"I cannot start my day with a confrontation" The 2017 ILX Film Poll Voting Thread - Ballots Due Sunday, March 4th at 7pm EST.

Rest assured: I'll do what I can to get A Quiet Passion, The Ornithologist, or The Lost City of Z up there.

Same, plus Personal Shopper and Nocturama

I can't think of anything better 2017 movies than the 5 just mentioned there.

does L’Économie du couple count as a 2017 movie?

Personal shopper feels like it came out ages ago (I still haven't seen it)

I thought it was brilliant, and along with Nocturama and A Quiet Passion it will be my top 3.

Of the following films, which are eligible:

Toni Erdmann, Certain Women, Personal shopper, elle, the handmaiden,the love witch, hell or high water

I think you'll find that at least three of those 'placed' last year, but hey everything's eligible

so i encourage votes for any and all Welles films

Last year's results, fwiw ...

Toni Erdmann	475	18
Manchester By The Sea	379	15
American Honey	300	10
Moonlight	297	11
Things to Come	271	10
Paterson	247	11
Cameraperson	244	9
Embrace of the Serpent	239	10
Certain Women	223	8
Elle	216	9
O.J.: Made in America	209	6
Silence	206	9
Love & Friendship	186	9
The Handmaiden	185	8
Cemetery of Splendour	178	5
The Witch	168	8
Arabian Nights	165	5
I Am Not Your Negro	163	7
Green Room	160	8
Hell or High Water	143	8
The Assassin	143	5
The Neon Demon	141	7
I, Daniel Blake	137	6
Son of Saul	129	5
Hail, Casear!	118	5
Victoria	115	6
A Bigger Splash	114	4
Mountains May Depart	112	4
The Other Side	111	4
The Measure of a Man	108	4
Hunt for the Wilderpeople	92	6
Weiner Dog	91	4
Everybody Wants Some!!	85	5
Little Men	85	5
Childhood of a Leader	83	3
Knight of Cups	83	4
Fire At Sea	82	4
No Home Movie	82	4
Sunset Song	82	3
The Death of Louis XIV	81	3
Loving	77	4
20th Century Women 76	5
Arrival	73	5
Sieranevada	72	2
The Fits	71	4
Jackie	70	4
High Rise	69	3
The Lobster	68	4
Sing Street	66	3
Anomalisa	65	3
Maggie's Plan	65	3
Indignation	63	3
Tower	63	3
Pearl Button	62	2
Rams	57	4
De Palma	56	2
The Love Witch	56	2
Zootopia	56	3
Our Little Sister	50	3
The Club	47	3
Eisenstein in Guanajuato	46	2
Aferim	45	2
La La Land	42	2
Train to Busan	41	2
A Quiet Passion	40	1
Being 17	40	1
Visit or Memories and Confessions	40	1
Weiner	39	2
Chevalier	38	2
The Woman Who Left	38	2
Deapool	37	2
Under the Shadow	37	2
When Marnie Was There	37	2
White Girl	36	1
Tale of Tales	35	3
Dirty Grandpa	33	1
Julieta	33	2
Mustang	33	2
The Nice Guys	33	1
The Red Turtle	33	2
Remainder	32	2
My Golden Days	31	3
Happy Hour	30	1
Kubo and the Two Strings	30	1
Nocturnal Animals	30	2
Standing Tall	30	1
Hypernormalisation	29	2
Right Now, Wrong THen	29	2
The Illinois Parables	29	2
Captain America: Civil War	28	1
Cosmos 28	1
Scarred Hearts	28	1
Keanu	26	2
Nothing Left Unsaid	26	1
The Greasy Strangler	26	1
The Wialing	26	1
Evolution	25	2
Ixcanul	25	1
Kate Plays Christine	25	2
Men and Chicken	25	2
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping	25	2
Supersonic	25	1
Swiss Army Man	25	1
Couple in a Hole	24	2
In the Last Days of the city	24	1
Lemonade	24	1
Mapplethorpe: Look at Pictures	24	1
Queen of Katwe	24	2
Triple 9	24	1
Into the Inferno	23	1
Mimosas	23	1
The Edge of Seventeen	23	1
The Invitation	23	1
A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery	22	1
Aaaaaaah!	22	1
Author: THe JT LeRoy Story	22	1
Christine	22	1
Florence Foster Jenkins	22	1
Passengers	22	1
The Treasure	22	1
Dog Eat Dog	21	1
Kaili Blues	21	1
The Son of Joseph	21	1
Tickled	21	1
Your Name	21	4
Histoire(s) Du cinema 20	1
The Ornithologist	20	1
Girls Lost	19	1
The Hateful Eight	19	1
Don't Think Twice	18	1
Neruda	18	1
Not Film	18	1
10 Cloverfield Lane	17	2
Aquarius	17	1
Creepy	17	1
Eat That Question: Frank Zappa...	17	1
King Jack	17	1
Nocturama	17	1
Serena	17	1
A Town Called Panic: Back in School	16	1
El Sur	16	1
I Am Not A Serial Killer	16	1
Louder than Bombs	16	1
The Jungle Book	16	1
Doctor Strange	15	1
Don't Blink	15	1
In the Shadow of Women	15	1
Captain Fantastic	14	1
Harmonium	14	1
Le Fils de Joseph	14	1
My Friend from the Park	14	1
Neon Bull	14	2
Other People	14	1
February	13	1
Star Trek Beyond	13	1
Sully	13	1
Janis: Little Girl Blue	12	1
Sweet Bean	12	1
Hacksaw Ridge	11	1
Halfway	11	1
Microbe and Gasoline	11	1
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki	11	1
The Sundial Carved with a Thousand...	11	1
Uncle Kent 2	11	1
American Pastoral	10	1
JLG/JLG	10	1
The United States of Love	10	1
Godless	9	1
King Lear	9	1
Sweaty Betty	9	1
Cafe Society	8	1
One Sings, the Other Doesn't	8	1
The Untamed	8	1
In the Realm of the Sense	7	1
Papusza	7	1
The Last Family	7	1

I see The Death of Louis XIV got some votes last year.

This year too

Yeah thanks I knew I'd voted for some of those last year but they definitely didn't get a British release til this year

Perhaps we should make something that placed in the previous year ineligible for the following. I dunno seems unfair on some but I don't wanna vote toni erdmann film of the year 2 years running eg (tbh I might have it at 2 or 3 this time around but still)

Has anything got votes 3 years running yet?

Perhaps we should make something that placed in the previous year ineligible for the following.

I strongly disagree w/ this. I purposely didn't vote for Toni Erdmann last year because I knew I would want to to vote for it in this year's poll, 2017 being the year it got a cinema release in Britain and the year that I first saw it.

I also didn't get to see Scorsese's Silence until the very beginning of 2017, but I didn't include any of the staggered release movies that I also loved in early 2017 (Julieta, Toni Erdmann, Elle). I guess I go by Oscar qualifications, cf. Personal Shopper, which came out in the USA in March 2017 and didn't qualify for the Oscars despite opening in many other countries in 2016. And yeah honestly I feel like putting Twin Peaks in is fishy, as much as Lynch says it's one long movie it's not, it wasn't made for the cinema, it was made for television. I still put it on my ballot because this is a message board poll and I loved Twin Peaks and ultimately idgaf but it's definitely not the same as Fanny and Alexander, which had a 3 hour theatrical cut released to theaters in America before anyone had access to the TV version. anyway

Perhaps we should make something that placed in the previous year ineligible for the following.

I strongly disagree w/ this. I purposely didn't vote for Toni Erdmann last year because I knew I would want to to vote for it in this year's poll, 2017 being the year it got a cinema release in Britain and the year that I first saw it.

― Agharta Christie (Ward Fowler), Sunday, 4 February 2018 20:46 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag

I'm cool with that but it means I'm going to vote for a few films I voted for last year

Toni Erdmann WON last year? i am getting better at forgetting the results of these polls almost instantly.

these slo-mo releases are a good argument for delaying such decisions til July.

sonotgonnahappen.jpg

Poll sent!

Ballot sent!

You guys are voting so early! Have you seen everything? There’s still time to watch some good stuff by female directors:

My Happy Family
On Body and Soul
By the Time It Gets Dark
Berlin Syndrome

I have a ballot ready to go, but I'm holding off sending it until March 1st or so.

I can't see The Florida Project until February 20, so I have to wait until then at least.

But, seriously, those four I listed are very good. I don't want to be the only one who votes for them!

I def wanted to see On Body and Soul when MUBI was showing it but I didn't get round to it. Missed By the Time It Gets Dark in its one week run. Sadly there is only so much time.

I put The Nothing Factory in my ballot.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/28/the-nothing-factory-review-unconventional-workplace-drama

This was like a summation of a lots and lots of political cinema of many colours, and its very knowing on how boring as well as exciting a lot of it was.

You guys are voting so early!

I always think of this as a poll of the films I saw in 2017, so in theory could have submitted my vote on Jan 1st. There's always next year's poll!

I put The Nothing Factory in my ballot.

I avoided this because the Glasgow Film Theatre booklet compared it to Gomes' The Arabian Nights, which I largely disliked, but based on your description I regret that now.

Its miles better than The Arabian Nights, whose 1st part I caught and also despised (oh they are both Portuguese and left-wing! So bloody lazy).

It's very much in the same tradition as Arabian Nights, a tradition that goes from Antonio Reis and gives so many Portuguese films such an ethnographic dimension. There's a bunch of Portuguese documentaries a lot like it, and you see aspects of it in Pedro Costa and Joao Pedro Rodrigues as well, just to name two other major Portuguese filmmakers.

Pedro Costa has a completely different rhtyhm and his films are the result of a specific project and even a politics (there is much empathy for the poor and it delves into Portuguese history and colonial history but its also very resigned about it all as well).

no Ward, no. eg, Phantom Thread is not a 2018 film, not no way, not nohow.

UK Release Date: Friday 2 February 2018

pish tosh

Just looked through the list from last year. I'm voting for at least four that got votes last year.

Also noticed that one of them, Eugene Green's The Son of Joseph, got one vote in English and one in French! Let's consolidate our votes this year, Green fans. Pick a language!

Tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of the premiere of The Son of Joseph. Great film.

It is great, and the most openly comic film of his I've seen. Of course there's comedy in all his films, and obviously Le monde vivant was pretty silly, but this one is classic farce.

"How do you feel about hipsters?"

"I hate them."

"Me, too!"

The Nothing Factory was some hot, flaming bullshit, and this is from someone who thinks Arabian Nights is one of the best films ever. To compare them is criminal. If you want to watch a film that will clumsily attack you for daring to watch it, for three fucking hours, be my guest. Dismal

And yeah, of course I'm aware the effect was intentional. That doesn't mean that the execution was good or that I'm happy to have been subjected to it

If you compiled all the scenes that took place outdoors then you'd have a decent ambient short tbf

Glad I'm holding my ballot. I've seen Good Time and Nocturama so far this week.

Really, really happy you hated The Nothing Factory, Louie. Tell me you didn't walk out? That's even better.

Or if you did please tell me it was around the 20+ min scene of the Capital I-intellectuals talking around the dinner table. I knew one or two ppl would walk at that and right enough.

Oh I stayed till the end, buddy

I'm aware the Intellectuals bit was meant to be satirical, but the point was so heavy-handed. 'film attacks its own bourgie audience' has been done, oh, very slightly better ;)

Some people did indeed leave during that bit btw

It wasn't satire. Its partly a play on some of the 60s/70s political films. Mainly and basically though talking about what is going on should be fine for the audience -- who are mostly educated (in the sense they come in with some familiarity with Marxist texts and current affairs) -- they ought to be staying with it. Especially given what happened later.

Every one of its intellectual flourishes was subsequently deflated - seemingly on purpose - but not in good ways. We are shown how the main guy is a horrible prick to his wife, the musical bit is a daft contrivance, the workers' discussions go in futile circles. Some of the actual theory was sound but nothing new - the rest felt like antagonism. For a film about the Struggle it really didn't seem to have many answers

It doesn't pretend to have any answers and you should not start looking for it ina film (you basically look for edgy stuff - hence the ambient comment - anyway). The worker discussion is documentary and it's exactly the kind of thing you should be listening to. They seized the means of production. Musical functioned as a break and it often has a part in certain political films.

Guy being a horrible prick to his wife is your male feminist logging on.

God knows how Fred is gonna sort this out.

Why would I sort it out? I saw it in a competition of debut films, I thought it was a promising but flawed film that seemed fairly typical of Portuguese cinema.

Just thought you had all the answers, that's all.

Weekend Bump

Saw and was inspired by too few new films to vote, though they didn't include Get Out or The Work or The B-Side or, I expect of greater relative interest to me, Mudbound or BPM or Ex Libris or The Four Sisters. I typically enjoyed the half-Varda and to a lesser degree Soderbergh and Winterbottom, but found them less interesting slight returns to somewhat familiar territory (same for the 2016 Assayas, which I saw that year too, though it might be worth a second look), and the Grateful Dead movie I more than willingly sat through four hours of was as advertised both long and a little strange but not quite a trip. Lady Bird was not without its minor charms, but I suspect I would have enjoyed a lot more with Gerwig rather than Ronan in front of the camera, and ultimately I was tempted to deem it the vaguely-indie coming-of-age-comedy cognate of the comic-book/sci-fi films whose artistic merit appears to have been inflated by whatever cultural importance there may be in their being helmed by and/or starring women and/or African-Americans, less interesting or substantive than, say, the more adult Columbus. Same goes for The Florida Project, which I found too aggressively awful in content, milieu, and lack of any particular point I cared to discern to be attentive to the extent to which it may have been well made by anyone other than the adult leads. While I'd felt similarly about previous McDonagh work, the somewhat-accidentally-seen Three Billboards felt sufficiently meatier in its storytelling and mild convention-subversion to overlook the complications and light weight; I suspect Wind River probably was too. The Hong movie seemed a bit more interesting than those I'd seen previously, but not enough to bother me that I was dragged out of it early on content grounds. My favorite 2017 film (excluding 2016s not seen in that year like Cameraperson or especially Robinson Devor's fairly compelling Pow Wow) was probably The Other Side of Hope, which felt most of and responsive to the moment.

February. I realize there's this compulsion for some to see everything before drawing up a list, but it's just a poll. If you miss something this year, you catch it next year. In general, I hate the modern tendency to rush everything--record and film reviews now, opinions now, year-end lists in early December--but February is perfectly reasonable. A year-end poll in June seems silly to me.

June was a proposed compromise against the much-loved July poll of this year

I thought June was fine esp as a counterbalance to October year end polls

Do it in Feb w/ the Oscars

i guess we won't know who made the real five-baggers unless oscar tells us

June

yeah June, fionnland has a good point about it breaking up the glut of lists/polls this time of year. and those movies that don't make it out of new york or la by march 2019 might be someone's favorite, it's happened to me. but oddly this is the first year ever where I've seen everything of note (except Cold War). somehow everything made it here by the end of the year. but this is the first time this has happened to me 15+ years after leaving new york.

February is perfect for me, personally. It gives me time to go to Gothenburg and catch up in January, and it means I get the list-making over with as the new festival year begins in Berlin. But ok, if the rest of you want to wait until June, I guess that's what we'll do.

ftr

Really, the solution is to always do the poll in late July so nearly everything that opens on one continent the previous year will have had 7 months to spread, like a social disease.

― Dr Morbius

Actually rather agree with the late July idea

― imago

Yeah I was gonna say we should do this in the middle of the year every year to avoid these double placements. I live in a mid-sized city in the USA and often get less than half of the prestige/quality art house films until early the next year, often going all the way into March.

[...]

Certain Women came out in Europe in March 2017, and was released on home video in June. this could've been avoided & could be in the future by delaying the poll til mid-summer

― flappy bird

Agreed that we should put off voting until at least July for the previous year.

― WilliamC

counterpoint:

thought about watching Coco before voting; too busy watching Twin Peaks

― Dr Morbius, July 2017

Morbs hasn't finished watching Twin Peaks yet, so if we hurry we can counteract any objections bcz he's obv still too busy to have watched any 2018 releases

I'm making a vaguely concerted effort to catch up w/ some now-on-streamings at the moment (Madeline² last night), and Shoplifters is coming to a tiny indie in late January, so I'm expecting to be happy both to vote and to run the poll in February (cutting off votes before the Oscars, rolling out a week or so after). But nobody in the delayed results thread this year argued against the expanded catch-up time!

April maybe?

as a compromise

Feb please. June was a one-off.

et tu Whiney

There was a thread recently where there was some debate over when the year-end film poll should be. I thought it would have been here, but I guess not.

Anyway, I wanted to run a political-film poll this summer. Is is possible for the year-end to be over and done with before then?

ayo clemenza

maybe not over and done before the summer, given the fairly whelming opinion to wait ages, but before July?

clicks "submit post," leaves flat to go and see a movie postulating that evil monsters could take over American politics and society by infiltrating the media

I think we should start April 1

That'd be fine, thanks. I'll be retired by then anyway, so really, it doesn't matter.