Dracula Presents: The Ninth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Best Score
I usually introduce this category by declaring that I’m not really an expert in movie music and that the musical score isn’t often the main thing I focus on when going to a movie, but I kind of feel like I don’t have to do that this year. For one thing Spotify has made it a lot easier to check back in on the year’s best scores to confirm what they’re all about and secondly there were just a whole lot of really good scores this year that jumped out and made their greatness apparent.

Carol:

Carter Burwell specializes in adding a sort of grandiosity to movies that are on their surface rather small-scale and human. That makes him the perfect choice to score a film like Carol where there are huge emotions going on right below the surface but the characters don’t necessarily act on them in overly obvious ways. This melancholic score is driven largely by piano and some strings and has a sort of Phillip Glass, existential angst feel to it, but never feels bombastic and definitely drives the emotional side of the movie home in a big way.

The Hateful Eight:

Quentin Tarantino has made no secret of the fact that he’s one of the biggest Ennio Morricone fan out there and has filled his previous movies with snippets of the legendary Italian composer’s back catalog, but with The Hateful Eight he was finally able to get the maestro to contribute an original score to one of his films. The irony of course is that although The Hateful Eight is a western, it’s not really a spaghetti western, so Morricone had to take another tact and instead drew from his experience scoring horror movies and specifically from his work composing for John Carpenter’s The Thing. The resulting score is a tense and menacing little score that really ratchets up the tension in the locked down cabin the film is set in.

Inside Out:

If there was an award for “best body of work from a composer in a single year” the winner would almost certainly be Michael Giacchino, who’s been on fire in 2015. He also put together some really stellar scores for Tomorrowland and Jupiter Ascending, two movies that frankly weren’t deserving of his talents, but the best of the bunch was probably his work on Pixar’s Inside Out, which is something of a follow-up to his Oscar winning score for the film Up. Like with that movie Giacchino has come up with a great little earwormy ten note theme and builds up a score from there, coming back to this piece with various forms of instrumentation. It’s probably the most traditionally orchestral of these scores and gets a bit more conventional in the second half of the film when the adventure narrative takes over but it has a great whimsy to it and fits perfectly with the film.

Mad Max: Fury Road:

The score for Mad Max was the brainchild of a Dutch composer who goes by the name Junkie XL. Mr. XL is a protégé of and frequent collaborator with Hans Zimmer and the influence definitely shows as this is not unlike the music Zimmer (and XL, in an uncredited capacity) composed for The Dark Knight films in many ways. This is a big and loud score for a big and loud movie, it’s very percussive and has some very really big orchestral hits but also incorporates some cool electronic elements. What really sets it over the top is a driving theme played on strings that seems to ratchet up in just the right moments during various actions scenes.

Steve Jobs:

Easily the most eclectic and experimental of the five nominees, this score by relative newcomer Daniel Pemberton has a lot going on in it. There’s a side of the score which has a number of electronic elements that fits with the fact that this is a movie about people who are immersed in technology, but there’s another part that is actually based in Opera music, which fits in with writer Aaron Sorkin’s aspirations to write Jobs as a sort of tragic figure. The first segment matches the former, the second segment matches the later, and the third segment is a sort of fusion of the two. It’s a score that keeps you guessing and also cannily acts as a sort of metronome during all the witty exchanges.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

I don't remember a thing about Steve Jobs' score. Now, Mad Max on the other hand...

Easily the best score... of 1977.

That's not how you spell Ben "Kylo Ren" Solo.

Best Soundtrack
While many filmmakers prefer to use original scores to add a musical element to their films, some prefer to use pre-existing music. This award is for the best use of pre-existing songs over the course of a movie. Context is key here, I am not basing this on how these soundtracks come off as albums when removed from the movie and I’m also not particularly concerned with whether the music really fits my personal musical tastes so much as how the music fits in the movie.

Carol: As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Carol has a really good score by Carter Burwell, but it also makes great use of period appropriate popular music in order to fill its soundscape. This is a pre-rock era so most of this music is of the traditional pop crooner variety, which is not generally my thing. In fact I would have very little interest in any of this music out of the context of the movie but in context it does a great job of setting the tone of the given scenes.

Dope: Out of all the soundtracks here this is the one that consists of music I’m actually rather fond of outside of its use in the movie. Though the film is set in the present day its characters are obsessed with 90s hip-hop (as well they should be, modern rap is not in a great place) and some of the best golden-age tracks are used throughout. Some of the selections are a bit obvious and I might have appreciated a few more deep cuts, but I like the tracks just the same.

The Martian: When Mark Watney was left behind on Mars he was “lucky” have been left behind some items, including someone’s music collection. Unfortunately that somebody was his commanding officer who happens to primarily be a disco fan and Watney is decidedly in camp “Disco Sucks.” He proceeds to complain about having to listen to the likes of “Hot Stuff” and “Turn the Beat Around” but unbeknownst to him this music is doing a great job of giving the movie about his ordeal a lot of energy.

Tangerine: The Tangerine soundtrack is interesting in that it basically collects a number of tracks but lesser known trap and dub-step artists which sort of gives the film the illusion that it has an original electronic score. The music is rather abrasive and not really my cup of tea outside of the movie, in fact when I tried listening to the soundtrack on Spotify I found I could barely listen for ten minutes without turning it off, but it all blends really well in the actual movie and really gives the film an energy.

Youth: Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth probably has the most eclectic soundtrack of the nominees here but there’s still definitely a consistent aesthetic to the musical selections here. This is a movie about a classical composer and there is some classical music here but also some folky vaguely ambient leaning music courtesy of Mark Kozelek as well as some interesting songs by a group called The Retrosettes Sister Band, which are played live in the movie.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Best Cinematography
Cinematography is one of the more talked about categories of technical achievement and also one of the most visible to the untrained eye. New and weird things are also happening to the field as well. Digital is really truly starting to take over and some movies aren’t even being made with professional cameras.

Beasts of No Nation: Conventional wisdom might have been to make a film about African child soldiers in a sort of grungy documentary-inspired way, but instead director Cary Joji Fukunaga opted to make give this film the same kind or resources that something like Saving Private Ryan or Letters From Iwo Jima would get and part of that was to give it this very slick and expensive look but one that did feel appropriate to this location.

Mustang: This film about five Turkish sisters trapped under the increasingly repressive demands of their Uncle and Grandmother is immensely aided by its visuals which are both beautiful on their surface but also manage to capture a certain child-like gracefulness. Here the camera has this amazing way of filming these girls at their level and seems to almost pick up on their energy. It might not look spectacular in still images (or maybe it does) but in motion it’s really something special.

The Revenant: The fact that The Revenant was shot using natural light has been highly publicized, but that doesn’t really influence this nomination a whole lot. Firstly because it’s not a first for Emmanuel Lubezki (who pulled off the same trick to great effect in Terence Malick’s The New World) and secondly because I wouldn’t have thought any less of the film if it had been done with artificial light, but beautiful results are beautiful results and really it was the smooth but exciting camera movements in the action scenes that really made this work sing.

Son of Saul: This is the only of the five nominees to have been shot on film and also the only one that wasn’t in widescreen. This shouldn’t mislead anyone into thinking that this is some kind of nostalgia piece though because it’s actually some incredibly forward thinking cinematography. The photography itself is, well it would seem inappropriate to call it beautiful given the subject matter but it’s very strong, and the fluid camera movements while having a subject in the foreground so often is really an amazing feat.

Tangerine: Tangerine is not a film whose cinematography would be called “conventionally attractive” but in its own lo-fi punk indie way it has some of the most forward thinking looks in cinema this year. This movie was shot on a damn iPhone… a heavily modified iPhone, but an iPhone none the less. This would seem like a huge hinderence but it seems to free it up to have a sort of improvised mobility that a conventional film shoot. Additionally it has a cool way to accentuating the Los Angeles sun and give the sky this cool glow. I wouldn’t want every movie to look like this but it’s the perfect look for this one.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

The film community needs to get off of Roger Deakins' dick, not every movie he shoots is god's gift to the moving image.

I don't disagree with that at all. But he is awesome.

Total agreement in terms of your winner.