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Post by Dracula on Feb 5, 2017 10:21:02 GMT -5
For those who weren't here when I did this in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 this is part of a tradition of year-end rituals I put together each year and I'm ready to go through with this once again. Basically what I want to do here is post one category a day for four weeks. The First week will be scene based categories (best chase etc.), The second week will be technical awards (best editing etc.), The third week will be acting awards, and the last week will be genre awards and will culminate in Best Picture which will be announced in a top ten format. These awards will be entirely based on my opinions, but I don't plan to have this being an entirely self-indulgent pursuit. I hope that each category will lead to discussion and that people will find themselves playing along and giving their opinions about these various categories. So, without further ado I'll give out the first of the scene based awards: Best Fight
I usually start my personal awards with this category which chronicles a year in cinematic pugilism. Fight of the year looks at a scene in a 2016 movie which focuses on a melee fight either between two people or one person and a group of foes without much in the way of long range weaponry. Knives, swords, super powers are all fine, but it shouldn’t be a shootout and scenes where there are tons of combatants on both sides should probably be pushed to the set-piece category. Batman V. Luther Thugs – Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice: Batman V. Superman was quite the mess, but there were certainly elements of it that suggested that it could have been really awesome with a little more care. This moment in particular showed how it could go from the ridiculous to the sublime in an instant given that it came almost immediately after the infamous “Martha” moment. In it, Batman uses all his usual tools to break into a warehouse and take down a whole bunch of Lex Luthor’s thugs in some of the illest ways imaginable. Captain America and The Winter Soldier Vs. Iron Man - Captain America: Civil War: Captain America: Civil War was sold largely on its centerpiece battle in which multiple superheroes faced off against one another, and that was cool, but the scene which really lived up to the prospect of a civil war among heroes was the film’s final fight in which things get personal. The fight sees Iron Man fighting mano a mano with Captain America and his BFF and after any hope of reconciliation dissipates things get intense fast. Monkey Vs. Karasu – Kubo and the Two Strings: About half way through Kubo and the Two Strings Kubo finds himself having to dive into a lake to find a magic doohickey, and while he’s doing that his Monkey sidekick needs to fight off his evil aunt Karasu on board his ship. What follows is this really fast paced fight between the two of them with the monkey wielding a katana and Karasu using a chain/scythe combo. Given that stop motion would seem to be such a sluggish medium, it’s particularly impressive that Laika was able to make this scene as fast and fluid as they did. “Stay Down” – Moonlight: Not all great fight scenes need to be exciting action scenes. This key scene during the middle section of Moonlight in which Chiron is seemingly betrayed by his friend/paramour after said friend find himself pressured to play a game called “knock down, stay down” by the school’s bullies. Chiron ends up getting hit, trying to stand back up, and getting hit again as he’s ordered to “stay down.” This kind of set up could be played as triumphant if that’s what a movie called for but here it is Chiron’s lowest moment, a moment that would propel him to never be put in that position again no matter what the cost. Quicksilver Vs. Apocalypse – X-Men: Apocalypse: The critical consensus was that Oscar Isaacs was “wasted” as Apocalypse in this X-Men sequel, but I do think that having a great actor beneath all that makeup did clearly improve this little fight within a fight in the movie. In the scene the heavily over-powered quicksilver starts to use his signature time stopping speed to start punching the super-villain around but as he does this Apocalypse does not panic. Instead he takes a second to see how he’s going to find a way out of this situation, catches the character’s foot in the ground, then proceeds to break his damn leg. And the Golden Stake Goes to…
And here I go killing my credibility with the first award... Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice
 Do not mistake this choice as a suggestion that I’ve soften on this movie, because I haven’t, it’s still one of the worst movies of the year. However, I do believe in giving credit where its due and this was definitely an action scene worth recognizing. Batman uses both brains and brawn to take out all these guys and the fight itself feels like its choreography comes straight out of something like The Raid or John Wick. I’m a long supporter of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, but even I’m willing to admit that none of the comparable fight scenes in his films matched the intensity and craft of this five minutes of gold at the center of what is otherwise one of the biggest disasters of recent memory. |
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 5, 2017 10:54:13 GMT -5
Woooo golden stakes. Tenth annual, huh? Damn, feel old?
Also I think you probably made the right choice for the category. Cool to see Moonlight get a nod here.
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 5, 2017 10:56:43 GMT -5
I found the comic movies very lackluster this year, and I dont even remember the Batman fight you are talking about.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 5, 2017 11:14:10 GMT -5
Tenth annual, huh? Damn, feel old? Kinda I found the comic movies very lackluster this year, and I dont even remember the Batman fight you are talking about. |
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Post by Neverending on Feb 5, 2017 11:47:54 GMT -5
I dont even remember the Batman fight you are talking about. How could you forget the best fight of the year: |
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 5, 2017 12:15:46 GMT -5
Yeah, didnt remember that one.
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Post by Neverending on Feb 5, 2017 12:17:44 GMT -5
Yeah, didnt remember that one. Poppycock |
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Post by Dhamon22 on Feb 5, 2017 12:51:52 GMT -5
I would've went Moonlight or Civil War. Or maybe the opening fight in Doctor Strange if that counts.
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Post by Neverending on Feb 5, 2017 13:15:47 GMT -5
I would've went Moonlight or Civil War. Or maybe the opening fight in Doctor Strange if that counts. Batman is always the right answer. |
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Post by Dracula on Feb 5, 2017 22:46:08 GMT -5
Best Shootout
While the fight and chase categories are pretty consistently strong year in and year out, the shootout category can very pretty significantly by year. This year might be a bit of an off year but there are some pretty decent choices just the same. As usual, a shootout is defined as a fight between one or a few people using firearms. Large scale war and battle scenes are generally pushed to the set-piece category, but where the line gets drawn is a little murky. Church Shootout – Anthropoid: Anthropoid is about a covert group of spies that parachuted into Czechoslovakia during World War II in order to assassinate a high ranking Nazi. After doing this they hold up in a church until the heat dissipates but they’re betrayed and soon have Nazi’s swarming in to take them out. Rather than surrender the agents decide to go down fighting and take up defensive positions. As the Nazi’s flood in they must do everything they can to take out as many of them as they can. Hell or High Water - Sniper Scene: Hell or High Water has been called a western, and yet if I recall correctly I don’t think a single person gets shot or killed until pretty late in the movie. Following a bank robbery gone wrong this scene finds the wild Ben Foster character literally heading for the hills and taking a sniper position to distract the police away from his brother. He makes a number of wild shots, but he is able to take out one character in shocking form before he is himself put down. It’s not as kinetic as a lot of shootout scenes but the suspense to it and its effect on the characters makes it stand out.
Hotel Shootout – The Nice Guys: This shootout which serves as the climax of Shane Black’s The Nice Guys lacks the density of gunfire that some of the other shootouts here might have, but it makes up for it with attitude. In it our heroes are jockeying for a MacGuffin film reel and shooting various henchmen who get in the way of them doing it. It’s a witty little scene which plays itself out very differently from, say, a Michael Mann shootout through its various visual gags and humorous dialog bits.. Attack on the Enterprise – Star Trek Beyond: If you watch the original Star Trek show it’s amazing how rarely they actually shoot anything on it, they’re always getting into the corny old west style fist fights. Times have changed though and our Star Trek stories have grown increasingly martial over the years. This scene is paired with a larger sequence of the Enterprise being assaulted by a strange swarm of alien ships and has the enterprise crew must ward off a boarding party that has beamed over for mysterious reasons. Inciting incident - A War: This scene from a Tobias Lindholm’s A War is very different from most of the scenes that would be nominated in this category both in form and impact, but it’s worth considering just the same. In the scene a group of Danish soldiers in Afghanistan find themselves pinned down by gunfire outside an Afghan building. They try to return fire but don’t know where the enemy is or what to do. Finally the commanding officer orders a possibly reckless airstrike, one that will have major ramifications. And the Golden Stake Goes To…
Anthropoid
 This shootout is impressive both for what it is and also for what it isn’t. This “go down with your boots on” mentality can easily be moved into very unpleasant and jingoistic direction but somehow Sean Ellis manages to avoid that and play this in a way that finds a more genuine nobility into this self-sacrifice. A lot of this has to do with the tone they achieve both through the conflicted performances of the actors and the dark score by Guy Farley and Robin Foster.
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 6, 2017 10:01:05 GMT -5
I haven't seen Anthropoid or A War so I have little frame of reference for judging this category. Thinking on the year, Hell or High Water was probably the best shootout I saw all year, although The Nice Guys earns a lot of points for providing a scene which made me laugh so much.
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Post by Dracula on Feb 6, 2017 19:29:06 GMT -5
Best Musical Performance
I casually brought this category, which deals with scenes where a song is performed onscreen by the characters, into existence in the first Golden Stakes and kind of came to regret it ever since. Modern movies don’t really have a lot of musical performances in them so often I need to stretch to even find five eligible sequences, but that wasn’t the case this year. In fact I actually needed to make some tough cuts in order to get the final list. Worth keeping in mind, this category is looking at the scenes as whole entities including staging, placement in narrative, and novelty and not necessarily just the quality of the music itself. “No Dames”: Hail, Caesar: Leave it to the Coen Brothers to get the idea of paying tribute to Hollywood musicals some nine months before doing so would be deemed cool. This scene sees a film within a film being made involving a song and dance sequence where a bunch of Navy sailors sing about the fact that they won’t have the company of the fairer sex while deployed. It immediately becomes clear to the viewer that this song and dance they’re performing has a lot of seemingly unintentional homoerotic undertones and is filled to the brim with sexual innuendos. That’s funny and a sly little statement about the “Celluloid Closet” of the era, but it’s not a lazy parody either. The singing here is solid and the tap dance choreography is actually pretty impressive by the standards of “real” musicals. "Another Day of Sun" - La La Land: La La Land is odd in that it kind of becomes less and less of a musical as it goes but it certainly opens with a bang. This opening scene has a bunch of frustrated Angelinos spontaneously get out of their cars and sing a showtune. The scene is shot so as to make it look like it’s done in one shot and they apparently blocked off an actual overpass in order to make this happen. I don’t necessarily love the song and I think the sound mixing is a bit off, but it’s clearly bravura filmmaking that can’t be ignored. “You’re Welcome” – Moana: When submitting songs for the Oscars Disney opted only to get behind the epic ballads, but to me it was Moana’s uptempo and comical songs that best played into Lin Manuel Miranda’s lyrical abilities. The particular standout is this song sung by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Maui as he humblebrags about all his accomplishments. There is of course a certain perversity to writing a song in which a literal god is a bit of a dick about having created the universe, but this also manages to be a fun way to get some exposition about the character’s past accomplishments out there. “Drive it Like You Stole It” - Sing Street: One of my main complaints about Sing Street is that the music seemed a bit too good to be coming from a rag-tage group of fifteen year olds. One of the arguments its fans have made against that accusation is that the music isn’t “really” that good so much as the movie is presenting the image the kids have in their heads of how good they are. For most of the movie I don’t find that persuasive, but something like that clearly is going on in this scene in which the band reherses a pretty damn good song and imagine their dream scenario for how the gig will go complete with better costumes and various characters from the movie accepting them. “The Greatest Love of All” – Toni Erdmann: Late in the film Toni Erdmann our heroine reluctantly finds herself at a party with her father when he sits down at what sounds like a cheap Yamaha keyboard and starts playing the chords to this incredibly cheesy song made famous by Whitney Huston. After some coaxing our heroine goes along and begins singing a rendition of the song quite skillfully given the circumstances. The movie doesn’t explain it but it’s not hard to recognize that this is a routine that this father and daughter must have rehearsed when she was a young girl and this experience is taking her back and the lyrics seem oddly applicable to this woman’s situation. And the Golden Stake Goes To…Moana
 This song and sequence is just so damn fun. It’s also notable for how it’s presented on screen. This song starts out like a fairly standard scene (for an animated movie) of him singing to Moana, but as the song goes on the film breaks the fourth wall little by little until we get to the end and island background makes way for these neat backgrounds which are meant to look like they incorporate these physical items. It’s also serving the sly little point of distracting the audience much as it distracts Moana leading to the point where he straight up says in his lyrics that he’s going to screw over Moana and you’re too dazzled for this to even register until he’s locked her in a cave.
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Post by Neverending on Feb 6, 2017 20:03:38 GMT -5
I've had "You're Welcome" stuck in my head since November.
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Post by Dhamon22 on Feb 6, 2017 21:01:26 GMT -5
Great year for the musical performance category. "Drive It Like You Stole It" all day for me.
Hell or High Water for shootout.
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Post by Dracula on Feb 7, 2017 7:38:53 GMT -5
Best Chase
The chase scene has been a cinematic tradition going way back to the early silent era and it’s this tradition that we celebrate with this category. The traditional car chase has long been the staple of this category but this year the dominant format is actually the foot chase. Four of the five chases here are conducted by people moving on their own two feet, albeit sometimes aided by superpowers, and the one chases done with cars is hardly what you’d call traditional. Tunnel Chase- Captain America: Civil War: This is something of a hybrid chase in that, while it’s primarily a foot chase, there are a couple of different vehicles involved. It starts at the top of a building before the Winter Soldier drops down to a lower building pursued (for different reasons) by Captain America and The Black Panther, and then descends into a busy tunnel. Eventually Captain America gets into a car but finds The Black Panther clinging to it and The Winter Soldier eventually gets a motorcycle. There’s a lot going on there, but it’s a fun lead up to some of the crazier action scenes that would come later. Kaleidoscope Foot Chase – Doctor Strange: We got a taste of what the trippy magic of the world of this movie during a chase that opens Doctor Strange, but we wouldn’t really get the full dose until about the two thirds point when Strange and Mordo find themselves pursued by the bad guys though a city sized mirror dimension. The villain twists and turns the city skyline in all kinds of crazy ways as the heroes try to escape. A decidedly unique take on the foot chase which is one part Inception and one part The Matrix Reloaded but all with that Marvel sheen. Pickup Chase- Hunt for the Wilderpeople: This sequence from Hunt for the Wilderpeople is less of an action scene and more of a comedy scene, but the people in the middle of it don’t seem to have gotten the memo about that. Ricky for one seems to think he’s going to “go out in a blaze of glory” but the real over-reactor is the CPS worker after him as she’s managed to wrangle a dozen some cop cars, two helicopters, and a damn military vehicle to chase down a simple missing child who doesn’t want to be found. It’s not the biggest or most excited chase scene King Louie Chase – The Jungle Book: In remaking The Jungle Book for the 21st century John Favreau made the decision to change the character of King Louie from the mostly harmless “king of the swingers” seen in the original into a more openly malevolent figure. This results in a chase scene where he pursues Mowgli into an ancient ruin and corners him, but his recklessness proves his undoing as he breaks too many of the temple’s columns and the building collapses in on him. It’s a cool little chase that actually reminded me a bit of this one level from The Shadow of the Colossus. Weasel Chase – Zootopia: This chase scene is an excellent example of how fun the world building in Zootopia can be and also of how the movie plays around with the usual conventions of the “cop movie.” In it, the rabbit cop protagonist finds herself right in the vicinity of a bank robbery right as the weasel who committed the robbery is fleeing the scene and she begins her pursuit. This brings both of them into a section of the city for small rodents and both pursuer and the pursued have King Kong like dimensions in this neighborhood leading to amusing hijinks. And the Golden Stake Goes To…
Doctor Strange
 The use of 3D probably puts this one over the top. That might not be fair since I saw the other four in 2D, but that format seemed uniquely suited to the trippy kaleidoscope effects that the movie employed. There are other elements that help it stand out as well though, like the fact that it takes the time to include an above average Stan Lee cameo and the fact that it ends on a fairly pivotal stand-off. Mainly though it’s just the scenes overall creativity and over the top nature that gives it this.
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Post by FShuttari on Feb 7, 2017 8:45:59 GMT -5
oh man good choice for Dr. Strange. Quite trippy movie, worth every penny in IMax 3D
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Post by Dracula on Feb 7, 2017 19:35:55 GMT -5
Best Use of Source Music
The use of source music is a category dedicated to a movie’s ability to use pre-existing music in interesting ways. Diegetic, non-diegetic, whatever works works. This has been a particularly strong year for source music in movies and I needed to make a lot of hard cuts in order to get to this set of five songs in movies, but I think I got a pretty solid slate out of it. “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen – Aquarius: Aquarius is a movie about a music critic, so you knew there were going to be a couple of good needle drops going in. The best of these is almost certainly this moment in which our protagonist has to deal with a raucous party going on in the apartment above her (a deliberate attempt to drive her nuts) and her response to sip some wine and put on this classic Queen song in order to drown out the noise. It’s a rather temporary solution, but it gives her a moment of personal triumph even if no one else is there to see it. “Strange Fruit” by Nina Simone – The Birth of a Nation: “Strange Fruit” is an incredibly important song in American history. It was originally about early 20th century lynchings, but it applies just as much to the pre-Civil War era depicted in Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation. Played late in the film after Nat Turner’s rebellion has been quashed and the reprisals against African Americans have begun, the song serves as a sort of requiem for all the victims. The song is normally associated with Billie Holiday, but the decision to instead use Nina Simones slower tempo and more minimalist version worked excellently in the film. “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang - Everybody Wants Some!!: Movie sing-alongs have long been a sort of shorthand for group comradery and this is taken to something of an extreme with this scene from Richard Linklater’s latest film where our protagonists do an almost choreographed sing-a-long routine to what is basically the first rap song to break into the mainstream. Unlike something like “Tiny Dancer” this is a song with a whole lot of lyrics, and the fact that these guys seemed to have this routine almost completely memorized suggests that they’ve listened to it a million times. This is of course a song that would mark the emergence of a legendary new music genre, but in Texas in 1980 it was just a fun tune that these guys were happy to sing along to. “Camelot" (reprise)” by Richard Burton – Jackie: The musical “Camelot” is intrinsically tied to the Kennedy administration and assassination in American pop culture history almost entirely because of the interview depicted in the film Jackie, so the song’s presence in the film is not exactly a surprise. However, I do think that the way this song is finally used in the film is still a very clever and impactful moment, in part because the movie is all about the tension of whether or not the “Camelot” interpretation of those years is a lie or whether there was some deeper truth to it. By putting the song at the very end of the movie, Pablo Larraín gives Jackie the last word and suggests that he doesn’t mean to completely deflate the “myth.” “Go West” by The Pet Shop Boys- Mountains May Depart: Jia Zhangke’s Mountains May Depart is all about that filmmaker’s ambivalence about China’s embrace of western capitalism and given this the decision to bookend the film with The Pet Shop Boys’ cover of The Village People’s “Go West” is fascinating an brilliant. The film begins in 1999 with the cast in the middle of an exuberant line dance set to the song, suggesting that their excited to embrace western modernity, but by the end of the film most of that youthful excitement is lost even if our heroine still has enough energy to do one last dance along to the song. And the Golden Stake Goes To…
Mountains May Depart
 The original recording of The Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West” was recorded in 1993, not long after the fall of the Soviet Union and can in some ways be viewed as a reaction to that major world event in part because the vocals in it have a vague whiff of sounding like they’re being sung by a Russian military choir or something. In some ways that could also be implied as a sort of requiem for China’s true communist past but it doesn’t really sound like either a celebration of this change or as a mourning for the past. In other words it’s the perfect song for what Zhangke is trying to say with the film, and it’s also an earworm to boot.
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 7, 2017 22:34:41 GMT -5
This year had awesome uses of Van Halen, Metallica, Motorhead, and Slayer, and you ignored them all. The Metalhead in me is crushed.
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Post by Dracula on Feb 7, 2017 22:39:24 GMT -5
This year had awesome uses of Van Halen, Metallica, Motorhead, and Slayer, and you ignored them all. The Metalhead in me is crushed. Only one of those I recall off the top of my head was the Metallica song in X-Men: Apocalypse, which struck me as a bit of an on the nose joke. I was closer to nominating the use of "Sweet Dreams" from that movie. |
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 7, 2017 23:18:41 GMT -5
This year had awesome uses of Van Halen, Metallica, Motorhead, and Slayer, and you ignored them all. The Metalhead in me is crushed. Only one of those I recall off the top of my head was the Metallica song in X-Men: Apocalypse, which struck me as a bit of an on the nose joke. I was closer to nominating the use of "Sweet Dreams" from that movie. Free hint, the Van Halen song is also the name of the movie. |
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Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2017 5:44:45 GMT -5
Only one of those I recall off the top of my head was the Metallica song in X-Men: Apocalypse, which struck me as a bit of an on the nose joke. I was closer to nominating the use of "Sweet Dreams" from that movie. Free hint, the Van Halen song is also the name of the movie. I don't even remember that actually being in the movie. I definitely think I picked the right music moment from EWS!! |
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Post by Deexan on Feb 8, 2017 7:48:19 GMT -5
Free hint, the Van Halen song is also the name of the movie. I don't even remember that actually being in the movie. I definitely think I picked the right music moment from EWS!! You did; that was an awesome moment. |
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Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2017 8:15:06 GMT -5
Best Set-piece
Best Set-Piece is a strange little category which is basically meant to be a catch-all for what are big impressive sequences in movies, but which don’t really fall into my three other action categories and which aren’t mere character scenes or musical sequences. It’s also a place where I’ll put action scenes which sort of straddle the line between some of the other categories. Airport Battle - Captain America: Civil War: The scene that Captain America: Civil War was largely sold on was a battle royale at an evacuated German airport in which almost all of the established Marvel heroes face off against one another over the fate of The Winter Soldier. This fight employs a cornucopia of superhero fight moments including Ant-Man entering into Iron Man’s suit and sabotaging it, Scarlet Witch pulling cars out of a parking ramp, War Machine being shot down, and of course Ant-Man surprising everyone and becoming Giant Man. Basically the scene comic geeks thought Hollywood would never be able to give them. Dog in the Car – Don’t Breathe: Don’t Breath is largely a suspense based thriller but for a little while it leaves the dark house it’s primarily set in and becomes more of a kinetic kind of experience. During this scene our heroine is chased by a vicious dog and tries to find refuge in a random parked car. Realizing she needs to retrieve her bag she comes up with a McGuyver like solution to her predicament involving a rope and the car’s trunk, which works but not without some suspenseful hiccups. The Kidnapping- Nocturnal Animals: Though it lacks the production value and size and scope of some of the other set-pieces here, this scene from the “book within a film” of Nocturnal Animals definitely had most of the same tension that drives the best scenes of the year. In it a family is driving through West Texas when he’s more or less run off the road by a gang of redneck hooligans and what follows is an extremely tense standoff that will have you squirming in your seat with discomfort. Final Delivery – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story: Coming after a pretty impressive fight on the planet’s surface, this sequence is sort of the icing on the cake in which the death star plans have been transferred to some kind of futuristic flash drive and various rebels must rush to deliver them somehow or other. This is of course interrupted when Darth Vader himself decides to take matters into his own hands and begins light sabering the living shit out of everything in his way. One last rebel is narrowly able to pass it through a door before being sabered, and it is then passed along until it finds its way onto a shuttle that’s able to break free and escape… transitioning into one of the most famous opening scenes in film history. Plane Crash – Sully: Selling an entire movie around the promise of a single scene isn’t an impossible task, but if you’re going to do that then that scene better deliver in a big way when it comes. The crash scene in Sully certainly does and is impressive in meticulous recreation of this real life event from multiple perspectives. It’s full of interesting little elements like the flight attendants chanting “brace brace brace” or the first evacuees kind of hesitating as the break off the emergency exits or the big DeMille shot at the end of it all where we finally get a full view of the wreck after everyone is safely off. What’s most impressive about it is how it generates so much excitement from an event that actually want’s a kinetic rush so much as an orderly evacuation. And the Golden Stake Goes To…Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
 I had some trouble classifying this scene. Was it a chase scene? Not really, but it is ultimately about people being pursued. Was it a fight? Not really, although the Vader stuff could maybe be seen as a (very one-sided) fight? Was it a shootout? No, but there is some shooting in it. I guess it’s exactly the kind of scene this catch-all category was made for. Really though, what this scene taps into isn’t so much the conventional lust for action so much as this great feeling of recognition where you realize where they’re going with this and rather than chastising it for being predictable you’re just excited to see if they’re going to be able to pull it off… and they totally do.
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IanTheCool
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 8, 2017 18:50:32 GMT -5
Man, I feel like sucha curmudgeon when it comes to Rogue one....
I have to say I enjoyed that scene on a visceral level, but at the same time there was something very fanboy wish fulfillment about it taht does sit right with me.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 8, 2017 20:10:34 GMT -5
Best Art Direction
The art direction category is one of the more easily grasped craft categories and this has been a particularly strong year for them. The award covers design elements of a given movie, particularly the sets but also any special props and even the costumes to some extent if they feel applicable. There was an embarrassment of riches and I needed to make some difficult cuts. Please note that I’ve opted to exclude animated movies here, but honorable mention for Zootopia and Kubo and the Two Strings. 10 Cloverfield Lane: Movies that are set largely in a single building tend to be great showcases of set design simply because you spend so much time in that location and get to know it. That’s certainly true of the underground bunker where the bulk of 10 Cloverfield Lane is set. The team behind the film’s art direction are meticulous both in giving this building a logical geography while also decorating it with a number of interesting things like a jukebox and a set of puzzles all inspired by the ego of its builder. Doctor Strange: Comic book adaptations would generally seem to be ideal sources of art direction, but the Marvel movies never quite seem to stand out enough. That was not the case of their latest film, Doctor Strange, which featured a number of interesting sets and design elements. In particular, the various sanctums in Nepal, London, and New York are all very interesting sets and the less showy elements like Stephen Strange’s hospital are also better designed then they could have been. If you also consider other elements like the trippy magic effects and some of the costumes, this becomes a pretty easy nomination. Everybody Wants Some!!: Though it doesn’t have fantasy elements or take place in a mansion or something, Everybody Wants Some!! remains a very impressive display of recent history period detail. Set in 1980, a year that director Richard Linklater clearly remembers vividly, the movie features a meticulous to the point of obsessive recreation of what a college campus looked like in that year. With well-chosen posters on every wall and every bar and dance club specially reworked nothing here looks modern and you can tell that there was a degree of love put into this that’s missing from other movies set in years like this. The Handmaiden: The Handmaiden is based on a book set in Victorian England but it moves the action to Korea under Japanese occupation during World War II. As such we get a blending of three different cultures and two different times. This becomes most apparent in the mansion that much of the film’s first third is set in, which is explicitly built to encompass those three cultures but there are other locations that also have a certain cross culture aesthetic like the Dickensian hideaway that Sook-Hee lives in at the start, and then there’s that room where Count Fujiwara and Uncle Kouzuki have their final encounter. Warcraft: Warcraft was a weird disaster of a movie, but there was clearly a vision at its center and there was clearly a lot of creativity in it on the part of the design team. The castles that the humans live in look like something out of a particularly ambitious storybook and the knights wear suits of armor that feel complex and detailed (and not terribly historical) while the world of the orcs is also distinct and interesting. It’s a pretty interesting movie to look at any way you cut it… shame about the rest though. And the Golden Stake Goes To…The Handmaiden
 Movies about rich people set in time periods like this are a pretty usual shoo-in for art direction awards like this… not going to fight it. The art direction in The Handmaiden has all the richness of your usual “manor movie” but the cross cultural elements add a lot to it and the design work has a lot of that Park Chan-Wook perversity that gives it a certain something that you don’t get elsewhere.
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