Looking back on the most iconic movie moments, the worst excuse to reboot a franchise and the weirdest gratuitous nudity.
It's a stroke of impossibly perfect timing or, y'know, it only makes sense that one of the most unpredictable years in history has produced a truly unpredictable year at the movies. Sure, we saw the expected, inevitable reboots and remakes and sequels and threqueels, and then the superhero franchise reboots and remakes and sequels and threequels (Spider-Man: Homecoming! Justice League), but this wild year is also one that started with La La Land winning an Oscar then not winning the Oscar because, actually, Moonlight won the Oscar and ended with approximately half the men in Hollywood being fired.
In between, 2017 offered up so many wonderful movies that the impending awards season is shaping up to be -- you guessed it -- truly unpredictable. There were other movies that were definitely...choices. (The Accountant? Fifty Shades Darker? The Emoji Movie?) Below, we look back at some of the best, worst and weirdest moments of the year that was.
Best
Most Iconic Movie Moment of 2017: The "No-Man's Land" sequence in Wonder Woman. If movies really were wish fulfillment, Wonder Woman would have been wearing a pantsuit in this scene and using her magic bracelets to delete the president's Twitter account, but this was close! Watching an armor-clad Gal Gadot strut across the battlefield to single-handedly defeat the Germans was not only epic, but emotional. It was exactly what the f**k we needed to see this year.
Most Iconic Movie Line of 2017: So many movie writers wrote so many quotable movie lines this year -- "I'm Mary Poppins, y'all!" "Bring me the anatomy book." "Lick my ass, Diane. She can do a f**king triple." -- but the best, as scripted by Get Out writer-director Jordan Peele, has to be, "I'm TS-motherf**kin'-A. We handle sh*t. That's what we do. Consider this situation f**kin' handled."
Best Sex Scene Involving a Fruit: Call Me By Your Name. A hormonal teenager plus a peach that, yup, looks as much like a butt as emoji have led us to believe results in one of the most talked about movie moments of the year, an undeniably sensual, playful scene that Timothée Chalamet and director Luca Guadagnino have mentioned on more than one occasion you can do at home, too!
Best Sex Scene Involving a Fruit (Runner-up): Girls Trip. Tiffany Haddish plus a grapefruit results in our second most talked about movie moment (in which a sex act is performed on a fruit) of the year, hands down one of the boldest, most ridiculous and ridiculously funny scenes dared shown in cinema. (Do not try this one at home.)
Best Trailer for a Movie That Comes Out in 2018: Black Panther. And that's saying something, because if you're going to pick a Marvel movie -- and Marvel does know how to get us AMPED(!!!!!) with a trailer -- you're hard-pressed not to pick Avengers: Infinity War. Alas, that trailer did not have Angela Bassett in an African headdress. Fingers and claws crossed the movie lives up to our hype.
Worst
Most Unnecessary Sequel of 2017: Transformers: The Last Knight. And there were so many unnecessary sequels to choose from! (Like Daddy's Home 2, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and Smurfs: The Lost Village.) The Last Knight, the fourth sequel in a franchise that's had four too many sequels, takes the cake for being both a bad movie and having the gall to be 154 minutes long.
Worst Excuse for a Reboot: Baywatch. And there were so many reboots to choose from! (Dishonorable mentions to CHIPS, eesh, and The Mummy, which killed an entire cinematic universe before it even had the chance to become a cinematic universe.) Baywatch in concept is not a bad idea for a reboot, but the execution was so misguided, despite having franchise-maker Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron's abs and a Pamela Anderson cameo. Ultimately, it was a comedy that did not make me laugh even one time.
Worst Way to Get People Excited for Your Sequel: Even a year ago, the idea of Frozen backlash would be inconceivable. Everybody loved Frozen! Yet, ahead of the -- at one point -- anxiously awaited Frozen 2, Disney found out exactly how much Olaf is too much Olaf when the studio included the short Olaf's Frozen Adventure ahead of Coco. Short is used loosely here, as it was a whopping 21 minutes long, the length of a network sitcom, and was swiftly yanked from theaters.
Worst Use of CGI: Superman's digitally removed mustache in Justice League. You hate to kick a movie when it's down, but the special effects used to remove Henry Cavill's mustache were upsetting, to say the least. (Cavill had grown a mustache for Mission: Impossible 6 and was contractually obliged to not shave it off when he went back for reshoots.) Instead, Cavill's mouth looked uncannily plastic and like he'd taWLK shpliKE ThwIS. Digitally adding a mustache into his other scenes would have been less distracting. Superman would probably look cool with a 'stache.
Worst Timing of a Movie, Ever: I Love You, Daddy. If there were a poster movie to encapsulate all of the troubles in Hollywood this year, it is I Love You, Daddy, a movie about a sexual predator made by -- whaddya know?! A sexual predator. No one'll ever have to relive the horror show of 2017, though, since a week before the movie's release, Louis C.K. admitted he masturbated in front of unwilling women and the movie was scrapped.
Weirdest
Most Unexpected Murder Weapon Used in More Than One Movie: Mushrooms. First, in The Beguiled, when Nicole Kidman's antebellum school marm used poisonous mushrooms to off Colin Farrell (because he was mad she amputated his leg). Then, again, in Phantom Thread, in which Vicky Krieps' character nearly kills Daniel Day-Lewis by intentionally feeding him deadly shrooms, only for him to recover and her to do it again. (Though, to be fair, the second time was sort of sweet.)
Weirdest Movie Meal: When they ate the baby in mother! If you never saw mother!, you likely read that sentence just now and thought to yourself, "What the f**k is mother! about?" But if I told you -- that it's about the Bible and climate change and Jennifer Lawrence's unbraced sink -- would it make a difference? Yes, Lawrence's character gives birth to a baby (Jesus, right?), and he gets eaten. Get it? Like communion! Go watch mother!
Weirdest Use of Rihanna in a Movie: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. Rihanna will play a hacker in next year's Ocean's 8 and I'm like, of course. Obviously. That checks out. Meanwhile, in Valerian, Rihanna was cast as a galactic cabaret performer (that part makes sense! Stay with me!) who turns into a gooey blue-y alien shape shifter. Essentially, after a striptease number, Rihanna is playing her character from Home. Typecasting is real.
Weirdest Movie Kiss: Michael Fassbender kissing Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant. I wish I could remember the precise details of how this comes to be -- it involves Fassbender playing two roles as two different androids and, uh, also a flute -- but come for the Xenomorphs and stay for the Fassbender-on-Fassbender action.
Most Unexpected Gratuitous Nudity: The Hulk's butt in Thor: Ragnarok. We keeeew we would see Chris Hemsworth with his top off -- and we do, as Thor relaxes with every one of his abs flexed, just like you or I might do. But no one could have seen this coming: Mark Ruffalo's Hulk (as his big green half, not Bruce Banner) gets out of a hot tub and shows off just how thicc he is. What a year for movies!
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