Dracula Presents: The Tenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

It WERE a good line.

"The studio couldn't afford another X-Man." - Deadpool

"Save... Martha." - Batman vs Superman

"How much safer?" "Fifty-Fifty." - War Dogs

"Dormammu, I've come to bargain." - Doctor Strange

"I'm one with the Force. The Force is with me." - Rogue One

Im one with the force, etc made me roll my eyes so badly I think I was able to see the back of the theater

Best Adapted Screenplay

Though many critics are desperate for more “original” movies, it’s important not to forget just how much creativity can be found while using an existing work as a jumping off point. The nominees for best adapted screenplay this year come from stories that were originally novels, novellas, plays, and comic books, but what they all share is great ingenuity in making a film out of something that was once in a completely different format.

Arrival: Science Fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote the short story “Story of Your Life” in the late 90s and won a Nebula award for it. Almost twenty years later Eric Heisserer, a writer mostly known for writing bad horror movies, found himself adapting the story even though it didn’t really fit into any commercial trends. The result was a big budget Hollywood movie with a wacky time travel idea along with themes about communicating across cultures and the challenges of finding peaceful solutions in crises.

The Handmaiden: Sarah Waters is a Welsh author who specializes in writing lesbian fiction set in Victorian England… not exactly the most commercial genres, but there’s clearly some coolness to be mined from it as evidenced by Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden, which is an unconventional adaptation of Waters’ novel “Fingersmith.” Chan-Wook re-locates the action to Korea during the Japanese occupation but maintains a lot of the book’s feminist leanings and general wildness. The result is a twisty and sexy good time.

Moonlight: Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unproduced play “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue” is an experimental bit of theater in which we see a character at three stages of his life and these three segments all play out simultaneously. They never really found a way to make this work on stage, but for his film adaption called Moonlight Barry Jenkins simplified things by having the three acts play out one after the other but kept much of McCraney’s raw honesty and insights into the conditions facing young men like Chiron.

Our Little Sister: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s screenplay for his latest film Our Little Sister is actually adapted from a manga by Akimi Yoshida called “Umimachi Diary” but lacks all the science fiction and wackiness that western audiences tend to associate with all things anime. Instead it’s a restrained little drama that ignores the conventional rules of three act screenwriting and instead just lets the audience peak in on the lives of four people over the course of a year. In doing so the film creates four well fleshed out characters who are all believable and interesting.

Silence: Martin Scorsese reportedly read Shūsaku Endō’s novel “Silence” in the late 80s and had been trying to make it into the film ever since. It’s easy to see why Scorsese would be interested in the film given his well-known struggles with his Catholic upbringing. Rather than hand the project off to someone like Paul Schraeder or Terence Winter Scorsese opted to write the film himself along with a guy named Jay Cocks whom he had previously collaborated on in writing The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York. Together they made a very intelligent movie that juggles a number of very weighty themes in a way that American movies rarely do these days.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

I wanna see that one, but not sure how. Is it on bluray yet?

Best Original Screenplay
Generally one of the two screenplay categories will be noticeably stronger than the other in a given year for one reason or another. This has year the quality level has been much more evenly split than usual but I’d say the better of the two rosters is likely the original screenplay slate in so much as I can hardly imagine any of these five movies missing from the category even if I had to kind of bend a bit to move some of them out of adapted.

20th Century Women: I’ve long been a critic of screenwriters who write autobiographical coming of age stories out of a misguided belief that they need to “write what they know” but 20th Century Women shows that there is a right way to do this sort of thing. Of course the fact that writer/director Mike Mills seems to have had a slightly less clichéd adolescence helps, as does the fact that Mills (who is in his fifties) has more perspective on his youth than the young indie filmmakers who usually make these sort of things. Whatever made this one work so well there’s little doubt that this is a very warm screenplay that manages to create a whole lot of fascinating and fully fleshed characters who you enjoy hanging out with.

Jackie: It probably would have been easy to write a Jackie Kennedy film that followed the traditional biopic formula but instead writer Noah Oppenheim (the only of these nominees who isn’t also a director) opted for something much more interesting and much smarter than that. Using a very well thought out non-linear format, the film manages to dig deep into Jackie Kennedy’s feelings following her husband’s assassination while also examining the extent to which she sort of built up the mythology surrounding JFK’s mystique for the rest of the 20th Century.

Embrace of the Serpent: In the credits Embrace of the Serpent lists the film as having been based on the diaries of the two real life white explorers depicted in the film, but the film’s main character of Karamakate is fictional and the specific journey depicted in the film is also fictional and as such I’m inclined to view those diaries more as research material and to view the film as largely the original product of writers Ciro Guerra and Jacques Toulemonde Vidal, and one hell of an original product at that. The film is both a thoughtful examination of the effects of colonialism as well as a trippy little examination of three interesting characters and it’s chronology is especially fascinating.

Manchester by the Sea: Before he became a highly acclaimed film director Kenneth Lonergan was a Pulitzer Prize nominated playwright and while I wouldn’t call any of his film’s “stagey” you can still tell that that his passion is for telling very human stories rooted in dialogue and character and his best work yet is Manchester by the Sea. The film’s screenplay masterfully uses the in media res format to drop you into its protagonists shoes and beautifully reveals details of his history through flashbacks and just through little clues in his conversations. The resulting script is both painfully wrenching and yet oddly funny and watchable.

The Witch: A title card at the end of The Witch lists it as having lifted a number of lines and ideas “directly from period journals, diaries, and court records” but it is still very much an original screenplay to its core despite all the research writer/director Robert Eggars seems to have done. The film is of course lush with insight into puritan society and period accurate dialect, but beneath all that is a tense family drama which builds in intensity until everything goes crazy in the film’s final act.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Trailer of the Year
Trailers are essential for the commercial viabilities of a movie and studios dump a lot of money and resources into making the best possible trailers for their movies. And yet only a few trailers a year really do something special and rise above the fray. That’s what I’ll be looking at here. Bear in mind, this is limited to trailers for 2016 movies so if a trailer has already been released for movies that will be opening in 2017 they won’t be eligible until next year. Also I need to have seen the movie in question so I can judge if it gives away too much.

10 Cloverfield Lane:

This would be a classic example of what you’d call a “fake-out” trailer; a trailer that starts out seeming light and upbeat before revealing itself to actually be for something darker. It starts with a montage of images of the characters living in peace to the tune of “I Think We’re Alone Now” before a bunch of distortion comes into the song and it becomes clearer that things in this bunker aren’t so idyllic after all and we’re left with a big question mark of what she’s seeing out that window.

Fences:

The trailer to Fences takes a page from the American Sniper playbook and more or less has a scene from the movie play out seemingly in full and then incorporates footage from the film in the background. That scene is a speech by Denzel Washington’s character that was long considered a highlight of play and it also serves well as an explanation of where the character is in his life. The choice to also add in Viola Davis’ “Well I been standing with you” moment puts a perfect cap on it.

Knight of Cups:

Knight of Cups was the first Terrence Malick movie I couldn’t really get behind because of it’s unclear storyline and general meandering, but man did Malick shoot a lot of good footage for it and a lot of that footage looks incredibly interesting when presented in rapid fire succession and set to electronic music. It makes me think that if Malick had just edited the actual movie a little differently he would have really had something.

The Shallows (Trailer 3):

It’s amazing how one kind of outside the box decision can so perfectly enliven a trailer. Take this trailer for the silly little shark movie The Shallows. From a footage perspective it’s pretty standard, but it makes the interesting choice of incorporating a lecture about “self-reliance” from some sort of stuffy 50s educational film set to ominous electronic music over it. The subject matter makes sense given that the heroine needs to be self-reliant in order to escape the situation and that tag at the end where the guy says “you may think that’s the end of the story, but actually it’s only the beginning” is a good send off. How the hell did anyone come up with this?

Suicide Squad:

Was this the trailer that saved the DC Cinematic Universe? Probably not, but there’s no denying that this trailer set to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” did a lot to make people excited about this movie even after the disastrous Batman V. Superman. It’s not just the music selection that makes it work, there’s a real energy to the whole trailer and the moments they chose to highlight make the movie look a whole lot of fun and the do some cool things like using sound effects to the beats in the song. Even as a semi-defender of the movie I’ve got to admit that this trailer makes the movie look a whole lot better than it is.

And the Golden Stake goes to…