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The Conservatarians welcome Sonny Bunch to count down the best films of 2017, along with Ricochet Editor-in-Chief Jon Gabriel and FoxNews.com contributor Stephen Miller. Sonny is executive editor of the Washington Free Beacon, writes a weekly column for the Washington Post, and co-hosts the Weekly Substandard Podcast.
Our intro and outro music is “Screenwriter’s Blues” by Soul Coughing. To listen to all the music featured on The Conservatarians, subscribe to our Spotify playlist! You should also subscribe to this podcast and give it five-star, glowing reviews on iTunes.
Metacritic’s Top Five Films of 2017
5. Dunkirk
4. The Florida Project
3. Call Me by Your Name
2. Lady Bird
1. Get Out
Sonny Bunch’s Top Five Films of 2017
5. Wind River
4. Wonderstruck
3. The Florida Project
2. Blade Runner: 2049
1. Dunkirk
Stephen Miller’s Top Five Films of 2017
5. Logan
4. The Disaster Artist
3. Dunkirk
2. The Big Sick
1. It
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I have a special connection to The Room and The Disaster Artist, as my mom is the actress who played Claudette in the original film. At the premiere my sister sat next to Greg Sestero (I was living in Colorado at the time and could not attend). According to them, Franco’s movie is pretty spot on.
According to mom, she advised the other actors, “Don’t worry, this will go straight to video, sit on a shelf collecting dust and be forgotten. Just cash the check and put it on your resume.” After the film became a cult hit, one of the actors told her, “You lied!”
Classic
Blade Runner 2049 is essentially the original Blade Runner with 30 years of sci-fi clichés added: the rustbucket future, the dastardly villains, the obligatory resistance movement. I confess, as the film got progressively more and more melodramatic, I was literally laughing out loud. Fortunately it also got more and more noisy, so I didn’t bother anybody.
Wonderstruck, er, struck me as basically a well-meaning kids film, except that it is too slow-moving for kids. (Movie reviewers tend to like dull movies, I’ve often noticed.)
Wind River features the customary racial correctness; which most people don’t notice precisely because it’s so commonplace. That is, I’m sure Native American girls are raped and murdered as often as the film suggests, but we can be very confident that in virtually all cases the perpetrators are Native Americans living in the same community, not white interlopers.
Even more far-fetched, the guilty parties, instead of lawyering up, choose to go to war with the FBI and the Federal government.
Get Out is another example of racial correctness. (It reminds me of the scene in Roman J. Israel in which the black protagonist is mugged on a New York City street, by a white man.) If the black and white characters were reversed in the film, it would be denounced as racist.
The Florida Project: You have to read a lot into it (that isn’t there) to call it “heartbreaking”. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but there is no reason to suppose that the little girl is doomed for life, though changes are coming.
The Big Sick slows down a great deal in the second half, when Zoe Kazan’s character, the romantic lead, goes into a coma. The film has to be carried by the comedian who wrote the screenplay, based on his life, and he simply lacks the charisma.
I enjoyed this quite a bit, thank you! What did Stephen do that he was locked in some sort of metal-walled bunker for this episode?!