The 2017 Slammy Awards

All the best skylarking in the past twelve months of cinema presented by the Trustees of the Slam Zuckert Institute of Arbitrary Film Opinions

The Slammys: “Come on and Slam”

Official Theme Song:

 

And now, without further ado, Welcome to the Jam.

The “Best Use of a Tall Actor” award goes to…

In a year with many tall boys and girls I am honored to give this first award to Marshall for it’s casting of James Cromwell as the racist and inscrutable judge from the trail of Joseph Spell. Although we don’t get to see Cromwell in all of his 79 inches of glory very often (he spends most of his scenes sitting behind the bench) I can assure you that he is a very tall actor. Plus, look at him in his robe with those colonial bifocals. Do they even have the part that holds it up from his ears? Did he hold them up through sheer will and height alone? Good performances give answers, great performances ask questions, and even small questions are worth being asked, especially by tall actors.

Runner Up:

Tyler Perry in Boo 2! A Madea Halloween because he’s 6’5’’ and why not.

The “Least French” award goes to…

The delightful Brigsby Bear. It flew well under the radar this year but I really enjoyed this movie about a boy who was kidnapped from birth by a deranged couple and raised in an underground bunker with his two kidnappers, never being allowed to leave and his only communication with the outside world was a TV show called Brigsby Bear, which his “dad” created just for him. Then, a SWAT team saves him and returns him to his birth family but by this point he’s 20 and know nothing but Brigsby Bear (all of this happens in the first 30 minutes btw) so he goes on a quest to create a movie based on his beloved TV show that only he has ever seen (this is the rest of the movie). As you can guess it’s quite wacky but very funny and surprisingly heartfelt. One thing it was not, however, was French. Not French in the slightest.

Runner Up:

Patti Cake$. A movie about a schlubby woman trying to make it as a rapper from New Jersey is also decidedly not French.

The “Your Budget Was Way Too Big, You Should’ve Donated the Rest to a Charity and Made the Movie Worthwhile” award goes to…

Justice League for spending $300,000,000 on this dull and middling superhero film.

Runner Up:

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 for spending $200,000,000 on a film that was 90% the same as the first one. They could have just switched out the 70s jams for other 70s jams and re-shoot a few green screen scenes with Chris Pratt and would have had basically the same movie.

The “Most Likely to Piss off Trump Supporters” award goes to…

Trump supporters tend to like encouraging racism, maintaining the patriarchy, supporting wealthy individuals in their pursuit to exploit the labor of the poor, devaluing the humanity of people who immigrate to America, and ignoring truths that challenge their preconceived notions of the world so this award has to go to Dolores, a loving documentary about Civil Rights hero Dolores Huerta. She founded the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez and spent her whole life fighting for the rights, well being, and dignity of others…so naturally there is nothing Trump supporters would enjoy less than having to watch a documentary about her.

Runners Up:

Marshall (Trump supporters disdain people fighting for Civil Rights), I Am Not Your Negro (Trump supporters would hate James Baldwin if they had the gumption to read him),  Crown Heights (Trump tends to believe that any black person accused of a crime is guilty so I can’t imagine his supporters would enjoy a movie about an innocent black man, imprisoned due to systematic racism, fighting for his freedom), and A Ghost Story (this movie is just really really slow and I feel like most Trump supporters would get frustrated by this plodding, 90-minute meditation on relationships and regret).

The “Most Likely to Please Trump Supporters” award goes to…

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Runner Up:

The Founder because McDonald’s.

The “Intellectually Dunk On” award goes to…

Everyone who tried to debate James Baldwin in I Am Not Your Negro. Most of them were able to keep a straight face as he dismantled their arguments point by point but inside you have to imagine they were shaking in their boots as Baldwin would drive to the intellectual lane, rise up, put his knee into their chests, and rain down thunderous dunk after thunderous dunk of knowledge directly onto their heads.

Runner Up:

All the smarmy NASA people who couldn’t calculate two equations if they had a TI-84 but still thought they were better than Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and everyone else who played unglamourous but crucial parts in taking this country to the goddamn moon.

The “Most Likely to Inspire [Author’s Father] to run for Political Office” award goes to…

Oh man, please do Dad I will call press conferences every day and put all your speeches and policies in a coffin. I’ve always wanted to see a candidate’s kid come out and just roast their candidate-parent for the whole campaign and I guess sometimes you gotta be the change you want to see in this world, right?

Runner Up:

The Disaster Artist. 

The “Best Western© Award for Best Western” goes to…

While not technically a western I think I have to give this award to The Lost City of Z for it’s indomitable spirit of adventure. The movie follows Percy Fawcett in his journey to discover a lost metropolis in the jungles of modern day Mato Grosso and while at times I found it to be a bit slow I think the spirit of the western adventure lives on through it.

It’s based on a true story reported in the New Yorker and then a full book by David Grann and it’s worth noting that the New Yorker article that spawned the book and movie is incredible and probably the best New Yorker article I’ve ever read. It’s long, 58 pages printed out, but well worth the effort. Exciting and informative with bonkers twists and turns throughout, I cannot overstate how much I enjoyed reading it. Check it out: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/19/the-lost-city-of-z

Runner Up:

Ingrid Goes West I guess? I mean, she goes West, so it counts right? I didn’t see a ton of westerns this year. Maybe if I saw Dark Tower I could include that but from what I’ve heard about that movie I hesitate to use “best” anything in relation to it.

The “Most Notable Performance by an Animal/Best Non-Human Actor/Actress” award goes to…

The dog from It Comes at Night. It knew what was up the whole time.

Runner Up:

Roosevelt the tortoise in Lucky. Watching David Lynch ruminate over Roosevelt, who ran away in a daring escape, was one of my favorite running movie gags this year: this is a link

The “Aww, that was nice” award goes to…

The beginning and end of Coco (the middle, while excellent was kinda intense and less aww-inducing). As if there was ever any doubt, Disney/Pixar has given us another wonderful film about family and following your dream.

One of my friends whose family hails from Mexico told me that they even animated a bunch of famous Mexicans and placed them in and around the background of all the crowd scenes without trying to drawn any attention to them, just letting people find them if they know them. But then again this friend also has a tendency to play jokes on me so he may have told me this fun fact hoping I would repeat it to someone else whose family was Mexican only for them to be like “what are you talking about paleface?”…So take this tidbit with a grain of sal I guess.

Runner Up:

The first half of The Florida Project; the fun, kids getting into summertime mischief part before the movie becomes a heartbreaking snapshot of the burdens of poverty in the US.

The “Piece of Dialogue most likely to enter the vernacular at some point in the future” award goes to…

What else could it be but “The Sunken Place” of Get Out fame. A succinct yet robust way to describe the experience of having someone else hijack your consciousness for their own malevolent purposes. It’s flexible and catchy and has been starting to gain some traction on some corners of the internet. I expect to see more and more people referred to as being “in the sunken place” in the not so distant future.

Runners Up:

The Shape of Water and Atomic Blonde for both using the phrase “unfuck” (as in “unfuck this mess!”) which I find to be just delightful. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “unfuck” in a movie but yet this year it pops up twice, what momentum!

The “Most on the Nose Award for a Movie About a Sexual Predator, written/directed/starring a sexual predator,as an homage to another sexual predator” award goes to…

I’m supposed to give this one to I Love You, Daddy, right?

The “Best use of a nuclear submarine in a car chase” award goes to…

Fate of the Furious?

The “Good Time Award: Best Movie With the Name Good Time. I Loved Good Time” award goes to…

And this one to Good Time? I thought about instituting a “no movie-specific award category” rule this year but the Slammys are for the people and the Slam Zuckert Institute of Arbitrary Film Opinions has strict bylaws that instruct us to give the people what they want.

The “Most Menacing Performance by Michael Shannon” award goes to…

Michael Shannon in Pottersville. Suck on that The Shape of Water, your menacing Michael Shannon has nothing on this film about a kind-hearted small-town general store owner who dresses up as Bigfoot to quench his wife’s thirst for excitement. Yes this is a real movie, yes it came out in 2017, yes Michael Shannon is in it (and so is Ron Perlman!), and no I have no idea how it got made. Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQmsRLaUiTE

Runner Up:

Michael Shannon in The Shape of Water.

The “You Almost Handled ___ Social Issue Well” award goes to…

The often enjoyable but profoundly confusing Colossal for its portrayal of alcoholism, relationships, and gender dynamics. I really dug the concept of this movie, Anne Hathaway waking up from a night of binge drinking to realize that she is accidentally controlling a 100-foot tall monster in Korea, but the movie gets in over its head when it starts to get heavy and tries to tackle these more serious topics. It almost found its way but never quite got the balance between wacky monster movie and social comedy right.

Plus I didn’t like the ending. One thing that’s great about fiction is that you can create worlds with vastly different rules from the world we actually live in but when a movie creates rules then drastically changes them/ randomly adds new ones it lessens the impact the whole story. I won’t spoil it but Colossal added an insane new rule in the climax that felt cheap to me and that’s why I’m sour.

Runner Up:

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, MO for its muddled racial message. They brought up police violence against black Americans a lot but most of the time it was a crutch for the protagonist to shit on the police, which she was doing for unrelated reasons, or to crack jokes at…maybe the police’s expense? I couldn’t really tell. While it was a dry acknowledgement of the issue there was no real statement or message or thesis behind it so it ended up being a distracting sideshow to the movie which was already basically one big distracting sideshow. So perhaps it was intentional so who knows.

The “Worst and Best Sequel/Reboot/Adaptation into a Series/Reboot of a Series” award goes to…

The underwhelming Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I mean, some people like it apparently but I thought it was kind of dull and ham-fisted and now it closes a million doors and opens a million and one and they have like 19 years of Star Wars planned ahead whether they get better or not. I love a good series as much as the next person but this Star Wars story line has pretty much run its course for me. Unless they get Justin Timberlake in there and he convinces Kylo Ren and Po to sing a parody folk song, that’s the kind of universe crossover I can get behind.

Runner Up:

The Circle. Enough Dave Eggers adaptations already, stop ruining the books plz.

The “Hot Take that Aged the Worst” award goes to…

The plot of Beauty and the Beast. 2017 might not have been the best year to put out a movie about a romance between a young woman and a beast-man who keeps her prisoner in his castle.

Runner Up:

Ingrid Goes West. Any movie that centers around social media is going to be dicey but I think Ingrid was particularly clumsy with it. I won’t ruin the climax but I don’t think it has a positive message for all us social media-weiding youth running around.

The “Most Egregious Pandering to X. Solve for X” award goes to…

Tautological wording aside, I’m going to follow the spirit of this award and give it to Dolores for it’s intolerable pandering to people who care about the well being of others. It’s like, we get it, she spent her entire life fighting so others could have a better life, shove a sock in it already. Take that libs.

The “Least Plausible Action Sequence” award goes to…

The scene in Star Wars: The Last Jedi when a bunch of little ships are attacking the big ship and then the woman who turns out to be the sister of Rose gets murked but she still has time to drop the bombs from her ship into the big ship. When she releases the bombs they all fall down like they would on a planet with gravity, but they’re in space! What gives? Nuclear submarines I can forgive but violating Newton’s First Law I cannot abide by.

Runner Up:

That nuclear submarine madness from Fate of the Furious. I’ll forgive but I won’t forget.

The “Bad Bitch Contest: Who’s in First Place?” award goes to…

You. You in first place.

Well, that’s that. Thank you everyone for joining us and I hope you had fun at this year’s Slammy Awards! Have a great night, drive safe, and I look forward to you joining us next year where I’m sure I’ll spent 90% of the time gushing about Steve McQueen’s Widows.  

Slam Zuckert is a municipal bureaucrat. He sees a lot of movies and reads a lot of books and sometimes writes about them. His favorite movie is There Will Be Blood, his favorite mathematician is Georg Cantor, and his least favorite mathematician is Leopold Kronecker.