingâ€¦
and in its place there's a resurgence of loving kindness.
So both Three Billboards and The Shape of Water
are trying to address the state of our country today,
but they couldn't be more different in the way they go about it.
Three Billboards takes a sharp head-on approach
through incorrect humor and furious characters
driving a confrontational plot.
[This don't put an end to shit, you (bleep) retard,]
[this is just the (bleep) start!]
Meanwhile The Shape of Water is reaching us
almost in the way a dream does --
when we're dreaming, our defenses are down,
and we absorb the meaning of the dream
without understanding everything consciously.
One of the great powers of cinema is that it has the ability
to penetrate us emotionally in the same way.
[You ain't trying to make me believe in reincarnation or something, are ya?]
[Well, you're pretty, but you ain't her.]
Get Out is a masterful social horror
in the tradition of The Stepford Wives and Rosemary's Baby.
It draws on the greatness of those past classics
to produce a wholly original and much needed social commentary for our times.
[Black is in fashion!]
The title comes from an Eddie Murphy comedy bit,
about how a black character would immediately leave a haunted house
as soon as they noticed something was off.
[The black family comes into a haunted house --]
[I think it's Eddie Murphy --]
["These drapes are great."]
["GET OUT!"]
["Too bad we can't stay, baby."]
The implication is that a black person has to be hyper-aware
of the danger in this world just to survive,
whereas the horror genre is built around naive,
blindly trusting characters.
So by putting a black character centerstage
in a horror movie which's dealing with these questions,
Get Out is subtly revolutionizing the genre.
Zadie Smith pointed out that the film
gets a lot of its power from inversions,
which are a strong source of both social insight and comedy.
So from the start, the story inverts the old clichÃ©
of white characters locking their car doors or getting nervous
when they find themselves in a â€œbad neighborhoodâ€ .
Instead, Get Out starts with a black man walking
through a picturesque suburb and we feel the tense...
it's reminding white people that they can be the scary ones.
[When there's too many white people, I get nervous, you know?]
What's so subversive about the film is that
the target of the satire is white liberals.
[By the way, I would've voted for Obama for a 3rd term if I could.]
[The best president in my lifetime, hands down.]
These are people who would be shocked at being called racist,
who probably think of themselves as pretty â€œwoke,â€
[You don't have to give him your ID because you haven't done anything wrong.]
who are the very ones watching this movie and loving it.
[He was saying the joke about â€˜I would have voted for Obama three times.']
[The new version of that is â€˜I've watched Get Out three timesâ€ .]
But the movie's revealing that these same people
might have deeper internalized prejudices that are pretty terrifying.
When it comes down to it, many people are willing to
go to great lengths to preserve their privilege,
no matter what their surface-level politics are.
[Your existence will be as a passenger.]
[An audience.
You will live inâ€¦ The Sunken Place.]
All of this makes Get Out a landmark film in so many ways.
The most famous LGBTQ love stories to date
tend to have a tragic tone and focus on fighting a homophobic world.
[No...
No...
No!!]
Meanwhile famous heterosexual movie romances
are full of aspirational scenes emphasizing
the beauty and desire of a couple discovering each other.
So what's striking about Call Me By Your Name is
it depicts a relationship between two men
in the style of a classic movie romance --
with joy and luxurious sensuality.
And in doing this, it sends a powerful emotional message that â€œlove is loveâ€ .
[Love is love is love is love.]
The romance in Call Me By Your Name is in fact so aspirational
that it's almost an over-the-top bourgeois fantasy.
The leads are both extremely handsome and sophisticated and charming,
spending their summer lounging in this ridiculously beautiful Italian villa.
Call Me By Your Name is set in the 80s, but the setting also feels timeless,
exempt from the forward motion of the rest of the world.
We see this in the way that anthropology and history
are woven into the story...the shots of the ancient statues
are playing up the beauty of the male form,
and they're also subtly recalling a time in history
when it was socially acceptable for a man
to publically take younger male lovers.
[Not a straight body in these statues, they're all curved,]
[Sometimes impossibly curved, and so nonchalant.
[Hence, their ageless ambiguity, as if they're daring you to desire them.]
We escape into this very free, educated community
where everyone speaks multiple languages and is reading all the time.
Or else may be playing the piano, swimming, or eating a salt boiled egg.
It's a kind of temporary idyllic paradise.
A Utopia.
Some people have actually criticized this film for not being political enough --
Director Luca Guadagnino has said,
â€œI didn't want the audience to find any difference or discrimination
toward these characters.
It was important to me to create this powerful universality.â€
But there may be a deeper, subtly political message
in what Call Me By Your Name doesn't say and in its idealistic quality.
The story is set in the early eighties
which was right around the time the AIDS epidemic was beginning in the U.S.
So it's as if this was a kind of innocent time
when two men could have this kind of relationship,
without having to face the tragedy that was to come soon after.
Guadagnino is planning to make a sequel that picks up in the late 80s
and actually touches on the AIDS epidemic.
So Call Me By Your Name gives us a kind of beautiful calm moment
before any of that -- and we sense that the whole reason
Elio and Oliver can have this joyful relationship is because
they're in the bubble of this open European society,
in the shelter of Elio's accepting parents.
Meanwhile, the obstacles to their relationship
are very much present -- they're just internalized and offscreen.
So by the end we see that this fantasy has to end.
Oliver has to go home and be closeted again
because he believes that he must.
Most of all it's truly in the universality of the romance
that Call Me By Your Name sends its biggest message --
it's a coming of age story that anyone can relate to.
It's about Elio's sentimental education,
and how he learns that both pleasure and pain make life worth living --
and by the end we feel like we've learned these lessons first hand with him.
[Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once.]
[And before you know it, your heart's worn out.]
Next up, stay tuned for part II, where we analyze
what's most striking and innovative about the rest of the
best picture nominees.
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