A 2017 Movie of the Week Review

One movie a week for an entire year. We made it. There have been good movies and bad movies and so, so many in between. And we’ll get to some “best of” and “worst of” looking back on the movies that we watched in 2017, but for a moment, let’s peel back the curtain at how the movies were selected. To be fair, we made several adjustments and tweaks to how the movies were selected as the year progressed, but for the most part each month, one reviewer would select a movie for all of us to watch. If there was an extra month, we would usually take turns with the extra month unless there was a reason that someone wanted to pitch a specific movie to be watched on a specific week. It’s not a perfect system as there were several exceptions to the aforementioned rules, but it’s enough that we can look back at the picks and see who had the best and worst picks this year. (Note: The ratings of each movie are mine (Joel’s) and the other reviewers are free to make their own ratings if they feel mine vary too far from their sensibilities.) Below are all of the movies we watched this year with a star rating for each (out of 5 stars)

Zootopia *****
Coin Heist **
Sing Street *****
Princess Bride *****
The Jungle Book ****
Man Up ***
Chasing Amy ****
The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby **
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves ****
The Usual Suspects ***** 
Tig ****
Shakespeare in Love *****
Imperial Dreams ****
The Iron Giant *****
Comet **
Working Girl ***
Team Foxcatcher ****
I Am Your Father **
Nerdland *
The Discovery **
Tropic Thunder ****
Battered Bastards of Baseball *****
Glengarry Glen Ross ****
Oh Hello **** 
Enemy of the State ***
War Machine ***
Mudbloods ***
Exam ****
Win it All **
Look Who’s Back ****
Best Worst Thing That Could Have Happened ****
Frailty ***
The Founder ****
Lion ***
Best in Show ****
III The Ritual *
Sausage Party *
Quiz Show ****
Lost in La Mancha ****
Death Note **
It Follows ****
Little Evil ***
Extraordinary Tales ***
Sleeping with Other People ***
Toys **
Jiro Dreams of Sushi ****
Spotlight ****
Mudbound ***
Rogue One *****
The Dinner *
A Christmas Prince ***
Bright **

 So now, the question is, who picked the best movies this year. On average this is the star rating of each of the reviewer's picks

 Alexa - 3.6
 Alexa seemed to play it the safest this year, often picking movies that already had a great deal of critical acclaim or something that was already a bonafide classic that some of us just hadn’t gotten around to seeing yet. Either way in any given month, Alexa’s movie was the one that was most likely to at least get a thumbs up on a thumbs up/thumbs down scale. Alexa was also the only one of the reviewers to never pick a one star movie this year. (You might also argue that Alexa’s score is artificially inflated because I gave A Christmas Prince three stars when many would say it’s the worst movie she picked this year, but I still maintain it’s a movie that succeeded in every one of its goals.)
Best Pick - The Iron Giant
 Worst Pick - The Discovery

 Joel - 3.4
Speaking for myself, I swung for the fences this year. Every one of my movies was one that I hadn’t seen before so I could offer no personal guarantees of quality before we watched them. This ended up backfiring just as often as paying off, which means that I ended up with a lot of picks that would be considered interesting if not quite good.
 Best Pick - Battered Bastards of Baseball
 Worst Pick - Nerdland

 Chris - 3.2
 Chris had the widest range of quality of any of us. He had the most five star picks, but also the most two star picks as well. At times Chris was also more interested in reviews of a certain movie than the actual movie itself (see his Sausage Party review) but he had enough sure things in his pick list to be able to safely make up for those.
 Best Pick - Rogue One is cheating so I’ll say The Princess Bride
 Worst Pick - Sausage Party

 Jason - 2.3
 It’s worth noting that Jason didn’t start reviewing and picking movies with us until halfway through the year which means that he had fewer data points than the rest of us. This means that a bold choice that doesn’t work out ( While I still applaud the attempt) is going to hurt his score a lot more than the rest of ours.
Best Pick - Exam
Worst Pick - III The Ritual

 Finally, there is one interesting trend that I wanted to point out. Everyone who picked a Netflix Original movie ended up having that movie hurt their score. (save for one or two documentary exceptions) While we had this idea to explore Netflix’s movie library as they become more and more focused on television shows, it’s clear that Netflix is not yet the movie powerhouse they are on the television side of things, and from the looks of things, there’s still a long way for them to go.