The heads of prominent Dallas and North Texas Film Festivals announced their selections for the Top Ten Films of 2017 during WFAA’s Midday at 8 news broadcast today with Edgar Wright’s BABY DRIVER, Jordan Peele’s GET OUT, and Guillermo del Toro’s THE SHAPE OF WATER taking the top three spots among films released in 2017.
I was wrong and I was wrong because it is so very easy to be wrong as a male in this arena. It is so incredibly easy to think of me first. It is beyond easy to not consider everything that vitally needs to be considered simply because I have a penis. It is a painful admission to make even as I seek to correct it and do better.
Those films are going to make the “Make America Great Again” crowd (which everyone knows is actually code for “Make America White Again”) stop for a moment and reflect and decide that they shouldn’t be tacitly saying, “We’re okay if you eliminate (read, “kill if you have to, but by all means force to leave the country”) all the blacks and Jews as long as we get those clean coal jobs back like you promised.”
Do we dare to watch? Do we dare to look at women’s brains? No matter how ambitious, how whimsical, how inclusive or exclusive, how morbid or light, how vapid or cerebral? Are we willing to embrace the cynicism? The bluntness?
In honor of the wonderfulness of Patty Jenkins’ WONDER WOMAN, this group of films has a loose connection of amazing women, including; the incredibly underrated director that Ida Lupino was (THE HITCH-HIKER), a “I’m having more fun than I should be allowed” performance by Glenn Close in THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS, a Marilyn Monroe double feature, one of Julie Andrews’ somewhat less-heralded favorites (for me at least) gems (THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY), as well as an extremely late-to-the-party screening of ROGUE ONE.
