10 Lessons Learned from the 2017 BBFC Annual Report

I’ve waited long and hard, but Christmas for Emma has arrived! The BBFC Annual Report for 2017 dropped today, and here are the ten main takeaways I got from consuming it!

01. Emma knows her BBFC

Just as I’d predicted in my anticipation blog, the film which got the most complaints to the BBFC last year was Logan. 

The Worst Acting Performances of 2017 [10 - 6]

Now that awards season is all wrapped up, it’s time for this blog to slowly wave goodbye to 2017 and start looking ahead to the 2018 cinematic year! As part of that slow wave goodbye, I will celebrate the best and worst of 2017 according to me! 

We shall start with the worst acting performances. Here was 2016’s worst performances list for reference. I unfortunately had to throw shade at Jesse Eisenberg, one of my favourite actors, in last year's Hall of Shame. I'm glad to report he reined his Lux Luthor in a lot in Justice League, and thus, avoids making the list a second year running. Phew!

10. Daisy Ridley, Murder on the Orient Express

Although the Star Wars actress is very pretty, has a nice screen presence and seems like a lovely person, she was far too lightweight in the role of Mary Debenham. The film is set in the 30s, and Ridley’s character is secretly having a relationship with Dr. Arbuthnot (Hamilton’s Leslie Odom, Jr). Such are the outdated attitudes of the time towards inter-racial dating, that Debenham and Arbuthnot have to keep this, as well as their involvement with the murder of Johnny Depp’s character on the train, under wraps.

Statistical Analysis of the 141 films I watched in 2017, with BBFC analysis.

Just like last year, when I put my hard-earned coding skills into practice by analysing all the marks I’d awarded every film I watched in 2016, I repeated the process again this year.

The arithmetic mean of the 141 films was 6.64, a fractional increase from last year, meaning that my discernment skills to have improved slightly. That being said, the lowest mark out of 10 I gave last year was a 2, whereas I gave 1/10 to two films this year, and zero out of 10 to one, Darren Aronofsky’s bloated stinker, mother!, which is the worst film I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and featured that movie ingredient that I am so averse to: Jennifer Lawrence screaming her head off.

The Times' review of MOTHER! (Darren Aronofsky, 2017).

Uploading Kevin Maher's review of the polarising Mother! because The Times has a paywall. (click on the image for enlargement)

Although I've not yet seen the film, the closing paragraph sums up the pseud that is Darren Aronofsky (a man who's work I've uniformly despised, bar the decent The Wrestler) remarkably well, I feel.