Dracula Presents: The Tenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Huh, I expected Arrival to take the win.

Gonna say, Arrival is kind of going to get fucked over a lot in this thing. That movie had a real knack for winding up as my sixth favorite in a lot of categories, I like it more than it's award haul is going to suggest.

Woooo Trek. I hope the Academy sees ot that way.

Best Score

Every year I feel the need to clarify that I’m not really a “score person.” I don’t collect OST albums, I only know a handful of film composers by name, and frankly I don’t spend a whole lot of time focusing on background music in movies. It’s not uncommon for me to hear people praising or criticizing a movie’s score and realize I didn’t even remember hearing the music while watching the movie. However, because of this I feel like the scores that do jump out at me deserve all the more praise.

The Handmaiden: Jo Yeong-wook is a composer who has worked almost exclusively in the Korean film industry but his work on The Handmaiden shows that he’s certainly been world class for a while. His score for the film is very classical in nature, certainly more in keeping with the film’s European elements than its Eastern elements. It can function as conventional scoring at times but there’s also a side to it that can get really contemplative and Phillip Glassy at times.


High-Rise: Out of all the nominees here and with the exception of La La Land Clint Mansell’s music for High-Rise is probably the score here that I’d have the most interest in listening to when removed from the film. Mansell’s score is surprisingly maximalist coming from such a strange little movie, but that shouldn’t be mistaken to mean that it’s conventional per se. In fact one of its strengths is that it can sound really unique while still using the traditional tools of film composition.


La La Land: I have at times criticized La La Land for having “weak songs.” I stand by that criticism but I feel I should clarify that what I’m mostly referring to there are the lyrics and the vocalists singing said vocals. Fortunately I’m not looking at either of those things here, I’m strictly looking at the underlying music by Justin Hurwitz, and that is extremely strong. This is bombastic music that’s very interested in calling attention to itself, which isn’t always what you want in a film score but it is what you want in a movie like this.


Moonlight: A big part of Moonlight’s strength is that it looks at the life of a poor Miami kid and tells his story with all the highbrow techniques that would normally be applied to… I don’t know, the life of an artist in Paris or something. A part of that is the inclusion of a score by Nicholas Britell that is largely rooted in classical chamber music. The score is primarily conveyed through strings and you can observe how these strings become less discordant as the character increases in confidence.


Swiss Army Man: Possibly the most unique and innovative score of the year, the music Andy Hull and Robert McDowell (members of an indie rock band called Manchester Orchestra) have crafted for Swiss Army Man uses make use of what sound like vocals basically as an instrument. These aren’t actual songs with vocals mind you, for the most part the vocal sounds here do not make intelligible words so much as they make a sort of a capella backing music. I don’t think Hull and McDowell actually assembled a choir to do this so much as they programmed vocal sounds into a computer and assembled it as music. However they made it, it really helps add a lair of whimsy to the movie and improves it in a big way.


And the Golden Stake goes to…

If I had an award for best individual score cue that would have competed, unfortunately it had to be attached to the rest of that boring-ass score.

C'mon man...

Honestly, I barely think of that movie having music in it, which may speak to how well that score blended into the movie without being intrusive, but not necessarily the best way to get an award.

Probably would have been in if it were a top ten for scores

Incidentally both of the scores you named were disqualified from the Oscars for incorporating existing classical pieces.

I loved the stock footage in it. It always bothers me when movies like this don't use it. It gives them a sense of history.

Best Soundtrack

The soundtrack award differs from score in that it’s meant to reward the use of pre-existing pop music throughout a film rather than newly composed score work. The function of the music in the actual movie is key here as this is not meant to be about how the music works on a soundtrack album and it isn’t necessarily meant to refer to the quality of the actual music so much as how well it works for the movie.

20th Century Women: 20th Century Women is ultimately a movie about generations clashing, but they aren’t the generations we’re used to seeing clash and the clash itself is more amicable than what we usually see. The late punk rock scene is a major part of the film’s plot but the soundtrack is a bit more post-punk in nature with tracks by Talking Heads, Devo, The Buzzcocks, and Siouxsie And The Banshees prominently featured. The film also makes canny use of some of the older generation’s Jazz music as a counterpoint of all this but it all bends together surprisingly well.

American Honey: Some soundtracks feel like they’re added in after the fact as a sort of icing on the cake, but others feel baked into the film as an important part of what the film is saying about the culture being portrayed. Such is the case with American Honey which uses populist, if not always high charting, music in order to give you an idea what these characters’ lives are like. In the film they spend a lot of time listening to down and dirty trap music as well as some country music depending on who is controlling the car radio as well as some top 40 stuff like Rihanna’s “We Found Love.”

Aquarius: Aquarius follows a woman who writes about music for a living and has a very large record collection so popular music is a big part of the movie. There are a couple of Queen tracks that are notably used, but much of the soundtrack consists of Brazilian popular music and features a lot of Bossa Nova, samba, and Brega music by artists like Gilberto Gil, Taiguara, and Maria Bethânia. I’m not an expert on these styles of music but the care done in curating this soundtrack is evident in the film.

Deadpool: The highly irreverent Deadpool opens with a joke opening credits sequence set to, of all things, Juice Newton’s “Angel in the Morning” and from there you know you’re in for a lot of really playful soundtrack selections. We see this again with a sexual montage set to Neil Sedaka’s “Calender Girl” and also with some slightly more conventional/cool uses of Salt-n-Peppa’s “Shoop” and DMX’s “X Gon’ Give it to Ya” which still feel slightly subversive in this setting.

Everybody Wants Some!!: When Richard Linklater made Dazed and Confused in 1993 they released not one but two soundtrack albums and they went Platinum and Gold respectively despite that film’s failure to take off at the box office. The same mainstream success has not necessarily been bewtowed upon his music selections for this sister film Everybody Wants Some!! but it’s not for lack of trying. This is a killer assemblage of early 80s pop/rock hits that was clearly handpicked by the director and from his memories.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

There are some good music moments in Suicide Squad... just too many of them.  Kind of brings the whole thing down.

Thinking on it, it seems the best scores from 2016 came from videogames and not movies.