Dracula Presents: The Seventh Annual Golden Stake Awards

Dracula 02-01-2014 09:07 PM

Dracula Presents: The Seventh Annual Golden Stake Awards



I've put this off too long, time to start. For those who weren't here when I did this in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 this is an 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 fight 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:



Chase of the Year

Traditionally I start with Fight of the Year, but I thought I'd switch things up a bit this year and start with the chase category. This is for any kind of scene where people are chasing each other across a distance. Car chases are the most popular of course, but foot chases are also acceptable and so are chases on motorcycles, boats, airplanes, and other assorted vehicles.



Tank – Fast & Furious 6: Universal pictures probably secured the financial success of this Fast & Furious sequel on February 3rd 2013 when during a trailer airing during the Super Bowl, we saw Ludacris say “Uhh, guys, they have a tank.” The idea of these former car-thieve having to take down a modern military tank that’s rampaging across a Spanish highway is exactly the kind of lunacy we expect from this franchise.



Cornfield Chase – The Last Stand: The Last Stand is, among other things, one of the strangest commercials for General Motors vehicles that has ever been made. All the cars in the movie are made by GM and they show off all aspects of their line from simple pickups and suburbans to the villain’s $100,000 Chevrolet Corvette C6 ZR1. At the film’s climax this sports car finds itself being chased though a cornfield by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who’s driving a simple Camero. Its not the first movie to feature cars going through a corn crop, but it’s an image I’ve always found intriguing.



Armored Car Robbery – Pain & Gain: Pain & Gain wasn’t really an action movie, but Michael Bay went ahead and departed from the true story in order to give us this crazy foot chase between The Rock and a bunch of trigger happy police. In it, a coked out of his mind character played by The Rock tries to commandeer a bag of money from an armored car and is chased all over the streets of Miami. The Rock’s hulk-like size and his character’s insane recklessness make it a very memorable piece in what is otherwise a very inconsistent film.



Post Robbery Police Chase – The Place Beyond the Pines: This short but very memorable chase scene from The Place Beyond the Pines shows Ryan Gostling’s character attempting to escape from a bank robbery gone wrong on his motocross cycle. Common police officers try to coordinate the chase as Gostling uses the mobility of his bike to weave through traffic and go off-road. It ends with a plausible crash which leads into a tense confrontation in a house he runs into which will alter the film dramaticly.



Chasing Down Khan - Star Trek Into Darkness: I was more than a little annoyed by the way that this Star Trek sequel felt the need to borrow the motif of a character screaming “Kaaaaahhhhnn” to the heavens, but at least the emotion of that scene sets up this foot chase in which Spock desperately chases down Kahn through the streets of future San Francisco and onto some flying trucks. There’s something oddly appealing about the way Zachary Quinto is running here and I also like that we finally get a good idea of what city streets are like in Star Trek’s world.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Neverending 02-01-2014 09:25 PM

Action scenes are very over-the-top these days so it's always nice to see one that's more focused on character and story.



IanTheCool 02-01-2014 09:52 PM

They're back! I saw Pain and Gain but don't remember any chase scenes. I saw Star Trek but can't say I was wowed by the chase scene. Didn't catch the others



PG Cooper 02-01-2014 10:01 PM

Glad these have started. Good choice for the winner, though I'm a bit surprised the boarding attempt by the pirates in Captain Phillips wasn't nominated.



Dracula 02-01-2014 10:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PG Cooper (Post 2871931)

Glad these have started. Good choice for the winner, though I'm a bit surprised the boarding attempt by the pirates in Captain Phillips wasn't nominated.

I wouldn't really call that a chase exactly...



Neverending 02-01-2014 11:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2871929)

I saw Star Trek but can't say I was wowed by the chase scene.

I disagree. That's one of my favorite scenes in the movie and for the same reasons that Dracula stated.



PG Cooper 02-02-2014 09:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2871934)

I wouldn't really call that a chase exactly...

It's a vehicle trying to escape a pursuer.



Justin 02-02-2014 12:52 PM

Good choice, Drac. That would've been mine, too.



Daniel 02-02-2014 01:35 PM

Ah ha, the infamous Golden Stake awards ... good choice on the first one. That movie deserves any recognition it can get.



Jack 02-02-2014 03:12 PM

Solid argument for a good scene in a bad movie. Speaking of...did anyone see Jack Reacher? Caught up with it a few ays ago. Also not great but has a pretty terrific, well-shot chase.



Dracula 02-02-2014 04:28 PM

Going to post this next one ahead of the Super Bowl:



Best Musical Performance

This is and always has been a really weird category. Had the movies Once and Black Snake Moan not come out the year of the initial Golden Stakes award there’s a good chance that I never would have thought to make it a category. Basically it’s a category that looks at scenes where characters are performing music on screen, and the award is for the scene rather than necessarily the quality of the music. Every year I worry that I won’t find five nominees I’m happy with and every year I actually do end up with a lineup I’m happy with. Go figure.



“Roll Jordan Roll”- 12 Years a Slave: In 12 Years a Slave we see religion at its worst and we see it as its best. We see it at its worst at William Ford’s plantation, where it’s used to justify all sorts of cruelty, and we see it at its best in this scene where it gives people hope (perhaps unfounded hope) when they’re in a desperate situation. In the scene the slaves are singing a traditional spiritual and Solomon only reluctantly begins to sing along before suddenly taking to the song in a very heartfelt way. The scene depicts both an important shift in attitude for the character and also acts as a rebuke for a similarly titled but obscenely offensive song that’s sung earlier by the Paul Dano character.



“Please Mr. Kennedy” – Inside Llewyn Davis: In this scene in Inside Llewyn Davis you really get to see the process of collaborative studio creativity. We see the characters warming up in some peculiar ways (something about puh-puh-puhs?) before the characters finally launch into this weird little song that is both kind of dumb and also kind of catchy. The key to the scene is of course Adam Driver, whose weird chants make the song both funny and also intriguing.



Marcus’ Rap – Short Term 12: Few of the young people at the foster care facility in the film Short Term 12 are in a good place, but the character who seems to be in the worst place is a guy named Marcus who’s about to age out of the facility and faces an uncertain future. He lets out all his frustrations in this scene where he recites a rap song he wrote to one of his caretakers. He’s not overly talented and the song isn’t exactly expertly written, but that’s not really the point. What matters is that he manages to express his personal frustrations in a way that doesn’t shatter the “hard” exterior that he’s built.



Piano Duet – Stoker: I wasn’t a huge fan of Stoker, but I did like this scene where India Stoker is playing a piece on the piano when her uncle Charlie suddenly appears behind her and starts playing along with her. They play a nifty little duet but there’s also something rather uncomfortable about the way that he’s forcing himself into her activity. It reflects the character’s larger discomfort with the way that this uncle has butted into her life even if he’s ostensibly helping her in a number of ways.



“Goldfinger” – The Wolf of Wall Street: There’s a scene in The Wolf of Wall Street where Jordan Belfort says “when you sail on a boat fit for a bond villain, sometimes you need to play the part.” It’s a sentiment that he’s even warped enough to bring to his wedding night where he’s apparently asked the wedding singer (played by Sharon Jones) to sing this theme to the Bond film of the same name. In this context the song’s lyrical content like “Pretty girl, beware of his heart of gold / This heart is cold” and “Beckons you to enter his web of sin” take on a new context.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Neverending 02-02-2014 04:35 PM

Before IanTheCanadian says anything...



VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



PG Cooper 02-02-2014 04:43 PM

Good stuff.



Neverending 02-02-2014 04:50 PM

For the record, this is the best musical sequence of 2013 and I'm insulted that Dracula didn't even nominate it:



VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



JBond 02-02-2014 04:56 PM

"Outer spaaaace!"



Dracula 02-02-2014 05:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872003)

For the record, this is the best musical sequence of 2013 and I'm insulted that Dracula didn't even nominate it:



VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:

And the notion of boy bands in heaven makes me thankful that I don't believe in an afterlife.



Dhamon22 02-02-2014 05:13 PM

Great choice for chase scene.



I would've went with Marcus' rap for song but I haven't seen ILD yet.



Glad these are back, love 'em.



Neverending 02-02-2014 05:18 PM

I spoke to PG Cooper and he's upset Spring Breakers wasn't nominated for any musical awards.



PG Cooper 02-02-2014 05:22 PM

I'm hoping the Britney Spears scene will be nominated for Best Use of Source Music.



Dracula 02-02-2014 05:34 PM

I'm only going to say this once: my decisions for most of these awards is locked in and public pressure will not be changing any of my choices.



PG Cooper 02-02-2014 05:44 PM

So...does that mean the aforementioned Spring Breakers scene isn't going to be nominated



Neverending 02-02-2014 06:19 PM

If Spring Breakers had more nudity it would have won Best Picture.



Dracula 02-03-2014 07:06 PM

Shootout of the Year

Blame it on the superheroes, but shootouts just aren’t as common in action movies as they used to be. In fact, whenever we do see a good gunfight it almost seems jarring, like some kind of old-school throwback. Still, I was able to find five gunfights that got the blood pumping and kept this violent tradition alive. This year there seems to have been a trend of good gunfights in not-so-great movies, but I’m not going to hold overall film quality against any individual scenes.



Shuttle Assault – Elysium: Neill Blomkamp is in some ways the first of a generation of post Playstation action filmmakers, and this has given him an appreciation for imaginative weaponry. This scene in which Matt Damon is attacked by androids after launching an assault on a shuttle is not the best edited or shot shootout of the year, but its elevated by some cool weapons that seem like hybridized version of modern weapons like AK-47s.



Hotel Shootout – Gangster Squad: In a post-Aurora and post-Sandy Hook world the movie Gangster Squad was heavily criticized for the amount of gun violence it had. Personally, I’d argue that gun violence was actually the only half-way decent thing about the movie. This scene depicts a massive shootout between cops and gangsters both outside and inside of a hotel that’s been decorated for Christmas. Needless to say, the Tommy guns wreck the hell out of those decorations.



The Last Stand – The Last Stand: Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return to the screen wasn’t brilliant, but I had fun with it and think it deserved better than it got. This scene, which plays on the trope of the showdown on Main Street is filled with a lot of little bits of oddball violence like a man being exploded by his own bandolier and an elderly woman shooting a bad guy in the head. It’s a scene that successfully combines traditional action with Kim Ji-woon’s unhinged sense of comedy.



Boathouse Shootout – Mud: Mud is the only movie here that wouldn’t be considered an action film, in fact it’s not really a movie you expect to see end with a shootout, but it does and it’s a good one. The scene features a number of criminals trying to break into a houseboat, but they find themselves thwarted by both the people in the houseboat and by a man on the other side of the river shooting at them with a sniper rifle. The distances involved and the geography that’s been established really make the scene unique.



White House Siege – Olympus Has Fallen: The film Olympus Has Fallen envisions a massive attack on the White House carried out by a North Korean paramilitary organization that charges the rose garden in a sneak attack. These bandana wearing terrorists mow down secret service agents and on duty, leaving Gerard Butler to as a lone agent going in behind them. The fight finally spills into the White House as dozens if not hundreds are killed, pretty much everybody except the lone agent who must save the day.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 02-04-2014 10:17 AM

I wasn't actually all that jazzed about that shootout. Also, and I hate to sound like a broken record, but I thought the shootout at the end of Spring Breakers was pretty good.



Justin 02-04-2014 10:45 AM

I don't even remember the Spring Breakers shootout. I've seen only one film in this category (Mud); so I'm either lucky or really out of the loop.



Knerys 02-04-2014 12:07 PM

I'll give you Olympus Has Fallen for it sheer unapologetic style. Throw back indeed, where most action these days involve a superpower of some sort.



The movie however was...just ok.



FranklinTard 02-04-2014 12:20 PM

Terrible year for shootouts.



Neverending 02-04-2014 12:29 PM

Gangster Squad went from a shootout inspired by The Untouchables into a fist fight inspired by Lethal Weapon. Next year, Dracula should create a category for rip-offs and "homages".



PG Cooper 02-04-2014 12:36 PM

I actually really like the Gangster Squad shootout.



MovieBuff801 02-04-2014 02:39 PM

Me too. It was a fun climax.



Dracula 02-04-2014 05:19 PM

Best use of Source Music

Original scores are great, but there’s nothing quite as satisfying as when a filmmaker can take a song from the archive and make it their own by perfectly matching it to visuals. The award isn’t for song quality necessarily (although that helps), rather, it’s about the way it’s used to improve a scene or fit into an overall theme. It’s also worth noting that this is primarily meant to cover the use of popular music rather than pre-existing classical or jazz music.



“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John in American Hustle: American Hustle is all about 70s excess, and few people in the 70s were quiet as excessive as Elton John. The song is used during a atmospheric scene where the various players are about to go on their mission and are more or less getting psyched up upon arrival. It’s just one of many moments in the film is able to make a classic rock song make more sense when returned to its original cultural context.



“Everytime” by Britney Spears in Spring Breakers: There’s a lot of weird stuff in Spring Breakers, but it’s probably at its most zany when three bikini clad women in pink ski masks with firearms are hanging around James Franco’s character at a poolside piano. He begins playing a rendition of this Britney Spears’ song which quickly transitions into the original studio version. The girls dance to this and the film cuts to violent scenes of them taking part in the Franco character’s gang war. It’s one of the most surreal moments in cinema all year.



“Who Gon Stop Me” by Jay-Z and Kanye West in The Great Gatsby: I thought that The Great Gatsby’s anachronistic soundtrack was, at best, a mixed bag. At times it just seemed jarring, but occasionally it seemed to work and I was especially fond of the way they used this track off of Watch the Throne in the scene where Nick Carraway first takes a shot of alcohol in a debauched prohibition party. The use of Kanye’s contemporary party jam really gives the audience a sense of how it must have felt to be taking part in a liberating bit of illegal fun in this society.



“I’m Free” as covered by The Soup Dragons in The World’s End: When The Soup Dragon’s cover of The Rolling Stone’s “I’m Free” first enters The World’s End it’s in the context of a simple little gag about how the Simon Pegg character has had the same cassette tape in his car since the 90s. That’s a neat little metaphor for the character’s inability to change but the song’s relevance really becomes clear later in the film when it brings in free will as a theme and the lyrics “I’m free to do what I want any old time” takes on new relevance.



“Mrs. Robinson” as covered by The Lemonheads in The Wolf of Wall Street: Ever the cinematic prankster, Martin Scorsese can always be counted on to fill his films with subtle little nods to cinematic history. In The Wolf of Wall Street that meant filling the movie with neat little visual references to the 1967 film “The Graduate.” He caps it all off by featuring this cover of that film’s most famous soundtrack selection by the 90s punk band The Lemonheads. The song is played while the FBI are finally raiding Jordan Belfort’s firm and it really gives this sense of his crazy scheme finally reaching its end.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Neverending 02-04-2014 06:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872238)

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” by Elton John in American Hustle

JBond will be upset you didn't nominate the Live And Let Die scene.



Quote:

“Everytime” by Britney Spears in Spring Breakers

I'm willing to bet a million dollars that Dracula added this at the last minute. You can thank me later, PG Cooper.



Quote:

“Who Gon Stop Me” by Jay-Z and Kanye West in The Great Gatsby

This one should have won, Old Sport.



Dracula 02-04-2014 07:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872239)

JBond will be upset you didn't nominate the Live And Let Die scene.

Just didn't like that scene. Seemed really random.



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872239)

I'm willing to bet a million dollars that Dracula added this at the last minute. You can thank me later, PG Cooper.

This is why I knew I couldn't win for losing when you guys felt the need to make that suggestion.



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872239)

This one should have won, Old Sport.

My feelings about the way that soundtrack affected that film was too mixed to really pull that trigger, but it worked very well in that scene.



JBond 02-04-2014 09:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872239)

JBond will be upset you didn't nominate the Live And Let Die scene.

You speak for me more than I do on these boards.



I thought the "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" part was amazing.



Dracula 02-05-2014 06:52 PM

Fight of the Year

Fight of the year is an award for scenes depicting fights between people who are not using firearms. Usually that means fist fights but knives, swords, clubs, hammers, and other melee weapons are also allowed. With the surge in superhero movie genre we’ve seen more than the usual amount of inventive one on one fight scenes. Three of the five nominees for this category are from superhero movies one comes from a comedy with fantastical elements, and only one of them features a fight that is entirely between people who are mere mortals. Also there’s not one, not two, but three scenes here that involve the train stations. What are the odds of that?



Waterloo Station Fights – Fast & Furious 6: This is sort of two fights for the price of one because the film cuts between two fairly interesting fights that are occurring in different sections of the London subway system. The first is between MMA fighter Gina Carano and profetional badasa chick Michelle Rodriguez, and the other is a two on one fight in which Sung Kang and Tyrese Gibson simultaneously fight a henchman played by Joe Taslim (a judo expert who had a part in The Raid: Redemption). Both are traditional action fights and both are well choreographed.



Superman Vs. Zod – Man of Steel: Man of Steel ends with a defeated General Zod losing his mind and determined to go down fighting. What follows is a clash of titans, in which the two Kryptonians use their powers of flight, speed, strength, laser vision, and endurance in a battle royale for the fate of Earth. Director Zack Snyder uses extensive CGI and an eye for epic action to turn this into a very memorable (if controversial) finale.



Thor Vs. Malekith – Thor: The Dark World: The Dark World: Malekith was a lame villain in a movie that was pretty flawed, but he did at least provide a pretty good fight scene for Thor at the end. With Greenwich England as their battleground, Thor and his foe find themselves going through multiple portals that have opened up as they fight it out. It’s a finale that’s somewhat reminiscent of the final chase scene from Monster’s Inc. and like that film I’m not exactly sure that the movement between worlds really makes logical sense, but it’s pretty fun anyway.



Wolverine Vs. Shingen – The Wolverine: The character of Wolverine is ostensibly a superhero but his action scenes are generally closer to traditional brawls than the effects extravaganzas you normally see in superhero flicks. This scene takes advantage of the film’s Japanese locale and has Wolverine clashing claws with a man wielding two samurai swords. There’s a certain brutal grace Wolverine’s motions here and the final kill is a pretty cool moment.



Bathroom Fight – The World’s End: Things seem amiss in the town of New Haven during the early scenes of The World’s End, but we never really get confirmation of this until our heroes are forced to get into a fist fight to the death with a group of metallic teenagers who bleed blue blood. Given that this is a comedy, the attack comes while they’re in a bathroom and the fight choreography is a bit heightened. It even ends with Nick Frost performing pro-wrestling move. It’s a fun and well executed fights scene that comes long before the point in the movie where the audience gets sick of seeing robots getting dismembered.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 02-05-2014 07:29 PM

Good choice.



Neverending 02-05-2014 07:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872354)

It’s the first time a filmmaker has really captured what a full on fight between an all-powerful hero like Superman and an even foe would look like.

If Tim Burton would have been allowed to make Superman Lives in 1998, it would have been mind-blowing as Superman and Doomsday (the character NOT our moderator) have their epic brawl. Heck, even the McG/Brett Ratner/J.J. Abrams Superman movie from the early 2000's where Superman fights a Kryptonian Lex Luthor might have been noteworthy. But in 2013, where a long list of summer blockbusters have destroyed major cities, it just seems run of the mill. There's no difference between the end of Man of Steel and every Michael Bay Transformers movies. Like I've said before, Zack Snyder and David Goyer took the easy way out instead of finding a creative solution to the movie that still involved an epic fight. If Christopher Nolan had been a more in-your-face producer he would have fixed that ending. There's already reports saying that Nolan wasn't a fan of the ending. And the fact that he's not involved with the Batman/Superman movie says a lot.



rant over



PG Cooper 02-05-2014 07:56 PM

I felt the impact of the structures falling in Man of Steel. I didn't in Transformers.



Neverending 02-05-2014 08:12 PM

That's surprising considering Man Of Steel made no effort to give Metropolis or its citizens any personality. It was just a bland city getting destroyed. Kevin Costner being killed by a tornado was probably more emotional except that scene was incredibly stupid.



Dracula 02-05-2014 08:25 PM

For the record, I don't really hate the action scenes in Transformers, it even got a Golden Stake nod that year for the highway chase scene. The problem with that movie has less to do with the action (although its much more poorly edited) than with its obnoxious tone, bad attempts at comedy, and my general disdain for the Transformers as a property. So, comparing the final set-piece of MoS to that movie isn't really that offensive to me, because that's pretty much the only thing about that movie which works.



Anyway, if you guys haven't already guessed by now, this is why I started with the Chase award instead of the Fight award this year. I knew that bringing up Man of Steel would result in bickering.


MovieBuff801 02-05-2014 08:51 PM

Excellent choice. This fight never loses any of its awesomeness whenever I see it.



Justin 02-05-2014 09:08 PM

I actually really liked "The Bathroom Fight" in The World's End. Hilarious, chaotic, and entertaining. Not that the battle between Zod and Superman wasn't fun, it was just...just what I expected. Nothing I hadn't anticipated.



Neverending 02-05-2014 09:18 PM

I haven't seen the movie yet but Edgar Wright usually directs fun action scenes.



JBond 02-05-2014 09:24 PM

Great choice.



Dracula 02-06-2014 05:35 PM

Set-Piece of the Year

The Best Set-Piece category is a sort of catch-all for scenes that are clearly standout productions but which don’t fit into the traditional categories like Best Fight and Best Chase. Some of these scenes act as a sort of hybrid of the other three scene types while others are just unique things that don’t fit into any other boxes. Previous winners include everything from the Embasy Siege from Argo to the dawn of life sequence from The Tree of Life.



Storm – All is Lost: The unnamed narrator of the film All is Lost goes through all sorts of trials and tribulations over the course of the film, but he’s in is the most precarious situation when his already damaged boat finds itself in the middle of a giant storm that puts his vessel into a 360 degree roll. This forces him to go out into the tempest to attempt to repair the sail, which is when things get really testy for him. It’s a pretty intense situation that really tests the character played by the legendary Robert Redford.



Initial Hijack – Captain Phillips: When the hijacking of the MV Maersk Alabama was playing out in the news I had a tough time picturing what the hijacking of a modern ship would look like, partly because it isn’t an event that (as far as I know) had ever been dramatized in a prominent film. Paul Greengrass rectifies that in this dramatic re-enactment that’s suspenseful and unique. You feel the sailors desperation and their fear as they’re fired up from long distances.



ISS Escape – Gravity: Amidst all of the chaos of Gravity the character played by Sandra Bullock is given one moment of respite when she manages to board the International Space Station. The serenity is short lived. Before she knows it she’s desperately trying to flee the soon to explode space station and as soon as she’s out the door she’s forced to untangle the Soyuz module from parachute cords just as the debris field returns and almost kills her again.



Trains – The Lone Ranger: The Lone Ranger is a mess of a movie, but it finally finds its mojo at the eleventh hour when the William Tell Overture begins to play and the film embarks on an action set-piece that’s one part chase, one part shootout, and one part fight. The whole scene has a wacky energy too it that almost recalls silent comedy and specifically Buster Keaton’s 1927 masterpiece The General. It’s a set piece so good that it almost single-handedly justifies the movie’s existence.



The Battle of Smallville – Man of Steel: While this is ostensibly a fight between Superman and two of Zod’s henchmen, the addition of the army to the fray makes it feel almost like a full on battle and bumps it into the realm of being better characterized as a set-piece. Like the Zod fight we discussed earlier, this really feels like an epic battle between powerful foes. It also utilizes kryptonian super-speed excellently. I love the part where Faora-Ul takes out a dozen some armed soldiers with minimal effort.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



MovieBuff801 02-06-2014 05:49 PM

Good choice, and I'm glad you at least nominated The Lone Ranger. While the film is certainly nothing special, that climax has got to be my favorite action scene of 2013, period. As much of a kick as I get out of all the different action scenes in Man of Steel, there's just something about The Lone Ranger's final setpiece that inspires a feeling of glee in me. Maybe it's that "wacky energy" you pointed out. It's at the point where I'm willing to sit through the film again just to see that sequence another time.



PG Cooper 02-06-2014 06:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872414)

This one almost isn’t fair because really, practically the whole of Gravity is one big set-piece. You could pick pretty much any random ten minute slice from it and come across a sequence that could be contender for this category, and to some extent this win is a stand in for those other sequences. What’s more all of these scenes wouldn’t have fit in the other “action scene” categories (unless you want to get metaphorical about what a “chase” is), and that goes to show how unique Gravity is as an action movie of sorts. [/spoiler]

Ouch.



Good choice though. And I definitely agree that pretty much any random scene in Gravity could have won.



JBond 02-06-2014 07:01 PM

No-brainer.



Dracula 02-07-2014 06:43 PM

Give two for the price of one today.



Best Makeup

Ever since the emergence of CGI a lot of people have come to fetishize effects that are real and practical. This category isn’t necessarily covering all forms of practical effects work, but makeup is certainly part of that realm. This year things took a turn for the bloody, and four of the five nominees here are depicting some form of injury or bloodshed.



Lee Daniels’ The Butler: This film is set over the course of almost the entirety of the twentieth century, and as such the hair and makeup on Forrest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, and other actors changes dramatically with the years. Additionally many actors like Robin Williams and Alan Rickman are made to look a lot like various presidents. The one thing holding this makeup back is that it doesn’t really work on actor David Oyelowo late in the movie.



Evil Dead: There’s always on nominee in this category which pretty much just represents the best in slasher movie gore makeup, and this year that fall pretty firmly onto this remake of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. This film is full of over the top splattery bloodletting, with each scene more intentionally nauseating than the last. It’s not easy to create all the tongue splitting chainsaw slicing mayhem that’s on the screen here, but these people achieve it seamlessly.



Prisoners: Though its ostensibly a drama, the movie Prisoners takes a grisly turn when the Hugh Jackman character begins to torture Paul Dano’s character in order to get information out of him. Dano’s face eventually becomes more and more battered and misshapen as this continues, and it gets really disturbing really quick. We don’t actually see this makeup very often in the film (Dano’s character is often hidden) so the makeup artist makes the few glimpses we get count.



Rush: For much of its first half the makeup in the movie Rush consisted of some relatively simple touches that made everyone look period accurate and made the principal actors look as much like the real people they were playing as possible. It was solid but nothing award worthy. Then midway through the film one of the characters has a bad crash and for the rest of the film the makeup artists have to realistically render his burn wounds, and that’s what pushes the work into contention.



World War Z: Zombies have been done to death, especially in the last couple years. That’s why it’s cool that they were able to do something that was just a little bit different with the zombies in World War Z. These undead monsters look more sick than decayed, they’re characterized by the black blood that runs through their veins, which you can see coursing beneath their skin. This black blood doubles as a way around censorship and as a cool makeup effect.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:

 





Best Sound Design

Year in and year out this is the category I most dread having to try to sound intelligent about when, in truth, I have no idea what I’m talking about. For one thing, half of the 2013 movies I’ve seen have been at home, where I’m hearing audio through the crappy little speakers on my TV, and even if I saw a film in theaters there’s a good chance that the sound mix was the last thing I was paying attention to. Let’s just get this over with.



The Conjuring: The modern trend in horror movies is to make films about invisible ghosts that screw with people by dropping objects and making things go bump. This one is no exception and features all kinds of loud noises coming out of nowhere in the middle of what appear to be quiet scenes.



Gravity: In space, no one can hear a satellite dish get torn apart by a debris field. In making Gravity Alfonso Cuaron decided to stick to his guns and avoid depicting sound in space, but amazingly he was still able to give his film an exciting and dynamic sound mix. Operating on the principle that the astronauts do hear the vibrations that occur when they touch objects, the they were able to get some exciting audio.



Man of Steel: One movie always gets into this category simply for being transcendently noisy, and this one fits the bill this year. This large scale room shaking sound mix manages to capture every pow and thud that Zack Snyder throws in and the many, many, many, explosions are rendered well by the sound effects department.



Rush: Cars be going “vroom” y’all! In making the film Rush the sound team needed to capture the sound team needed to capture the loud and specific sound of 1970s Formula One race tracks. I think they did that.



Spring Breakers: Spring Breakers does really have the kind of technically proficient blockbustery sound mixes that usually get nominated in categories like this, but it does some experimental things that I noticed and thought about pointing out. At times the audio doesn’t match what’s on screen, lines from earlier or later in the film will be edited in out of context, scenes will shift while audio continues. Lots of strange things like that which maintain the film’s surreal woozy tone.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



MovieBuff801 02-07-2014 07:01 PM

Good choice.



Both Man of Steel and Rush deserved their respective nominations, no doubt. I vividly recall my theater seat vibrating A LOT when I first saw Man of Steel, especially during the last 45 minutes. And I watched Rush again on Blu Ray yesterday, and MAN, did those racing scenes sound great.



Justin 02-07-2014 08:31 PM

Gravity's sound design is indeed insanely good. Man of Steel was nicely done, but it wasn't nearly as unique or as innovative.



IanTheCool 02-08-2014 08:12 AM

Yeah, Gravity's sound design is amazing. I wouldn't have even thought of Rush for make-up, but good call on the nod.



Dracula 02-08-2014 12:35 PM

Best Art Direction

Art direction mainly pertains to set decoration and the surrounding design philosophy; I usually extend it to pertain to props and to some extent even costumes. I’m looking for art direction that is both cool and unique, but which also serves the film as a whole well. Sometimes that means imagining new and extravagant visions, but other times that means making things as real as possible in order to increase immersion.



Dallas Buyers Club: There’s nothing innovative about the art direction in this film, but I think there’s something to be said about movies that can invisibly make sets look realistic and lived in and more than any other movie this year I think the design team for Dallas Buyers club were able to do that. The film places you in 1980s Texas without having any of the craft draw attention to itself the way it does in, say, American Hustle.



Elysium: It wasn’t a film that everyone liked, but I found its vision of a future defined by extreme wealth inequality compelling. It was able to make Los Angeles look like a favela and also envision a wealthy utopia as a sort of Halo ring in the sky filled with mansions. On top of all that the team was able to imagine a bunch of cool futuristic things like exo-skeletons and neat-looking guns.



Gravity: To make Gravity realistic the Art team needed to recreate contemporary space crafts and space stations with meticulous detail while also envisioning what would be like to be in the middle of a debris field. Little touches like the Russian instruction book in the capsule had to be thought out and created in order to keep things entirely authentic.



The Great Gatsby: When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his famous novel he described all sorts of opulence in the Jazz Age Long Island, but that wasn’t quite opulent enough for Baz Luhrmann, so he came along and punched them up a bit. He hasn’t filled the world with anachronisms exactly, but things are a lot more colorful than what you normally see in films set in this era. Otherwise it’s all about the huge and highly decorated mansions.



Her: While Elysium envisioned a distant future that looks vastly different that today’s world, Her is trying to see what things are going to be like some twenty or thirty years in the future when things are mostly like they are today, except kind of not. Little things have been changed here and there in this world and seemingly simple things like computer screens have been changed dramatically, but casually.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



IanTheCool 02-08-2014 12:50 PM

...



PG Cooper 02-08-2014 01:18 PM

Good choice.



Justin 02-08-2014 09:24 PM

I haven't seen Elysium, but I really loved the art direction of Her. Between the cubicles, high-waisted pants, and technology, it really shined for me.



Dracula 02-09-2014 10:36 AM

Best Soundtrack

The best soundtrack award differs from best original score in that it focuses on the use of pre-existing popular music rather than a newly composed score. Notice that I said “pre-existing,” so movies that mainly consist of newly recorded music like Inside Llewyn Davis aren’t really eligible, though soundtracks that mix pre-existing material with new material are (although only the licensed portions are to be analyzed).



American Hustle: Like the movie itself, American Hustle’s soundtrack was all about the 1970s, and the song selction seems to cover every aspect of popular music from that decade. There’s some Disco (Diana Ross’ “I Feel Love”), some Folk-Rock (America’s “Horse With No Name”), some glam rock (Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”), some Soft Rock (Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work”), and some good old fashioned Arena Rock (Santana’s “Evil Ways”). It’s like the older and slightly more urban flip-side to Richard Linklater’s famous 70s nostalgia soundtrack to the film Dazed and Confused.



The Bling Ring: With The Bling Ring Sofia Coppola is very much trying to capture what “the kids” are up to in 2013, and to do it she fills her soundtrack with a lot of very contemporary music from artists who paint a very opulent picture of American culture. It features tracks by Rick Ross, 2 Chainz, and of course two tracks by the maestro of luxury rap: Kanye West. Then in the closing credits she brings in Frank Ocean to act as a sort of voice of reason with his uncannily on-point song “Super Rich Kids.”



Spring Breakers: Another director trying to figure out what’s wrong with the youth of today was Harmony Korine, who also filled his soundtrack with Hip Hop, but hip hop of a very different kind. Where Sofia Coppola focused on rappers who give off an aura of sophistication and taste, Korine focuses on disreputable and alienating voices like Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka Flame, and Meek Mill. Of course the real backbone of this soundtrack comes from Skrillix’s widely despised “bro-step” music which, in this context, alters the tone of the film to turn it into a weird trippy party from hell... y’all.



The World’s End: The World’s End is all about a group of friends trying to recapture their youth in the late 90s, as such the film’s soundtrack is loaded with Britpop from that era by the likes of Blur, Pulp, Suede, and The Stone Roses. There was also that Soup Dragons track I nominated earlier as well as a Primal Scream song that’s integral to the film’s opening. The film also breaks the motif for a minute to include The Doors’ bizarro Brecht cover “The Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar),” which is certainly appropriate to the movies focus on old bars. It’s also pretty much the only nominee that isn’t actively about excess, so that’s something.



The Wolf of Wall Street: Martin Scorsese soundtracks in movies like Goodfellas and Casino are traditionally very melded to the time period they’re based in, but he goes for a much more eclectic mish mash for The Wolf of Wall Street. He uses some blues tracks by some of his own heroes like Cannonball Adderly and Howlin’ Wolf, but there’s also a punkier side to the soundtrack featuring the likes of The Lemonheads and 7Horse, as well as more 90s specific moments like Cypress Hill and Naughty by Nature. Also, kudos to Scorsese for having the restraint to keep “Gimme Shelter” out of this even though its opulence set against lyrics about rape and murder being a shot away probably would have matched every scene of the film.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



JBond 02-09-2014 10:59 AM

Good call.



MovieBuff801 02-09-2014 11:10 AM

Yep. So many of those songs are still in my head after seeing it.



IanTheCool 02-09-2014 11:18 AM

Do the hustle! do-do do-do dodo-do do-do



Dracula 02-10-2014 05:34 PM

Best Editing

Editing is a tremendously important part of cinema, but it can often go unsung in part because the many decisions that go into a successful edit can’t always be easily summarized or described. In fact there are many who will argue that the most successful editing is the editing you don’t notice. As such, this is probably an award that needs to be taken with a bit of a grain of salt, but I think I’ve found some worthy nominees.



Captain Phillips: I’ve long admired the editing in Paul Greengrass’ films, and Captain Phillips is no exception. Well maybe it is. Greengrass style remained almost entirely unchanged and yet you almost never heard anyone complaining about disorientation like they did for some of his other movies. That’s because Greengrass has found a way to make his style more accessible without really sacrificing immediacy.



Like Someone in Love: Most of the films that get honored for their editing focus in on elaborate set pieces, but some of the best editing shows up in movies like Abbas Kiarostimai’s Like Someone in Love, which makes a number of unconventional decisions which establish a tone and rhythm that are unique to the film. His edits here are playful, but also somewhat calming and almost zen-like up until its crazy final shot.



Man of Steel: Superman is of course faster than a speeding bullet, and that means that the film’s editors needed to keep up with him. Bringing sense and logic to Zack Snyder’s extravagant action scenes could not have been easy, but I think they pulled it off really well. The film’s editing also helps to integrate a cool flashback structure which gives flashes of Kent’s childhood while keeping the main story moving.



To the Wonder: In 2011 the film The Tree of Life won the Golden Stake for best editing without too much trouble. To the Wonder is in many ways a follow up to that film and it maintains it innovative editing style. There’s less of a tricky chronology this time around, but the editing team still manages to cut between Terrence Malick’s beautiful shots very effectively.



The Wolf of Wall Street: Thelma Schoonmaker is a legend in her field and with The Wolf of Wall Street she has done another lights out editing job along with her longtime collaborator Martin Scorsese. Here she manages to make Scorsese’s dense profile of Wall Street decadence. The editing is fast and daring, but never distracting or overdone.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



JBond 02-10-2014 05:40 PM

Yeah, that's a good choice.



MovieBuff801 02-10-2014 06:12 PM

Also a pretty obvious choice.



Justin 02-10-2014 06:25 PM

Some really great films here, such as Like Someone in Love and To The Wonder, but yes, The Wolf of Wall Street deserved it.



Neverending 02-10-2014 06:46 PM

LOL. A movie that's 30 minutes too long should never win a Best Editing award. And nominating Man of Steel was a joke too. You should have nominated and given the award to Gravity, a movie that has one character floating in space for 90 minutes and doesn't bore the audience.



MovieBuff801 02-10-2014 06:50 PM

I'm not sure what I'd give Editing to, but I know it wouldn't be The Wolf of Wall Street. Notice I didn't say I agreed with the choice



Neverending 02-10-2014 06:52 PM

I wouldn't have even nominated it. American Hustle should have gotten that spot.



Dracula 02-10-2014 07:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872817)

LOL. A movie that's 30 minutes too long should never win a Best Editing award. And nominating Man of Steel was a joke too. You should have nominated and given the award to Gravity, a movie that has one character floating in space for 90 minutes and doesn't bore the audience.

Even if I agreed that the movie was too long, that's irrelevant. Thelma Schoonmaker's job is to cut each scene energetically, not to make decisions about how long the story is or what scenes are or aren't included. Gravity, a film that is personified by long unbroken shots, doesn't really thrive on editing at all and the cuts that are there are rather perfunctory.



Neverending 02-10-2014 07:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872821)

not to make decisions about how long the story is or what scenes are or aren't included.

Actually... her job is to do that. A director can, and often does, get attached to every scene and the editor has to serve as an objective point of view.



Dracula 02-10-2014 07:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872822)

Actually... her job is to do that. A director can, and often does, get attached to every scene and the editor has to serve as an objective point of view.

No it isn't. The editor is a craftsman, they do not have veto power over scenes nor do they write long screenplays and they aren't meant to fight directors about length any more than the producers or studio executives do. Half of their job is done before the shooting is even over as they edit each day's work.



Neverending 02-10-2014 07:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872823)

No it isn't.

Yes it is, Dracula. The editor isn't on the set everyday so he or she doesn't care how much hard work went into every scene. Also, the editor isn't paying the bills so he or she doesn't care how much money each scene cost. So the editor is the most objective person in the room and part of the job is to be a voice of reason when something isn't working and has to be eliminated regardless of the baggage surrounding it. Now of course, the editor doesn't make the final decisions. That's either the director or studio, depending on who has "final cut" in the contract. But the editor still has to defend what they believe to be the right choices. And a good director, or studio, will at least meet the editor halfway and compromise on stuff because they know the editor is the most objective person. So the fact that Wolf of Wall Street ran 30 minutes too long is a poor reflection on Thelma Schoonmaker. Martin Scorsese and her have been working together for over 30 years. They have a close enough relationship that she can call him out on his bulls--t. So this movie being too long is ultimately her fault TOO.



PG Cooper 02-10-2014 07:59 PM

Except the movie isn't too long. Anyway, I think you made the right choice, Drac.



Dracula 02-10-2014 08:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872824)

Yes it is, Dracula. The editor isn't on the set everyday so he or she doesn't care how much hard work went into every scene. Also, the editor isn't paying the bills so he or she doesn't care how much money each scene cost. So the editor is the most objective person in the room and part of the job is to be a voice of reason when something isn't working and has to be eliminated regardless of the baggage surrounding it. Now of course, the editor doesn't make the final decisions. That's either the director or studio, depending on who has "final cut" in the contract. But the editor still has to defend what they believe to be the right choices. And a good director, or studio, will at least meet the editor halfway and compromise on stuff because they know the editor is the most objective person. So the fact that Wolf of Wall Street ran 30 minutes too long is a poor reflection on Thelma Schoonmaker. Martin Scorsese and her have been working together for over 30 years. They have a close enough relationship that she can call him out on his bulls--t. So this movie being too long is ultimately her fault TOO.

Nope. The award is best editing not best cut of a film. The film's run time is determined by all sorts of factors ranging from the length of the initial script, what the director wants, what the producers want, and what studio wants, and sometimes even what the test audiences demand. That's why the award is called best editing, not best final cut of a film. Its meant to gauge the editor's craft and skill, not their diplomatic abilities when trying to convince the other parties involved of the merits of various scenes.



Oh, and this is all moot anyway because I have zero problems with The Wolf of Wall Streets run time.



Neverending 02-10-2014 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872826)

The film's run time is determined by all sorts of factors ranging from the length of the initial script, what the director wants, what the producers want, and what studio wants, and sometimes even what the test audiences demand.

This is a Martin Scorsese movie. The only ones making the decisions in the editing room are Scorsese, Thelma Schoonmaker and MAYBE Leo DiCaprio.



Jack 02-11-2014 04:12 PM

I have no qualms with Wolf of Wall Street's running time and think it is a super strong candidate. Bit of insight...they actually tested the longer cuts of WOWS:



www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/mo...ng-movies.html



I was also impressed with the editing in both Stoker and Upstream Color this year. Certainly, to Dracula's point, two films where the editing is noticeable. Still, the way they found rhythm and momentum in the material really knocked me back.



Jack 02-11-2014 04:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872820)

I wouldn't have even nominated it. American Hustle should have gotten that spot.

I checked my watch a few times in Hustle. Not once in Wolf of Wall Street.



MovieBuff801 02-11-2014 04:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jack (Post 2872932)

I checked my watch a few times in Hustle. Not once in Wolf of Wall Street.

I checked my watch about four or five times during The Wolf of Wall Street.



Neverending 02-11-2014 04:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jack (Post 2872932)

I checked my watch a few times in Hustle. Not once in Wolf of Wall Street.

Bulls--t



MovieBuff801 02-11-2014 04:45 PM

I'll admit I checked my watch once during my first viewing of American Hustle, but not during either of my subsequent repeat viewings.



PG Cooper 02-11-2014 04:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending

Bulls--t

Yeah, god forbid others were fully entertained through the three hour run time.


Jack 02-11-2014 04:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2872936)

Bulls--t

You're right? I'm lying? What do you want, dude?



Dracula 02-11-2014 06:35 PM

Best Cinematography

Cinematography has traditionally been one of the easier categories for the average person to grasp (after all, we all have opinions about what “good” photography is), but people’s opinions on the subject can vary greatly. Photography can be smooth or gritty depending on what a film needs, and opinions about what makes an individual film beautiful can differ.



12 Years a Slave: Much of 12 Years a Slave is set outdoors, and during these scenes the film effectively captures and harnesses sunlight in interesting ways. It doesn’t look super filtered or corrected, but it does have a distinctively strong look just the same. Things really become impressive during the interiors, which are mainly lit by candles and lanterns and other period specific lighting implements.



Blancanieves: Between Nebraska, Frances Ha, Much Ado About Nothing, and Computer Chess, this has been a pretty good year for black and white in cinema. Out of all of them, I think the one that is the best photographed is this Spanish film that was made using silent film techniques. The film does look authentically vintage, but beyond that it employs some really cool lighting and classy framing in order to make it look like it was actually made by one of the old masters.



Man of Steel: Most super hero movies these days are content to have a functional, almost televisual look that doesn’t get in the way of the visual effects. For Man of Steel Zack Snyder and DP Amir Mokri opted for something grander and more memorable. The film was shot using the Anamorphic process rather than the more common Super 35 format, which generally looks slick while also giving a classical filmic look, which fits perfectly with the Americana and grandeur of the character.



Oblivion: Though it occasionally falls into the trap of using an orange and teal color scheme, when it’s at its best Oblivion can be one of the sharpest looking films of the year. It’s the only of these five nominees to have been shot on digital and this gives it a very detailed look that picks up on a lot of little things while also giving it a lot of deep blacks during the darker scenes. The best looking shots though, are of course the landscapes, which are calendar quality good for the most part.



To the Wonder: Emmanuel Lubezki has been getting a lot of press for his photography in Gravity, but much of the lighting in that film exists only in a computer. Lubezki’s real masterclass was in this Terrence Malick film, which looks every bit as good as what he gave us in The Tree of Life. It might not have been quite as revelatory as the work in that film, but it still looks great and makes that film a real wonder (no pun intended) to behold.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 02-11-2014 06:42 PM

Good choice and great write-up.



Justin 02-11-2014 07:29 PM

I'm a little surprised that Only God Forgives didn't make it. But good choice nonetheless.



Dracula 02-11-2014 07:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Justin (Post 2872955)

I'm a little surprised that Only God Forgives didn't make it. But good choice nonetheless.

I wasn't a big fan of that movie in general, and its cinematography wasn't really to my tastes either. I generally like my lighting to be a bit more natural.



MovieBuff801 02-11-2014 09:36 PM

Solid choice, but no nomination for Gravity? WTF?



JBond 02-11-2014 10:03 PM

...you guys have watches?



Dracula 02-11-2014 10:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MovieBuff801 (Post 2872959)

Solid choice, but no nomination for Gravity? WTF?

Gravity is like, 90% CGI. Almost everything that was actually shot with a camera in it was done so on a greenscreen. Those long extended shots were not accomplished by actually moving a camera. I could look past that if Emmanuel Lubezki had come up with some brilliant visual aesthetic for the film, but for the most part I thought its look was (appropriately) sterile and matter of fact, which is fine, but not necessarily what I'm going to honor with a nomination.



MovieBuff801 02-12-2014 12:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872962)

Gravity is like, 90% CGI. Almost everything that was actually shot with a camera in it was done so on a greenscreen. Those long extended shots were not accomplished by actually moving a camera. I could look past that if Emmanuel Lubezki had come up with some brilliant visual aesthetic for the film, but for the most part I thought its look was (appropriately) sterile and matter of fact, which is fine, but not necessarily what I'm going to honor with a nomination.

VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



Neverending 02-12-2014 12:35 AM

I feel that this is a more appropriate video



VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



Justin 02-12-2014 08:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872957)

I wasn't a big fan of that movie in general, and its cinematography wasn't really to my tastes either. I generally like my lighting to be a bit more natural.

Makes sense. I guess that answers any questions about Upstream Color, too...



MovieBuff801 02-12-2014 11:43 AM

I hate to come off as overly negative, but no nomination for the cinematography in Prisoners also disappoints me.



Dracula 02-12-2014 02:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MovieBuff801 (Post 2873007)

I hate to come off as overly negative, but no nomination for the cinematography in Prisoners also disappoints me.

Too much blue lighting in that one. The overuse of blue lighting to underscore melancholy has come to strike me as a bit of a cliche and has become a bit of a pet peeve of mine.



MovieBuff801 02-12-2014 04:48 PM

Agree to disagree. I find that Deakins' work there really helped give the film a hypnotic quality.



Dracula 02-12-2014 06:31 PM

Best Score

Amongst film buff there are some people who obsess over film composers and buy lots of score CDs and then there are some people who rarely even think about or notice background scores. Unfortunately I’m closer to the latter camp. So I guess you should take my opinions here with a little grain of salt. This has been a challenging year to assess from a musical perspective in general. There have been a lot of noteworthy scores but very little consensus around any of them in particular.



Captain Phillips: Captain Phillips isn’t really an action movie, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to its highly percussive score. The score is primarily credited to Henry Jackman, but rumor has it that it also has a lot of additional music by various other Hans Zimmer acolytes. Whoever is responsible for it, the music adds a lot of the film’s kinetic energy and wouldn’t have been out of place in one of Greengrass’ Bourne movies.



Her: One of the best decisions that Spike Jonze made in the production of the film Her was to make its world futuristic, but not too futuristic. As such a super futuristic techno score would have been inappropriate, and so would a more traditional film score. Instead he decided to focus in on the film’s emotional side and hire Owen Pallett and the band Arcade Fire to give the film a very contemporary indie-rock infused score that feels sincere, but not quirky.



Man of Steel: John Willaims is always a tough act to follow, and for Man of Steel Hans Zimmer needed to do something that would be completely different from Williams’ iconic theme while still being bold and dramatic. What he came up with was, much like the film, a grittier and more modern theme that still had that hopeful grandiosity somewhere in its core just waiting to burst free.



Oblivion: Director Joseph Kosinski seems to really like French Electronica music. He managed to get Daft Punk to do the music for his last movie and he got this less known (but apparently also famous) French band called M83 to do the music for this one. Their score skews more towards traditional film scoring than Daft Punk, but they do subtly add some electronic elements to their work which does make the music more propulsive and interesting.



Trance: And in what’s proving to be something of a trend this year we look at yet another score by someone who isn’t a traditional composer. That’s not to say Rick Smith isn’t experienced, he has worked on a number of other Danny Boyle movies, but he is yet another electronica composer. While he’s gone for a sort of grandiosity before, here he’s trying to make the music exciting, but at times almost playful and ethereal.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



MovieBuff801 02-12-2014 06:48 PM

Great choice. When I boil it down, I'm torn between that one and Oblivion, so I'm happy to see one of them get the award.



I was also a fan of Steven Price's score for Gravity.



PG Cooper 02-12-2014 06:57 PM

Yeah, that is a good choice. Personally, Price's work on Gravity is my favourite score of the year.



JBond 02-12-2014 07:15 PM

I would have gone Oblivion.



IanTheCool 02-12-2014 07:23 PM

I'm not understanding the sudden Man of Steel love that has been happening since it came onto bluray, but I do agree with this particular pick.



Neverending 02-12-2014 08:35 PM

Quote:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872354)

Man of Steel

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872414)

Man of Steel

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872541)

Man of Steel

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872804)

Man of Steel

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2872950)

Man of Steel

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2873038)

Man of Steel

24.media.tumblr.com/607e27fe...hahwo1_400.gif



Dracula 02-13-2014 05:59 PM

Villain of the Year

People hate good villains but they love to hate great villains. Every year I assemble a list of the best villains, but it usually involves a lot of caveats. First of all, villains actually have to be characters. You won’t see me nominate something like “the vaccum of space” here. I also won’t nominate animals or monsters unless they have human-like sentience. An even more important rule is that villains here must actively be the antagonists in their films, so I won’t be nominating people like Jordan Belfort here regardless of how vile they may be.



Edwin Epps- 12 Years a Slave: There are plenty of terrible slave owners in 12 Years a Slave including the characters played by Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Sarah Paulson. But the guy who looms over them all is Edwin Epps, as played by Michael Fassbender. While other slave owners at least try to justify their participation in this beastly practice in one way or another, this guy just seems to be a sadistic mother****er who shows absolutely no restraint in his cruelty.



Encarna / La Madrastra- Blancanieves: Blancanieves is a re-telling of Snow White set in 1920s Spain. For its version of the evil stepmother/wicked witch actress Maribel Verdú created a rather vile lady who believably commits all the sins that the character is supposed to commit and does it with a sort of maniacal glee. Whether she’s wearing bondage gear or a black witchlike veil, she comes across as a timeless face of evil.



General Zod – Man of Steel: Most of the Marvel movies are content to just make their villains eeeeeevilllll, but in Man of Steel they decided to actually give their villain some actual motivation for his various dastardly deeds. Here he’s re-envisioned not as a criminal but as a Kryptonian patriot who wants to terraform Earth in order to rebuild his destroyed home planet. Here he is a general, and carries himself as such, and Michael Shannon really sells it.



Emily Taylor – Side Effects: For much of the film you aren’t sure whether Emily Taylor is a villain, a victim, or a bystander in the film Side Effects and to what extent she was in control of her actions. By the end it becomes clear that she is not and never has been helpless in the movie, she’s been a schemer the whole way through and while her scheme is a bunch of soap opera ridiculousness, Rooney Mara sells it all a lot better than she should be able to.



Danny McBride – This is the End: Most of the actors holed up in James Franco’s house in This is the End are friends, but the clear exception is Danny McBride, who crashed the party and passed out in the bathroom during most of the apocalyptic goings on. McBride has made a career of making himself look like a dick, but it probably took special courage to actually play himself being an insufferable bastard. The persona is taken to its extreme late in the film, when he becomes the leader of a cannibalistic cult that keeps Channing Tatum as a gimp.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Neverending 02-13-2014 06:29 PM

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MovieBuff801 02-13-2014 06:32 PM

Excellent choice. It'd be mine, too.



PG Cooper 02-14-2014 06:20 AM

Great choice, Drac. Good call on McBride as well.



Also, while I do support your Man of Steel nominations, that GIF Neverending posted is hilarious.



Dracula 02-14-2014 06:08 PM

Best Cameo

I usually have trouble scrounging together choices for this category, but not this year. I had over twenty different possibilities written down before whittling the list down to these five nominees. I should probably point out ahead of time that I don’t necessarily define a cameo exclusively as a surprise appearance by a famous so much as any actor being able to make an impression out of a really small role that might not otherwise fit in a traditional acting award.



Robert De Niro – American Hustle: Robert De Niro, who did some of his best work in a while in David O. Russell’s The Silver Linings Playbook, returns to the Russell fold in this short but memorable role in American Hustle. De Niro has of course played Mafioso characters a number of times in the past, but he is a little different here than he usually is in these kind of roles. He’s playing more of an aged don here; more Junior Soprano than Jimmy Conway.



Channing Tatum – This is the End: This is the End is a movie that’s filled with cameos, like, to the point where they stop feeling like cameos. When just about every speaking role in a film is a celebrity playing themselves it kind of takes a little something extra for an appearance to be a surprise. That’s what happens when its revealed that Danny McBride’s personal gimp is none other than Magic Mike himself Channing Tatum. Dude clearly has a sense of humor.



Chris Evans – Thor: The Dark World: I’ve become pretty suspicious about cameos in Marvel films at this point. More often than not they feel more like branding exercises than genuinely inspired moments, but they actually found a pretty creative way to do it here. Using Loki’s holographic disguising device they manage to bring Captain America into the film for a moment without actually bringing him into the film. Its fan service, but fun fan service.



Romina Mondello – To the Wonder: I was saying before that I don’t necessarily think you need to be a famous person to fit in with this category, and that’s certainly the case with Romina Mondello, who has mostly worked in Italian television before making this brief appearance in To the Wonder. Playing a character that just sort of appears out of nowhere, she delivers a speech about living for one’s self which runs counter to the tortured devotion that most of the film’s characters suffer from. What’s more, she delivers this speech in a way that’s so charming I wanted to know more about her.



Matthew McConaughey – The Wolf of Wall Street: Matthew McConaughey plays a pretty prominent role in the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street, and I wonder is some audience members were disappointed to see him disappear from the film after about fifteen minutes. Still, he makes a hell of an impression in a short time in which he teaches Di Caprio’s character about the hedonistic ways of Wall Street. He also improvised that weird chest beating thing, and that’s just hilarious.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



IanTheCool 02-14-2014 07:03 PM

Ehh, I thought his character's introduction was one of the weak points of the plot.



Justin 02-14-2014 09:50 PM

It's the best of the bunch, at least.



Daniel 02-15-2014 12:02 AM

You know ... I thought the dumping of DeNiro's character was one of the worst parts of Hustle, but when he is in the movie, he was spine-chilling. It's a shame the movie decided to not show his face one more time after that unnerving scene. For the time he was present, I would agree with that choice.



Daniel 02-15-2014 12:03 AM

Also, the Best Villain should have gone to Space Debris - Gravity



Deexan 02-15-2014 04:24 AM

No cameo nomination for Man of Steel?! The Wayne Enterprises satellite perhaps?



Dracula 02-15-2014 06:07 AM

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Originally Posted by Daniel (Post 2873223)

Also, the Best Villain should have gone to Space Debris - Gravity

I do specifically outline that one has to be human to be eligible for Villain of the year.



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Originally Posted by Deexan (Post 2873231)

No cameo nomination for Man of Steel?! The Wayne Enterprises satellite perhaps?

I considered Kevin Costner, but decided his role was too large. Laurence Fishburne, Christopher Meloni, and Richard Schiff were also vetted, but I ultimately decided that those were really just small parts, not cameos. The one who came the closest was Antje Traue, who I thought really did a lot with a little as Zod's henchwoman, but at the end of the day there were better choices.



Dracula 02-15-2014 09:12 AM

Best Supporting Actress

When I look at this lineup for Best Supporting Actress I’m struck by how young (or at least young at heart it is). June Squibb is obviously more… mature… than her competitors, but she was just as much of a discovery for me as the other nominees. In fact the only one of these women I knew by name before 2013 was Sally Hawkins, but even she wasn’t exactly a household name.



Lupita Nyong'o- 12 Years a Slave: I said earlier that many of the actresses here are being introduced to audiences for the first time, but the only one who didn’t even have a single feature film credit before this year was Lupita Nyong’o, who is absolutely heartbreaking as a slave named Patsey in 12 Years a Slave. The first thing I did when I came home from seeing the film was to look up her name and wonder where Steve McQueen found her.



Léa Seydoux- Blue is the Warmest Color: While playing the slightly older and more experienced lover of Adèle Exarchopoulos’ character, Léa Seydoux has to deal with a lot of baggage. In the wrong hands her character could have come off as very unlikable figure, especially later in the film when “the honeymoon is over” so to speak and some of her character’s more prickly edges begin to be revealed. Fortunately Seydoux’s performance help’s the audience see her side of things and keep the character grounded and believable.



Sally Hawkins – Blue Jasmine: The role of Jasmine’s lower-middle class sister Ginger could have been played in a number of rather terrible ways. She could have been reduced to “white trash” or could have been played up as some kind of long suffering Italian wife type, but Sally Hawkins manages to drive the character in a way that avoids all the potential stereotypes while still becoming an interesting scene partner for Blanchet’s Jasmine.



June Squibb- Nebraska: Actress June Squibb spent much of her career as a stage actress for much of her career and didn’t have a film credit until 1990. This year, at age 84 she finally got a film role that really shows off what she’s capable of. As Woody Grant’s long suffering wife Squibb manages to steal a number of scenes by playing one of those elderly characters who’s simply too old to put up with people’s ****.



Kaitlyn Dever – Short Term 12: The youngest of the five nominees here is Kaitlyn Dever, who plays a troubled youth in the film Short Term 12. Her character is a teenager who is clearly troubled and has a history of self-harm, but who refuses to open up about this and instead shields herself with a smug “too cool for this” attitude. In her performance she must reveal a wounded interior that exists beneath the surface of the character’s stoic façade.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Justin 02-15-2014 10:24 AM

I completely agree.



PG Cooper 02-15-2014 10:26 AM

Good choice. I'd have gone with Nyong'o but Seydoux's performance is great as well.



Dracula 02-15-2014 06:37 PM

Best Supporting Actor

Alright, so you may notice that one of the actors nominated here has spent most of the award season campaigning as a lead actor. He can do that all he wants, but I’m strict about these supporting/lead designations and when a movie is told almost entirely from the perspective of another character I have trouble calling them leads. Besides, the lead actor category is over-stuffed and this makes more room for other actors there.



Michael Fassbender- 12 Years a Slave: Is Michael Fassbender capable of doing a performance that isn’t kind of awesome? Probably not, and in this third collaboration between him and director Steve McQueen he manages to put his raw talent into a form that is hard for anyone to deny. Playing a truly vicious and despicable character, Fassbender manages to be both evil and at the same time kind of pathetic.



Bobby Cannavale – Blue Jasmine: I was pretty high on Bobby Cannavale after his awesome performance in season three of “Boardwalk Empire” and thought it was pretty cool to see him playing a completely different character in Blue Jasmine. Stepping into a role that was based on a character who was once played by Marlon Brando is not easy, but Cannavale managed to make the character fit in a modern context and also did a great job of keeping the character from seeming like a complete jerk.



Barkhad Abdi – Captain Phillips: Much has been written about Barkhad Abdi’s inexperience before he was discovered at an open audition by the producers of Captain Phillips. This modest origin is impressive indeed given that he’s an actor who manages to stand toe to toe with none other than Tom Hanks. You can also see the increasing desperation on his face over the course of the film as it becomes more and more clear that this situation isn’t going to end well.



Michael Shannon – Man of Steel: Michael Shannon is the kind of actor who knows just the right way to go over the top without seeming ridiculous, and that’s exactly what he does while playing General Zod in Man of Steel. Shannon took the title of “General” seriously and played Zod as a sort of Kryptonian Julius Caesar, a man trying to maintain a sort of psychotic dignity while carrying out his insane duties.



Bruce Dern – Nebraska: We haven’t seen a ton of Bruce Dern in prominent roles recently and that helps you to be a little surprised by his work here in Nebraska, where he plays an aging father who believes he’s won a million dollars. I sometime wonder what it’s like for… veteran… actors like Dern to have to play aged characters who are losing their faculties. Do they worry that this is their near future? I don’t know, but they have a certain intensity just the same.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 02-15-2014 06:42 PM

Great choice.



Neverending 02-15-2014 07:28 PM

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Dracula 02-15-2014 08:23 PM

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Dracula 02-16-2014 09:16 AM

Best Actress

While the Best Actor category this year has been a super tight race between about 8 or 9 guys, the Best Actress race has been a bit looser and has allowed room for some lower profile performances to slip in. Well, “lower profile” is relative; there’s nothing here that will surprise a dedicated film lover too much, but I did depart from the predominant awards-season narrative in a couple places here.



Julie Delpy – Before Midnight: Reprising her role as Céline for the third time, Julie Delpy once again impresses. After all these years she seems to have become really comfortable in this character and when she and Ethan Hawke are trading lines it has a sort of improvised immediacy. The Best Actor category was a little too stuffed for Hawke to have a place in it, but to some extent I feel like this award is for both Delpy and him.



Adèle Exarchopoulos – Blue is the Warmest Color: Adèle Exarchopoulos was mostly unknown outside of France before she starred in Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue is the Warmest Color, but that won’t be a problem for her going forward. In her role here she undergoes a pretty dramatic transformation and goes from being a confused teenager to being an immature young adult at a crossroads.



Cate Blanchett – Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen seems to be at his best when he’s making movies about women, possibly because his female characters end up feeling less like surrogates for their creator. The character of Jasmine in Blue Jasmine seems particularly unique. She’s a messed up chick who’s largely responsible for her own situation and yet still seems somewhat sympathetic because of Cate Blanchett’s performance.



Sandra Bullock – Gravity: Gravity is essentially a one-person show, and those are usually good showcases for a person’s given talent. It’s exactly the kind of showcase that Bullock needed, because most of the garbage that she makes does not adequately showcase her range. Hopefully this will be the start of a Matthew McConaughy style career re-invention for her. Her character is really pushed through the ringer in the movie, and she proves to be up to the challenge.



Brie Larson – Short Term 12: I feel like I must have underestimated Brie Larson in the past because her work in Short Term 12 was something of a revelation. She’s 24 years old, but she’s mostly been playing teenage roles up to this point. Here she almost feels like she’s playing someone who’s older than her real age, in part because her character has been through a lot in her life. The character has problems, but she’s also highly competent at her job and is constantly putting up a super-strong façade in front of the young people she leads.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Dracula 02-16-2014 08:10 PM

Best Actor

Two of the most high profile awards at any given award shows are always Best Actor and Best Actress. The reason for this simple: the award goes to movie stars. I personally don’t think these acting awards are really that much more important than all the other awards, but they are important, and this particular award is extremely competitive this year. I had to make cuts here that I didn’t want to make, but I’m pretty happy with the final five.



Chiwetel Ejiofor- 12 Years a Slave: He gets a little overshadowed by Nyong'o and Fassbender at times, but I was still pretty damn impressed with what Chiwetel Ejiofor was able to do as the central character of 12 Years a Slave. Ejiofor is a great actor, but he hasn’t always had the best roles to demonstrate his skills. Here he’s older than he was the last time I remember seeing him on screen and he does a really good job of portraying the dignity that his character manages to maintain throughout his ordeal.



Tom Hanks – Captain Phillips: Tom Hanks is one of those guys you get so used to seeing as a charming individual on talk shows that you sometimes forget that he’s also a pretty great actor. It’s with films like Captain Phillips that he reminds you of how he got to this place of incredible respect. Playing a regular guy who’s caught in a crappy situation, Hanks doesn’t turn Phillips into some kind of hero but he does manage to put you in his shoes and allows you to be impressed with how he was able to get out of it alive.



Matthew McConaughy – Dallas Buyers Club: Proof positive that a great performance can come out of a mediocre movie (and that a mediocre movie can’t be made that much better by a great performance) is Matthew McConaughy’s turn in Dallas Buyers Club. McConaughy is pretty far removed from his glamorous romantic-comedy persona here and he also can’t really fall back on his usual “alright, alright, alright” ticks. As such this is pretty much the most transformative performance we’ve seen out of McConaughy even during this “McConaughsense” he’s been going through.



Oscar Isaac – Inside Llewyn Davis: Oscar Isaac probably does deserve some credit here for being able to sing all the songs I the film and making for a plausible talent. However, this nomination is for acting, and he more than earns his way here on that alone. I really love the way that Isaac is able to thread this needle in which he manages to make audiences understand why his character is behaving the way he is and allows them to sympathize with him even when he’s kind of being an ass.



Leonardo Di Caprio – The Wolf of Wall Street: I wouldn’t call Leonardo Di Caprio’s performances in recent years “humorless,” but I have gotten the impression that in the post-Titanic years he was maybe over-compensating in order to prove that he was a serious thespian. This is why it was so surprising to see him adjusting so quickly to the comedic rhythms of The Wolf of Wall Street. He trades lines with Jonah Hill like a pro, but his dramatic chops come into play too, especially when he’s giving speeches to his “troops” like some kind of crazed cult leader.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:


Justin 02-16-2014 08:13 PM

I'm so happy that Blue is the Warmest Color is getting some recognition. Incredible actresses.



PG Cooper 02-17-2014 08:26 AM

Great Best Actor choice.



Dracula 02-17-2014 05:54 PM

Best Acting Ensemble

The acting ensemble award is an award that looks at the entirety of a film’s casting decisions and tries to give an overall award for the collective achievement of all the performances. The casting of smaller parts matters just as much if not more than the casting of stars, there’s no “I” in team, and I’m looking for movies that manage to have solid casts top to bottom. I’m not just looking for tons of stars either, in fact the reckless casting of recognizable faces can potentially hurt you here if they don’t all fit (which is why 12 Years a Slave didn’t make the cut BTW).



American Hustle: David O. Russell has alienated a number of actors over the years, but he does seem to have found a cadre of actors who can stand him and many of them have returned to star in American Hustle. The core cast of Bale, Adamas, Cooper, and Lawrence is of course great but it does run deeper than that. Jeremy Renner has largely been left out of the awards discussion, but his work is as transformative as anyone’s and note should also be made of Louis C.K. (who pops up in two nominated movies this year), who has great comical chemistry with Bradley Cooper. The brief appearances by Michael Peña and Robert De Niro are the icing on this emasculate cake.



Blue Jasmine: Woody Allen has always been great at assembling casts, and he really outdid himself with Blue Jasmine. I’ve already talked at length about Blanchet, Hawkins, and Cannavale, but it goes deeper than that. Alec Baldwin isn’t stretching himself here, but he certainly works in his role and so do Michael Stuhlbarg and Peter Sarsgaard. Louis C.K. also shows up and does a good job but is ironically overshadowed by a much inferior stand-up comedian: Andrew Dice Clay, the casting of whom proved to be oddly inspired.



Inside Llewyn Davis: I’m docking some points for the casting of Justin Timberlake (who’s good in the singing parts of course, but who has a kind of dumb look on his face at all times), but otherwise this is pretty solid. Carry Mulligan fits in really well and so do John Goodman, Adam Driver, and F. Murray Abraham. The film also deserves kudos for having the vision to put a non-celebrity like Oscar Isaac in the main role. I’m sure that pissed off some money men, but it was the right call.



Man of Steel: People got a little too caught up in complaints about the final action scene to sit back and appreciate the incredibly solid cast that Snyder and Nolan were able to assemble. Henry Cavil proved to be a worthy Superman and I thought Amy Adams did a great job of re-inventing Lois Lane while Kevin Costner and Diane Lane both did a very good job of playing slightly younger versions of the kents. On the Krypronian side we had Russell Crowe as a more active and interesting version of Jor-El while Michael Shannon and Ayelet Zurer were both excellent villains. Even the really small parts like Lawrence Fishburne’s Perry White, Richard Schiff’s Emil Hamilton and Christopher Meloni’s Nathan Hardy were all on point.



Nebraska: A best ensemble award is as much for the people in charge of casting as it is for the actors themselves. Those people in charge of casting did a great job of filling Nebraska with authentic faces that feel at home in the desolate rural locations. A number of the people in small parts are non-actors, and when casting the main parts they showed amazing restraint in order to make sure that they only brought in people like Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacy Keach, and Bob Odenkirk who actually look like they could conceivably be living in places like Billings, Montana and Hawthorne, Nebraska.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



JBond 02-17-2014 06:04 PM

Good choice. Good nominees too. (I've actually seen all 5!)



IanTheCool 02-17-2014 06:43 PM

Drac, there's a couple categories there you didn't nominate Man of Steel for. Better revisit those.



PG Cooper 02-17-2014 06:48 PM

You and Neverending could be great members if you wish to be. You only lack the light to show you the way. For this reason above all, your capacity for good, Dracula has nominated Man of Steel a lot.



Neverending 02-17-2014 07:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2873384)

Man of Steel: People got a little too caught up in complaints about the final action scene to sit back and appreciate the incredibly solid cast that Snyder and Nolan were able to assemble. Henry Cavil proved to be a worthy Superman and I thought Amy Adams did a great job of re-inventing Lois Lane while Kevin Costner and Diane Lane both did a very good job of playing slightly younger versions of the kents. On the Krypronian side we had Russell Crowe as a more active and interesting version of Jor-El while Michael Shannon and Ayelet Zurer were both excellent villains. Even the really small parts like Lawrence Fishburne’s Perry White, Richard Schiff’s Emil Hamilton and Christopher Meloni’s Nathan Hardy were all on point.

That's fine and all, but there was a little movie called This Is The End. Maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. There was also a movie with a similar title called The World's End. Again... maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. The Hunger Games had a sequel this year and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman was in it. Again, maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. There was a movie called Spring Breakers with a bunch of hot chicks and a crazy James Franco. Again... maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. You know... just throwing a few options out there.



Neverending 02-17-2014 07:45 PM

BY THE WAY.........................



Have you guys noticed that Dracula has given Dallas Buyers Club no love whatsoever? Are we gonna ignore that? Is that the elephant in the room?



Dracula 02-17-2014 08:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873390)

That's fine and all, but there was a little movie called This Is The End. Maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. There was also a movie with a similar title called The World's End. Again... maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. The Hunger Games had a sequel this year and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman was in it. Again, maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. There was a movie called Spring Breakers with a bunch of hot chicks and a crazy James Franco. Again... maybe you saw it or maybe you didn't. You know... just throwing a few options out there.

This is the End has a cool assortment of celebrities, but they aren't really "acting" so much as they're joking around. Funny movie, but that's not what this award is about.



The Worlds End I mostly centered around Pegg and Frost, the other guys are alright, but they don't have a ton to do.



Catching Fire was mostly crap, Hoffman was sleepwalking through it and there are some very spotty performances from much of the rest of the cast and even Jennifer Lawrence's performance seemed to be on auto-pilot.



Spring Breakers is one of the least actor driven movies of the year. Even Franco's performance is a little over-rated IMO, its a cool character but I think a lot of that had to do with the writing and the costume/hair-style.

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Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873391)

BY THE WAY.........................



Have you guys noticed that Dracula has given Dallas Buyers Club no love whatsoever? Are we gonna ignore that? Is that the elephant in the room?

It got nominations for Best Actor and Best Art Direction... which is probably more than that sappy movie deserves.



Neverending 02-17-2014 08:19 PM

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Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2873393)

they aren't really "acting" so much as they're joking around.

Your understanding of acting AND comedy frightens me sometimes. But whatever. Let's avoid another "editing" debate.



PG Cooper 02-17-2014 09:01 PM

I'm with Drac in regards to This is the End. Most of them aren't really stretching their abilities too much. I do disagree on Franco's performance in Spring Breakers though, which I thought was great. That's not to say the movie deserved a Best Cast nomination though, since outside of Franco the rest of the cast don't do much of anything.



Neverending 02-17-2014 09:12 PM

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Originally Posted by PG Cooper (Post 2873398)

I'm with Drac in regards to This is the End. Most of them aren't really stretching their abilities too much.

This was an ensemble category and that movie had a great ensemble. Especially during the scenes where Danny McBride is causing trouble and everyone is fighting with each other. You can't simply say, "oh they were JUST goofing around." There was great writing, great delivery and great back-and-forth between all the actors. This wasn't just s--t they made up on the spot like a bunch of college students making a video for YouTube. It was all well-crafted. Dracula doesn't know comedy and he especially doesn't know acting.



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That's not to say the movie deserved a Best Cast nomination though, since outside of Franco the rest of the cast don't do much of anything.

Fair enough but what about Dallas Buyers Club or Captain Phillips or 12 Years A Slave or, heck, even something like Great Gatsby? Point is... Man of Steel? Really?!



Deexan 02-17-2014 09:35 PM

Man of Steel had a whole bunch of great actors involved but I didn't think any of them gave standout performances, with the possible exception of Crowe.



Dracula 02-17-2014 09:51 PM

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Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873399)

This was an ensemble category and that movie had a great ensemble. Especially during the scenes where Danny McBride is causing trouble and everyone is fighting with each other. You can't simply say, "oh they were JUST goofing around." There was great writing, great delivery and great back-and-forth between all the actors. This wasn't just s--t they made up on the spot like a bunch of college students making a video for YouTube. It was all well-crafted. Dracula doesn't know comedy and he especially doesn't know acting.

Yeah, but they're playing themselves... literally. Its the same comedic personas that they've all displayed before. There's nothing wrong with that, it just isn't what I want to nominate for this category.



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Fair enough but what about Dallas Buyers Club or Captain Phillips or 12 Years A Slave or, heck, even something like Great Gatsby? Point is... Man of Steel? Really?!

Dallas Buyers club was out because Jennifer Garner is ****ing terrible in it. Captain Phillips is basically a two man show. 12 Years a Slave was taken out because of questionable stunt casting (including your favorite actor in the film, Brad Pitt), and The Great Gatsby wasn't considered because most of the cast outside of Di Caprio was unengaging and/or miscast (especially Toby Maguire).



Neverending 02-17-2014 10:06 PM

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Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2873401)

Yeah, but they're playing themselves... literally. Its the same comedic personas that they've all displayed before. There's nothing wrong with that, it just isn't what I want to nominate for this category.

George Clooney plays the same character in every movie. Matthew McConaughey plays the same character in every movie. Leonardo DiCaprio over-acts in every movie he's in. So... what's your point other than drama is better than comedy?







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Dallas Buyers club was out because Jennifer Garner is ****ing terrible in it.

And... Amy Adams was great in Man of Steel???



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Captain Phillips is basically a two man show.

At what point is Man Of Steel an ensemble? All those actors you mentioned almost never interact with each other at the same time. It's always Superman and General Zod, Superman and Lois Lane, Superman and Kevin Costner, etc etc etc



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12 Years a Slave was taken out because of questionable stunt casting (including your favorite actor in the film, Brad Pitt)

Other than Brad Pitt, who gives a s--t? All the actors gave great performances. In 100 years when most of those actors are forgotten, people won't even notice "the stunts" other than Jesus showing up at the end.



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and The Great Gatsby wasn't considered because most of the cast outside of Di Caprio was unengaging and/or miscast (especially Toby Maguire).

Even with all the flaws, it was still a better cast than Man Of Steel and an actual ensemble.



Dracula 02-18-2014 06:14 AM

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Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873402)

George Clooney plays the same character in every movie. Matthew McConaughey plays the same character in every movie. Leonardo DiCaprio over-acts in every movie he's in. So... what's your point other than drama is better than comedy?

Clooney has never been nominated for a Golden Stake, McConaughey didn't get nominated until this year (when he finally started branching out), DiCaprio isn't as bad as you make him out to be.







Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873402)

And... Amy Adams was great in Man of Steel???

Yes



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873402)

At what point is Man Of Steel an ensemble? All those actors you mentioned almost never interact with each other at the same time. It's always Superman and General Zod, Superman and Lois Lane, Superman and Kevin Costner, etc etc etc

Yeah, bu Captain Phillips is always Tom Hanks and Barkhad Abdi, Tom Hanks and [insert random unknown actor who plays First Mate], Barkhad Abdi and [insert random unknown actor who plays Pirate #3, and who isn't nearly as good as Barkhad Abdi], or Tom Hanks and random Catherine Keener cameo who doesn't show up again.



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873402)

Other than Brad Pitt, who gives a s--t? All the actors gave great performances. In 100 years when most of those actors are forgotten, people won't even notice "the stunts" other than Jesus showing up at the end.

In the review thread you all but said that Brad Pitt ruins the movie. I bet that if I nominated it instead of Man of Steel you would be lambasting me for the choice and we would have been having a big argument about whether or not that one errant casting choice made it a bad choice.



Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873402)

Even with all the flaws, it was still a better cast than Man Of Steel and an actual ensemble.

I'm just going to quote from my review:

"I think part of the problem is that I don’t think the film’s cast really worked particularly well. Di Caprio is good enough at doing what he needs to do (look suave and give mysterious looks), but I found Carey Mulligan’s Daisy uninteresting, Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan stiff, and Tobey Maguire’s Nick Carraway extremely awkward."



FranklinTard 02-18-2014 02:47 PM

cameron diaz in the counselor was a pretty solid villain. didn't get too attached to many characters though (how typical of cormac mccarthy writing), so killing some of them didn't really make you hate her in typical villain fashion.



and the man of steel trolling has got to stop.



Dracula 02-18-2014 05:48 PM

Best Line

This freaking category. It’s in this category that I almost always run into problems. Part of it is that the movie quotes that eventually become famous usually don’t get canonized until people live with the various films for a while. Another part of it is that I’m not necessarily taking notes while watching these movies and it’s not that easy to keep track of all these quotes as I go. As such there’s always one or two seemingly obvious quotes I manage to forget each year. However, I’m slightly more confident about this lineup than I usually is even though I had to cut some pretty good lines to get these five.



“Okay well, number 1, you're ****ing nuts! You are. Good luck! Find somebody else to put up with your **** for more than like 6 months okay? But I, accept the whole package, the crazy and the brilliant. I know you're not gonna change and I don't want you to. It's called accepting you for being you.” – Before Midnight: Only when two people have become really comfortable with one another can someone question their partner’s sanity and have it be endearing like this. The later parts of the line might sound a little one the nose out of context, but this isn’t just any conversation. It shows up in the midst of a really heated argument in which these people’s relationship is really on the line.



“Half of North America just lost their Facebook” – Gravity: This is a very simple and matter of fact throwaway line, but what I like about it is that it hints at a whole lot in a very offhanded way. Throughout Gravity we’re so consumed in Sandra Bullock’s personal ordeal that we rarely even think to consider how this space disaster is affecting all the people down on Earth. The destruction of all these satellites is almost certainly disrupting communication and wreaking havoc on the surface but outside of this little quip by George Clooney it hardly occurs to us.



“Well, I have now seen, first hand, what a lifetime’s diet of Reader’s Digest, the Daily Mail, and romantic novels can do to a person’s brain.” – Philomena: Philomena is a pretty bland movie, but its screenplay is written by Steve Coogan, so every once in a while little quips like this do break through. I also considered Sixsmith’s description of “human interest stories,” but this seemed like a more concise amalgamation of his attitude as he first began interviewing the title character. Over the course of the film he comes to respect the person he was describing, but I think he might have been right the first time.



“Hermione just stole all of our ****. And Jay suggested that we rape her. I think the only reason he did that is because he knows he's about two minutes away from becoming the house ***** himself.” - This is the End: First of all, for the record, Jay Baruchel did not actually suggest that anybody get raped. It is interesting that Danny McBride interpreted it that way, but he actually didn’t. This quote comes shortly after a misunderstanding leads Emma Watson to steal most of the survivors’ supplies and is spoken by McBride into a camcorder. The timing is just about perfect and it pretty accurately captures the surreal nature of having just been on the losing end of an interaction with an actor from the Harry Potter series.



“I'll tell you what, I'm never eating at Benihana again. I don't care whose birthday it is.” - The Wolf of Wall Street: Moments earlier Jordan Belfort cursed god for using “a chain of ****ing hibachi restaurants to take [him] down.” His colleague, played by Jonah Hill, further commented on this irony with this little quip in which he consuls his friend through a gesture that requires only the most minimal of efforts on his own part. I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure that this line was improvised, and it’s this kind of gold that can come from a set that encourages creativity like this.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



JBond 02-18-2014 06:17 PM

Yeah, Wolf of Wall Street had to win somehow.



Neverending 02-19-2014 03:27 AM

Dracula. Dracula. Dracula.





Your mama's p---y was the canvas. Your dad's d--k was the paintbrush. Boom! You're the art.

- James Franco, This Is The End



No Ragrets.

- Scottie P, We're The Millers.



You're nothing to me until you're everything.

- Sydney Prosser, American Hustle



Was all this legal? Absolutely not!

- Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street



Old Sport.

- The Great Gatsby.



Daniel 02-19-2014 04:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873473)

Dracula. Dracula. Dracula.



No Ragrets.

- Scottie P, We're The Millers.

Not even one letter?



This would be my choice.



Henri Ducard 02-19-2014 10:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daniel (Post 2873481)

Not even one letter?

I don't know what's funnier, no ragrats or the name Scottie P.



Dracula 02-19-2014 06:05 PM

Best Original Screenplay

It wasn’t until after I assembled my nominees for the Best Original Screenplay that I realized that these five disparate screenplays had one thing in common: they were all either written or co-written by their directors. Then I remembered that the exact same thing happened last year. Why is that? Simple, the only people in Hollywood who have the power to make movies that aren’t based on existing properties anymore are established filmmakers who can really push things through. Or it’s just a coincidence? Well considering that the exact same thing happened last year, I think not.



American Hustle: American Hustle was originally written by Eric Warren Singer under the title “American Bull****” and it spent two years on the famous “Blacklist” of unproduced screenplays before it was picked up, re-written, and re-titled by David O. Russell. The script is a very quietly clever work which zags whenever you expect it to zig; when you expect it to be a simple morality tale it proves to be more ambiguous, when you think it’s going to get self-serious is becomes a farce, and when you think it’s going to get real plot-heavy it focuses in on the characters.



Blue Jasmine: The placement of Blue Jasmine in this category is a little tenuous, as the film borrows heavily from Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire.” I even considered tossing it over to the Adapted category in spite of the fact that its officially credited as an original screenplay, but that category was more competitive and this seemed like the path of least resistance. Anyway, Woody Allen does it again. Allen does a great job of creating a dark comedy that manages to be topical and universal at the same time and walks a fine tightrope in making its audience both sympathetic with and repulsed by its protagonist.



Inside Llewyn Davis: The Coen Brothers have long been known for their funny dialogue, but they would have been forgotten a long time ago if that’s all they had to offer. Their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis is a difficult little character study which certainly features that signature dialogue, but it’s in many ways overshadowed by the screenplay’s many other virtues. I guess the most important of these virtues is that it creates a flawed but endearing and always fascinating central character.



Short Term 12: Writer/Director Destin Daniel Cretton based his film Short Term 12 on his own experiences working at a home for troubled youths. Normally that would have been a recipe for a twee and self-indulgent exercise, but Cretton instead had the wisdom to focus his film not on the character who is ostensibly based on himself, but instead focuses on the more interesting veteran workers at the facility. The resulting movie has the authenticity of personal experience but lacks the normal indie clichés I’ve come to expect from movies like this.



The World’s End: A lot of modern comedy is derived from the personalities of the actors within them and the improvisations that they bring to the table. Nothing wrong with that, but a byproduct of that is that the movies all too often feel a bit messy and ramshackle. Edgar Wrights films on the other hand feel a lot more controlled, planned, and structured. The World’s End in particular really feels like its interested in telling an actual story in addition to eliciting laughter and is one of the better examples of a mainstream comedic screenplay.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 02-19-2014 06:07 PM

Agreed.



JBond 02-19-2014 06:45 PM

Agreed.



Daniel 02-19-2014 07:18 PM

Glad to see Short Term 12 get some love. Was pretty overlooked, but a great film.



Justin 02-19-2014 07:25 PM

Completely agreed. Great script.



IanTheCool 02-19-2014 07:32 PM

I havent missed best trailer and best poster, have I?



Dracula 02-19-2014 07:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2873546)

I havent missed best trailer and best poster, have I?

Should be given out Friday and Saturday



donny 02-19-2014 08:09 PM

Yeah, good choice. Just saw Blue Jasmine last night, thought it was great.



Knerys 02-20-2014 10:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873473)



You're nothing to me until you're everything.

- Sydney Prosser, American Hustle

This was a good one.



Dracula 02-20-2014 05:49 PM

Best Adapted Screenplay

One of the things I always find interesting about these awards is seeing whether the nominees in the original or adapted screenplay categories of a given year seem to be stronger. In ’07 and ’08 the adapted screenplay categories were better but in the next three years the original category had the edge. Last year though, adaptations made a comeback and I think that trend has mostly continued in 2013. Five really good adaptations this year.



12 Years a Slave: 12 Years a Slave is essentially a biopic, but it doesn’t really feel like one so much as it feels like a character study and an overall survey of the institution of slavery and the many forms it took in the antebellum South. John Ridley’s script is based on Solomon Northup’s own autobiography, but the film never turns Northup into some kind of flawless hero. Instead it looks at him as a flawed but ultimately admirable man who managed to maintain his identity and dignity though an onslaught of dehumanizing circumstances.



Before Midnight: There are a lot of people who seem to object to the idea that a sequel should qualify as “adapted” rather than “original,” but it makes sense to me and this movie is a good example of how sequels can benefit from having their groundwork pre-established by previous installments. It’s also a great example of how a good sequel should be able to go in new and interesting directions rather than simply rehashing previous formulas. Beyond that though, it just felt like a really authentic look at the discussions between two likable people at a turning point in their lives.



Blue is the Warmest Color: Here’s an irony for you, this screenplay is based on a comic book. Well, an “underground graphic novel” if you prefer, but essentially a comic book. That’s not a medium that many people look towards when making French coming-of-age palm d’or winning dramas, but Julie Maroh’s graphic novel was indeed a worthy source material even if its author was not apparently a huge fan of the resulting film.



No: The first movie I saw this year was the Chilean drama No, and it’s stuck with me after all this time. For whatever reason I haven’t had many places to honor it so far but its screenplay, written by Pedro Peirano and based on an unproduced play by Antonio Skármeta called “El Plebiscito,” the film looks at an interesting moment in histoy from an interesting perspective and does so with energy and wit. It’s a sort of Latin American Argo, but with less Hollywood back patting.



The Wolf of Wall Street: Two of the five nominees here are based on autobiographies (the other being 12 Years a Slave) and they could not possibly be about more diametrically different specimens of humanity. Where Solomon Northup was a good man in a terrible situation, Jordan Belfort is a horrible man who is allowed to live a life of luxury… and both stories are frighteningly true. Yikes! What’s more, Terrence Winter’s screenplay tells this particular story in a bold, witty, and oddly entertaining and comical way.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



IanTheCool 02-20-2014 06:18 PM

I think its weird that Before Midnight is in this category, but you do make a good point I suppose.



Justin 02-20-2014 06:34 PM

I wasn't really a big fan of No (in fact I don't even remember watching it), but I think your choice is a solid one. 12 Years a Slave is also a stellar adaptation.



PG Cooper 02-20-2014 10:37 PM

I liked Blue is the Warmest Colour fine, but nothing about it's script really seemed all that special to me. Certainly not better than Before Midnight.



Neverending 02-21-2014 01:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2873656)

I think its weird that Before Midnight is in this category, but you do make a good point I suppose.

I like how Before Midnight is labeled as an adapted screenplay because it's a sequel but American Hustle, which is based on a real-life FBI case and the real people involved, is considered an "original" screenplay.



MovieBuff801 02-21-2014 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Neverending (Post 2873684)

American Hustle, which is based on a real-life FBI case and the real people involved, is considered an "original" screenplay.

Yeah, I can't wrap my head around that, either.



Dracula 02-21-2014 07:14 PM

Best Poster

I’m a little bit obsessed by movie posters and this is consistently one of the awards I have the most fun handing out. There are, however, a lot of eligibility caveats. First of all I’m only counting posters for 2013 films irregardless of what year the actual poster came out. Secondly I’m only looking at the posters for films I’ve actually seen so I can know for sure whether or not the image represents the film at hand. And finally, I’m only looking at domestic posters and I’m only looking at posters that are officially (and widely) released by studios, so fan art and mondo prints will not be eligible.



42:

img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ps968cfb4c.jpg

This Jackie Robinson biopic was not very worthy of its subject, but this poster is. First of all, the person designing the poster clearly knew enough about Robinson’s playing career to know he was most famous for his base running, and as such he opted for this action pose of him sliding into a base. That’s neat, but what really makes this special is the decision to orient this image vertically instead of horizontally. It sort of gives the illusion that Robinson is standing upright with his arms victoriously stretched in the air. It’s a brilliant way to make a relatively simple image stand out.



All is Lost:

img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ps961ac15d.jpg

The other posters here all have some kind of high concept or gimmick, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but this poster is a great example of how a poster can work simply by choosing a dramatic moment in a film and recreate it effectively. I’m not sure if this is an actual still from the movie, but the poster does a great job of simply presenting the Robert Redford character as he’s in the middle of a dramatic situation. The rainfall is captured perfectly and really livens up the whole thing. It also doesn’t ruin it by cluttering the rest of the poster up too much.



The Bling Ring:

img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...psc9caaa62.jpg

The characters in The Bling Ring are very shallow and materialistic individuals so it’s only fitting that this teaser poster would reduce them to their (designer) possessions. The design is obviously minimalist, but there was clearly a lot of thought put into it. Each pair of sunglasses is selected carefully and you actually do sort of picture each character based upon the sight of each one when combined with the descriptors that are matched to each one. Cool choice of font for the title too.



Like Someone in Love:

img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...ps72ce56b2.jpg

Early in Like Someone in Love the lead character takes a ride in the back of the cab and the camera focuses in on her face as all the lights in Tokyo are reflected onto the car’s windows. It’s one of the most visually striking scenes in the film and I’m pretty glad that the poster designer seized upon it and also managed to pick just the right frame from it which would show her face surrounded but not overshadowed by the lights.



Nebraska:

img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...psce52fcfa.jpg

Nebraska is a film with an interesting look, but there weren’t a ton of visually exciting ways to advertise it. As such, the poster artist really needed to think outside the box in order to come up with something memorable. What ended up doing is finding a really creative way to present Bruce Dern in silhouette with the light just capturing his features on the top and right. The cool retro lettering on the bottom is the cherry on top.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



IanTheCool 02-21-2014 07:32 PM

Cool.



Justin 02-21-2014 08:06 PM

Like Someone in Love would've been my choice because of its use of color and framing. I don't really care for the All is Lost poster...there's too much going on.




JBond 02-21-2014 08:07 PM

Glad "42" got in there. Good choice on the winner.



Dracula 02-23-2014 08:39 AM

Best Trailer

I am of the belief that there is a certain art to the construction of a fine trailer and I feel like this is the category where I finally get a chance to express that. However, I do want to clear up that this award is for the best trailer to a 2013 film, not the best trailer that debuted in 2013, so trailers for 2014 that have already debuted will not be eligible until next year. Also I’ll only be considering trailers for movies which I’ve seen so that I can know whether or not they give away spoilers.



American Hustle:

VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



It is perhaps telling that this trailer doesn’t put one iota of effort towards selling audiences on the story of American Hustle. Instead it focuses on the actors and the visuals and outside of the speech about the painting at the beginning it hardly features a single line of dialog. For most of the trailer’s run time it rhythmically cuts between various tantalizing images along to Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times, Bad Times.”



Only God Forgives (Red Band):

VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



I’ve gotta say, I like this movie a lot more with all the boring parts cut out. This trailer does a great job of whittling this strange film down to its most intriguing images and moments. Its use of the Thai villain’s karaoke scenes makes for surprisingly effective scoring, and I also like how the music picks up right as the guy is about to be stabbed in the kneecaps. Also, ending on the “wanna fight” line works quite well.



Spring Breakers:

VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



Spring Breakers is a crazy fever dream of a movie, I kind of like the idea of it better than actually sitting through the movie. Fortunately this two minute version of the film exists. There are a lot of deceptive ways that the advertisers could have run with this, but aside from the fact that they maybe sell it as more of a conventional thriller than it really is, this trailer actually seems to “get” the movie’s vibe and doesn’t shy away from its more uncommercial aspects.



Star Trek Into Darkness (Trailer 3):

VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



This is probably the most straightforward and traditional of the trailers here, but there’s nothing wrong with that. This trailer does pretty much everything I expect from a blockbuster trailer: its sells the movie’s epic scale, presents some very cool imagery, teases some really neat action scenes, and most importantly knows what not to show. If anything this trailer’s biggest problem is that it makes the film look a lot better than it actually is, making the final film’s dumber moments all the more disappointing.



The Wolf of Wall Street:

VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



There’s a long and stories history of trailers using Kanye West music, with most of them leaning towards his music’s opulence and grandeur (the trailer for Leonardo Di Caprio’s other film this year did just that), but this trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street instead used his song “Black Skinheads” as a sort of rhythmic march as the trailer presents all sorts of crazy moments from the film. The trailer doesn’t lie at all about the film’s tone and it makes me wonder why so many people were surprised by the film’s nature when it came out.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



IanTheCool 02-23-2014 10:13 AM

And the one category you SHOULD have nominated Man of Steel for, you didn't! If that movie had been what that trailer was, it would have been great.



American Hustle is probably a good choice since it seemed to get a lot of people excited for that movie.



Neverending 02-23-2014 10:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2873830)

It is perhaps telling that this trailer doesn’t put one iota of effort towards selling audiences on the story of American Hustle.

American Hustle is the 2nd highest grossing Best Picture Oscar nominee this year, so there's no doubt it worked. It just comes to show that if you have great actors, a director on a good streak and a visually appealing movie, that's all you need to sell it.





BY THE WAY, instead of Star Trek Into Darkness, I would have nominated



THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE



VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:





OR





GRAVITY



VIDEO-CLick to Watch!:



Dracula 02-23-2014 10:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2873845)

If that movie had been what that trailer was, it would have been great.

That's how I felt about the Star Trek Into Darkness trailer...



JBond 02-23-2014 10:56 AM

Exactly. "Zeppelin."



Dracula 02-24-2014 08:15 PM

Most Underappreciated

Every year there are films that get either misunderstood or just fall under the radar. Most of the times this just means finding five movies that kind of fell by the wayside, and there’s a little bit of that this year, but I’ve got to say that the lack of appreciation for these five stings a little more than usual. I don’t know, I feel like the film intelligencia let me down this year and weren’t doing their jobs right when these movies came out.



Blancanieves: I was less than thrilled with the over-the-top response to The Artist two years ago for a number of reasons and this year that movie found a new way to annoy me: it drowned out the response to this much better contemporary European silent film. The people who did see this movie mostly had nice things to say about it, but for the most part it wasn’t able to get much traction with audiences simply because a lot of people just didn’t have the enthusiasm to see more than one movie that harkened back to early cinema in a decade.



Elysium: I like Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, but I didn’t love it as much as many people did. Then he made Elysium and I thought it was very similar to and about as good as the earlier film, but was surprised to find that most of the people who were over the moon about that earlier film absolutely hated the later one. I kind of get the problems that these people have with Elysium, but it seemed to me that District 9 is mostly guilty of the same things they were complaining about, so I was kind of left wondering what happened between the two reactions. Expectations can be a ***** I guess.



Ender’s Game: Ender’s Game is… not a great film, but it’s not a bad film either. It probably didn’t deserve to be turned into a blockbuster, but it did probably deserve to be more than shrugged off. Put it this way: this was a year when the internet collectively blew their wads anticipating the likes of Pacific Rim, and if the likes of that can fill up blog posts and earn over four hundred million dollars worldwide, I feel like a science fiction film that’s actually interested in exploring some interesting themes about militarism and conformity maybe deserved more than a brief shrug from the press.



Man of Steel: To call Man of Steel polarizing would be an understatement. People seem to either recognize its majesty or they seem to despise it almost on principle. Its odd because most of the objections people have towards it are things they seem to have zero problem with in other films. They either think there’s too much destruction in it (as if a city wasn’t also destroyed in The Avengers), or they think it wasn’t true enough to the comic book (as if The Dark Knight was fully in line with Bob Kane’s vision of that character), or they just couldn’t stand that the movie took itself even remotely seriously and didn’t hide itself behind a thick layer of irony and cynicism (because that’s apparently a crime now).



To the Wonder: I feel like Terrence Malick should have done enough at this point to have earned just a little bit of a benefit of the doubt, but that certainly wasn’t extended to his film To the Wonder. Alright, I get why this movie wasn’t going to be for everyone, its storytelling certainly wasn’t very clear or conventional. But I can’t help but think that a lot of critics would have been a lot more curious and patient with it if it hadn’t starred Ben Affleck or if it had been made by a European auteur. Instead I feel like it was met with a very dismissive if not apathetic response, as if any movie whose message isn’t immediately apparent to everyone isn’t worth talking about at all.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Justin 02-24-2014 08:22 PM

To the Wonder is a favorite of mine from 2013. By the way, Fast & Furious 6 was just absolute crap. There's nothing good about it whatsoever. Nothing.



JBond 02-24-2014 09:08 PM

Glad to see Ender's Game nominated. I still loved it after a recent re-watch. Easily a 3 and a half star movie.



But Elysium is crap. (District 9 wasn't much better.)



IanTheCool 02-24-2014 09:33 PM

Hmmm, do I take the bait?



Though honestly, none of the pre-packaged objections towards man of steel that you outlined reflect mine. And I didn't hate it, but I just don't think it met the majesty you mentioned. I think that disappointment more closely reflects how I feel about it.



But if you are concerned that it was under-appreciated by our crew here, fear not. Yes, I've been ribbing you a bit on nominating it so often (and NE, but lets face it, he'd just be getting on your case for something else if not that), but it seems like many CSers have been over-emphatically declaring their love for it ever since the blu-ray was released.



Dracula 02-24-2014 09:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2873976)

Hmmm, do I take the bait?



Though honestly, none of the pre-packaged objections towards man of steel that you outlined reflect mine. And I didn't hate it, but I just don't think it met the majesty you mentioned. I think that disappointment more closely reflects how I feel about it.



But if you are concerned that it was under-appreciated by our crew here, fear not. Yes, I've been ribbing you a bit on nominating it so often (and NE, but lets face it, he'd just be getting on your case for something else if not that), but it seems like many CSers have been over-emphatically declaring their love for it ever since the blu-ray was released.

To be clear, my "under appreciated" designation is meant more to respond to a film's reception by the culture at large, not necessarily the response around CS (where MoS seems to have more supporters than it does elsewhere).



PG Cooper 02-24-2014 09:54 PM

Go Man of Steel. Completely agree with your write up.



Neverending 02-24-2014 10:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2873973)

I’m fighting for the soul and integrity of both comic book filmmaking and by extension commercial filmmaking as a whole.

Christopher Nolan has been doing that for the past 10 years. He doesn't need your help.



Daniel 02-25-2014 03:32 AM

lol, man of steel.



Glaring omission from that round: Place Beyond the Pines



MovieBuff801 02-25-2014 10:27 AM

No qualms from me about Man of Steel.



Dracula 02-25-2014 09:43 PM

Best Comedy

This year for comedy has been very… quality over quantity. I’d say that there were at least three exceptional comedies this year, each of them films that I would have been happy to name “comedy of the year” any other year. Beyond that though, it’s been pretty barren. In fact I had to do some outside the box thinking in order to find two other nominees that I was even slightly happy to nominate. It should also be noted that what I’m looking for here are movies that make me laugh… a lot.



American Hustle: I think that classifying American Hustle as a comedy is pretty dubious. In fact I’m only nominating it because I was desperate to fill out the category and it seemed like less of a cheat than Blue Jasmine, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Nebraska. Still, when I think about it there really are a lot of scenes that are going for laughs, especially the ones between Louis C.K. and Bradley Cooper and the ones where Jennifer Lawrence is being wacky. I wouldn’t necessarily tell someone to go see it expecting a laugh riot, but it does seem a bit more dedicated to comedy than some of the other nominees.



Iron Man 3: I initially wasn’t going to nominate this here, but the more I think about it the less it seems like a cheat. Shane Black is more or less the father of the modern action/comedy and that made him ideal for this franchise which long ago used Robert Downey Jr.’s comedic persona to differentiate it from its competition. The fact that the film more or less sacrifice’s its villain for the purposes of a jokey twist pretty well indicates that the film is more interested in making its audience laugh than it is in creating a dramatic superhero movie, but hey, that was pretty funny.



This is the End: This is the End is in many ways a glorious mess of a movie, but boy o’ boy is it funny. I normally don’t much care for comedies that were clearly made really loosely for the purposes of encouraging improvisation, but there was enough talent here to make it work. Not every joke lands (that “Gangnam Style” reference would have been dated in 2012), but there are so many that do that it doesn’t really matter.



The World’s End: I haven’t been as enamored by the “Three Flavors Cornetto” trilogy as a lot of the internet, but I was charmed by this last installment, which just might have been my favorite of the three. This one is less of a parody than the previous installments. Sure, its riffing on sci-fi a little bit, but most of the comedy here has less to do with that than with the interactions between the characters. This is probably the most honed and planned out of all the comedies here.



The Wolf of Wall Street: There was a lot of talk this year about whether or not the films nominated for the Best Musical/Comedy category at the Golden Globes were really comedies. I think the other four nominees were debatable, but this one was not. The Wolf of Wall Street might have the budget of a prestige drama and it might tell a true story, but make no mistake, this is a comedy. If it weren’t a comedy it wouldn’t stop to watch Di Caprio’s character and Jonah Hill’s character riff about the later character’s cousin/wife or bring in subtitles to signal what Di Caprio and Jean Dujardin are really thinking during their negotiation. It could think of a bunch of other examples, but the point is, this movie goes for the laughs



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 02-25-2014 10:50 PM

Yup.



Justin 02-25-2014 11:05 PM

Meh.



MovieBuff801 02-25-2014 11:21 PM

Yeah, would've gone with American Hustle myself.



JBond 02-25-2014 11:45 PM

I'm actually watching This is the End now. It's **** just like I knew it would be.



Justin 02-26-2014 07:15 AM

None of them are all that great to begin with.



MovieBuff801 02-26-2014 03:02 PM

I pretty much dislike the current state of mainstream comedies overall, but even I have to admit This Is The End was really damn funny.



IanTheCool 02-26-2014 05:48 PM

And Grown Ups 2 gets snubbed again...



Justin 02-26-2014 05:57 PM

Give it another year, Ian. Time heals all. Grown Ups 3 is most likely on its way.



Dracula 02-27-2014 09:23 PM

Best Action Movie

Action movies have always served as the genre of the masses, the place where muscular directors with a strong eye for visual spectacle and energetic motion can create entertaining exhibitions that sell a lot of popcorn. When being judged for this category films will mostly just be judged for how they work as action movies, so other components like story structure and acting will be taking something of a backseat (within reason) and I will mostly just be looking at how the film works when the set-pieces get going. Oh, also, I’ve ruled that Gravity is more of a suspense/thriller type thing, so that’s why that isn’t here.



Elysium: Saying that a movie plays out like a video game is a rather hackneyed criticism and one that often gets misapplied. Elysium is one of the few films that actually seems worthy of the label, and I don’t mean that as a bad thing necessarily. What diffentiates most action video games are the weapons and equipment, and its in creating things like exo-suites and selecting cool weapons like modified AK-47s, samurai swords, and grenades that Elysium differentiates itself. It also doesn’t skimp on the gore.



Fast & Furious 6: Fast and Furious 6 is probably the most purely action driven of the five nominees here. Like the other films in the franchise it really doesn’t make any bones about the fact that it doesn’t have many goals beyond blowing things up and making its characters look cool, and there is something oddly refreashing about that. Its also interesting how this series has managed to keep up with the superhero movies in the CGI arms race that’s been going on. It’s a dumb movie, but it does deliver when the action gets going.



Iron Man 3: I haven’t been overly supportive of Marvel’s lineup, but I don’t hate them necessarily, and I definitely liked this one a lot more than the latest Thor movie. Director Shane Black is of course an action movie veteran going back to the days of Lethal Weapon and he does a better job than most at mixing action and comedy. Here he manages to mix up the usual Iron Man formula by having Tony do some fights outside his suit and there was that cool barrel of monkeys scene that just missed getting a set-piece of the year nomination.



Man of Steel: Outside of its iconography and the work it does re-imagining Superman for the 21st century, Man of Steel is also a badass action movie, especially in its second half. Superman’s extreme power has all too often been a hindrance for the property, firstly because he all too often overpower’s his enemies and secondly because his powers haven’t always been the easiest to render to their full potential, but Zack Snyder finally unleashes the full potential of the character within an action context.



Olympus Has Fallen: We live in times where action films feel less like traditional shoot ‘em ups and more like CGI bonanzas. There’s nothing inherently wrong about that, and I don’t fight it too much, but I do like to reserve at least one space in this category each year for action movie throwbacks like this. The film is a pretty blatant ripoff of Die Hard, but unlike this year’s other Die Hard ripoff this movie has the courage of its meatheaded ambitions and knows the value of a good bloody shootout.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



JBond 02-27-2014 10:13 PM

Yep.



MovieBuff801 02-27-2014 11:13 PM

Yeah, excellent choice.



Though, I have to say, I just can't get on board with the Fast & Furious films. That franchise's dumbness seems to work for most, but not for me.



Justin 02-28-2014 08:17 AM

Given the competition, it has to be the best.



PG Cooper 02-28-2014 10:51 AM

Good choice. I'm also with Moviebuff regarding the Fast and Furious series.



IanTheCool 02-28-2014 05:09 PM

Shocker. But out of the nominees, I would agree.



Olympus Has Fallen was not Scottish.



Daniel 03-01-2014 11:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2874282)

Shocker. But out of the nominees, I would agree.



Olympus Has Fallen was not Scottish.

If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP.



IanTheCool 03-01-2014 11:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daniel (Post 2874324)

If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP.

Precisely.



Dracula 03-01-2014 11:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2874282)

Shocker. But out of the nominees, I would agree.



Olympus Has Fallen was not Scottish.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daniel (Post 2874324)

If it's not Scottish, it's CRAP.

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2874326)

Precisely.

Ah, but it stars one Gerard Butler, who is... you guessed it: Scottish



IanTheCool 03-01-2014 11:43 AM

hmmm...



Dracula 03-01-2014 12:05 PM

Best Horror Film

I’m going to come right out and say that I think this was a uniquely abysmal year for horror movies. It isn’t even that the options on hand were terrible so much as most of them ranged from being over-rated to being meh. In fact, its such a bad year for this genre that there was only one horror movie all year that I even gave a positive rating to, and even that one only barely squeezed through. As such there’s pretty much only one thing a film needed to do in order to get nominated in this category this year: not be as bad as The Purge.



The Conjuring: A lot of people seemed to like this movie when it came out, and I’m not really sure why. It’s a fairly competently crafted film, and I guess that’s what people were responding to, but that wasn’t enough to make up for the fact that it’s an aggressively clichéd entry in the genre. It’s absolutely shameless in its regurgitation of tricks and scares that have already been run into the ground by other haunted house movies, and that more or less killed it for me. However, it was not as bad as The Purge.



Evil Dead: Horror remakes are usually a doomed enterprise, but every once in a while they work out. For the record, I didn’t see the Carrie remake and can’t tell you whether or not it’s as bad as The Purge, but I can pretty conclusively say that this Evil Dead remake isn’t. Of course I’m maybe a bit more prone to be non-judgemental about it if only because I’m not all that crazy about the original The Evil Dead (which is a film I view more as an energetic low budget project than as a real horror film). This remake is made pretty competently and has some effectively queasy gore.



Insidious Chapter 2: There were two James Wan helmed horror films this year: The Conjuring and Insidious Chapter 2. The Conjuring was probably the better acted and directed of the two, but Insidious Chapter 2 was the more creative of the two… well at the very least it was the sequel to a film that had an interesting twist on the haunting genre and was able to carry over that twist. At the very least it managed to surprise me in a few places, which is more than I can say for The Conjuring. That said, it’s still a pretty flawed and problematic film, but not as flawed and problematic as The Purge.



V/H/S 2: At the center of V/H/S 2 is a 30 to 40 minute segment directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans called “Safe Haven” which in and of itself may be one of the few horror movies this year worthy of more than the dubious honor of merely being “not as bad as The Purge.” In that short we see a small group infiltrate a strange Indonesian cult and… well, things get crazy from there. Its good stuff, unfortunately it’s just one small part of an otherwise unimpressive anthology film that isn’t much better than the last V/H/S.



You’re Next: I was kind of hoping that this would be the great horror movie that would save this genre in 2013, but that wasn’t to be. This home invasion thriller is in the rather awkward position of being too deconstructionist to be scary but not deconstructionist enough to really work as a sort of meta-comedy. As such it feels like a movie that was made by people who put a great deal of thought into the mechanics of the slasher film but not enough thought into creating the atmosphere of dread and menace that’s needed to really fuel such a film. It’s certainly a lot better than dreck like The Purge, but I don’t think it really worked overall.



And the Golden Stake goes to…

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



 



PG Cooper 03-01-2014 02:13 PM

I f***ing hate You're Next. One of the top three worst films I saw in 2013.



Justin 03-01-2014 03:41 PM

I would've went with The Conjuring; it effectively used small details and solid acting to build tension throughout the entire run time. Evil Dead wasn't scary, just gory.



Dracula 03-01-2014 04:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Justin (Post 2874336)

Evil Dead wasn't scary, just gory.

I would argue that none of them are scary, so, at least Evil Dead had something.



JBond 03-01-2014 04:22 PM

Great choice!



For all I know.



Justin 03-01-2014 04:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2874338)

I would argue that none of them are scary, so, at least Evil Dead had something.

This is true, but I suppose the allure of The Conjuring was that it relied on very little to be suspenseful. That's what sold me, at least. And I'm not a fan of gore (especially gratuitous amounts) in general, so that killed Evil Dead for me.




Dracula 03-02-2014 08:21 AM

I do plan to announce my choice for Best Documentary at a later date, but time is short and I want to announce my top ten list before the Oscar ceremony, so I'll be doing that over the course of the day.



The Number 10 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Dracula 03-02-2014 09:40 AM

The Number 9 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



IanTheCool 03-02-2014 10:05 AM

People seem to have completely forgotten that movie by the end of the year. Myself included.



Justin 03-02-2014 10:29 AM

I think it's pretty unforgettable. Some of the scenes are unbelievably beautiful.



Dracula 03-02-2014 10:44 AM

The Number 8 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Dracula 03-02-2014 12:02 PM

The Number 7 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



MovieBuff801 03-02-2014 12:07 PM

Not a big blow to your credibility as far as I'm concerned.



Justin 03-02-2014 12:13 PM

A fan of neither, but I can see why people like Captain Phillips.



Neverending 03-02-2014 12:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2874400)

if this had come out in 2005 it would have gotten a much more understanding reception.

I doubt it. Warner Bros. doesn't know how to make Superman movies and they would have pissed off people no matter what. First, they attempted the Tim Burton/Nicolas Cage/Jon Peters/Kevin Smith movie which had everyone raising their eyebrows. Then they tried a film with Brett Ratner/McG/J.J. Abrams and that had everyone scratching their head. Then they made Superman Returns with Bryan Singer and that made most people very upset. And now they made this trainwreck.



FranklinTard 03-02-2014 12:43 PM

all this arguing man of steels quality begs the question... are you trying to convince us or yourself drac?



Dracula 03-02-2014 12:52 PM

The Number 6 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 03-02-2014 01:02 PM

Great list so far.



Neverending 03-02-2014 01:14 PM

That's surprising considering that you have badmouthed the movie for being too much CGI and an easy film to edit.



IanTheCool 03-02-2014 01:18 PM

I just finished watching this. Not in 3D though, since the battery in my glasses was missing. I found it now, so I guess I will juts have to watch it again...



Neverending 03-02-2014 01:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by IanTheCool (Post 2874414)

I just finished watching this.

Look at Ian catching up at the last minute



Dracula 03-02-2014 01:47 PM

The Number 5 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 03-02-2014 02:09 PM

Love Before Midnight. I'd place it even higher.



JBond 03-02-2014 02:35 PM

Good write-up on Man of Steel.



Dracula 03-02-2014 03:00 PM

The Number 4 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 03-02-2014 03:04 PM

Good write-up. I half expected that film to top your list.



MovieBuff801 03-02-2014 03:04 PM

I regret not getting around to that one while it was in theaters.



Dracula 03-02-2014 04:15 PM

The Number 3 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Neverending 03-02-2014 04:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dracula (Post 2874440)

Why did it take 48 years to tell the story of Oskar Schindler, but 149 years to tell the story of Solomon Northup

Before the 1990's, Jewish people were in charge of Hollywood. After the 1990's, it has been corporations. Either way, there has been little interest for movies about slavery. The only reason this one was made is because Brad Pitt pulled some strings. And he'll be rewarded with an Academy Award tonight. One year after his buddy George Clooney. It's great being a handsome Caucasian movie star in Hollywood.



Dracula 03-02-2014 05:07 PM

The Number 2 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



PG Cooper 03-02-2014 05:13 PM

Great write-ups. I'm a bit disappointed in your number one choice though. I really don't get what's so special about that film.



JBond 03-02-2014 05:41 PM

Yeah, Fast and Furious 6 isn't what I would have chosen.



PG Cooper 03-02-2014 05:57 PM

Dude, don't spoil the winner.



Justin 03-02-2014 05:58 PM

If number one is what I think it is, then good work.



Neverending 03-02-2014 05:59 PM

Is it Her?



Daniel 03-02-2014 06:08 PM

Grown Ups 2



Dracula 03-02-2014 06:22 PM

The Number 1 Movie of the Year:

Spoiler!!! Click to Read!:



Justin 03-02-2014 06:40 PM

Called it. Well-deserved.



JBond 03-02-2014 06:51 PM

I still have to see it.



Neverending 03-02-2014 07:02 PM

French movie about lesbians? How Neverending of you, Dracula.



Fanible 03-02-2014 07:43 PM

Meh.