Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 2, 2018 17:33:16 GMT -5
For those who weren't here when I did this in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016 this is part of a tradition of year-end rituals I put together each year and I'm ready to go through with this once again. Basically what I want to do here is post one category a day for four weeks. The First week will be scene based categories (best chase etc.), The second week will be technical awards (best editing etc.), The third week will be acting awards, and the last week will be genre awards and will culminate in Best Picture which will be announced in a top ten format. These awards will be entirely based on my opinions, but I don't plan to have this being an entirely self-indulgent pursuit. I hope that each category will lead to discussion and that people will find themselves playing along and giving their opinions about these various categories. So, without further ado I'll give out the first of the scene based awards: Blanket Spoiler Warning Please note I have not held back when discussing spoilers of certain movies. On the old forum I could black these spoilers out but here I can't do that so easily.Best Fight Scene
We’ll start out, as we often do, with the best fight scene of 2017. For purposes of this category a fight scene is scene where two people fight or a scene where one person fights a number of opponents. These fights can be unarmed combat or they can involve melee weapons like swords or knives but the involvement of firearms should be kept to a minimum. Stairway Fight – Atomic Blonde: Doing action scenes in what appear to be unbroken shots is a little played out and will eventually stop impressing people, but not today. This action scene does the single short thing (presumably assisted by invisible cuts), but even without that added trick it would be more than thrilling enough to follow this fight as it spirals down two flights of stairs and into an apartment where a dude is taken out in absolutely brutal fashion. The scene feels at once over the top impressive in its constructions and choreography but also gritty and down to earth. John Wick vs. Common – John Wick: Chapter 2: This probably isn’t the best fight scene here, but it’s certainly the purest. In the scene John Wick has just escaped one deadly shootout and thinks he’s in the clear until Common (who I’m sure has a character name, but who I like to imagine is just the rapper Common moonlighting as an assassin) ambushes him. They try to trade bullets but quickly disarm one another and engage in a pretty legit martial arts fight that takes them down a flight of stairs and through a door. Wolverine Vs. X-24 – Logan: Having somehow convinced Fox to let them make the latest Wolverine movie with an R-rating, director James Mangold proceeded to finally bring the character’s berserker rage to the screen across a number of bloody fight scenes. Most of the film’s action scenes could be called fights given the focus on hand to hand or claw to hand combat but the fight that most clearly fits here is the climactic one where Wolverine fights his evil clone. This is a fight that Hugh Jackman to be on both ends of a beating, which is a logistical challenge that required a lot of costume changes and body doubles, but within the context of the film it never feels like a showy stunt so much as a character facing his demons. Rey and Kylo vs. Guards – Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi: I had my issues with The Last Jedi but there were certainly action scenes in it that deserve recognition and if there was any part of the movie that was strong in the force it was probably this one. The guard’s protecting Snoke are clearly modeled after the crimson robed Emperial Guard from The Return of the Jedi, who always looked cool but never really had a chance to do anything in the original trilogy. Rian Johnson corrects that by giving them a bunch of weird weapons and having them fight the briefly allied Rey and Kylo, who dispatch them in entertaining fashion. Thor Vs. Hulk – Thor: Ragnarok: There are superhero fights and then there are superhero and this is right here is a superhero fight. Power-wise, Thor and The Incredible Hulk are probably the avengers that make the most sense fighting each other and they really knock each other around in impressive form when forced into a gladiatorial arena by the Grandmaster. You can almost imagine the fight playing out in comic book panel format complete with sound effect text bubbles. The ending is a bit of a cop-out, but up until then it’s super fun. And the Golden Stake Goes To…
Atomic Blonde
 The main reason I even went to see Atomic Blonde is because I heard about this scene and it almost single-handedly makes this rather messy spy thriller worth seeing. The scene is meticulously choreographed and crazy but it also adds little touches to make it feel a bit more real than it probably should. Battle fatigue is more of a presence in this fight than is usually the case with both combatants being downright exhausted at the end but the sheer ambition of the scene really dwarfs most of the competition. |
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 2, 2018 17:56:58 GMT -5
Hell yeah!
Atomic Blonde is the only of the nominees I haven't seen so I can't really comment on the winner. The throne room scene in The Last Jedi is pretty dope, but I might lean toward the Logan fight scene, though that benefits from following a really awesome scene and setting up the excellent ending.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 3, 2018 13:16:18 GMT -5
Best Shootout
This year many have criticized Hollywood for glorifying gun violence. I haven’t been one of those critics. In fact I’ve been pretty actively encouraging it for the last ten years by giving out this award for the movies that are best able to render mass shootings in a cool looking way. Maybe I’m going to hell for that, but whatever, here goes. Smokin’ Pigs – Baby Driver: Baby Driver is, as the title would imply, an action movie that is most notably about driving but there is a decent amount of gunplay in it as well. This brief but efficient scene set to a remix of the song “Tequila” starts suddenly with Jamie Foxx’s Bats opening fire on some arms dealers they identify as “pigs” and two of his colleagues quickly follow suit. Baby is on the sidelines for the most parts and eventually needs to duck as his compatriots open fire on a car that’s trying to escape. Bonus points for Bats saying “tequila” as the drive away from the final explosion. Car Crash – It Comes At Night: We get a very different idea of what makes a great shootout from Trey Edward Shults’ It Comes At Night when our protagonists’ car is ambushed by two unknown assailants. He’s forced to jump out the window, crawl under his car, and hope that he can get out of the situation. The scene depicts exactly how chaotic and confusing a real shooting like this would be and the way it ultimately comes down to someone awkwardly shooting a guy who doesn’t know where he is really deflates whatever Mad Max fantasies you have about the end of the world. Art Museum Shootout – John Wick: Chapter 2: If The Fast and the Furious is the leading franchise of the 2010s for watching cars smash into each other then John Wick is the leading franchise for watching people get shot… a lot. This scene comes late in the second John Wick movie as Wick is chasing down the bad guy and finds himself in an modern art museum. There really isn’t a whole lot to say about it except that it’s kind of the John Wick gunfight formula taken to a logical extreme with Wick going through the museum and methodically shooting everyone in the head at close range with incredible efficiency. The hall of mirrors was also a neat touch. Opening – War for the Planet of the Apes: I tend to avoid full on battle scenes, and this was pretty close to being disqualified on those grounds, but I ultimately kept it on here because it’s ultimately more of a skirmish than a battle. The scene plays out a bit like a Vietnam battle with a mobile army in the woods launching an ambush against an entrenched enemy. They get met with a bunch of rifle fire and a lot of it plays out in this over the head shot that takes in a lot of the chaos in an interesting way. Trailer Shootout – Wind River: This is unexpected but kind of great. It begins with one of our heroes getting shot out of nowhere from the other side of a door before turning into a chaotic hurricane of pistol fire before one side gets the upper hand. We get tense moments like a cop desperately trying to reload his gun before his opponent and another moment when it suddenly becomes a sniper scene both inside and outside of the trailer. This whole progression of this gunfight isn’t slowed down to make it look cool either, it all goes really fast and there’s a real impact to seeing all this mayhem. And the Golden Stake Goes To…Wind River
 Wind River isn’t really an action movie and in some ways that makes the action scene that shows up towards the end of that all that more impactful. It’s a bit like how the movie Nightcrawler got a big injection of excitement by throwing a car chase into its third act. There are some narrative problems around this shootout, namely the fact that the thinking behind the bad guys here is suspect and that the screenplay doesn’t do much to reckon with all these dead bodies in its aftermath, but the visceral shock of the whole scene combined with how clearly well constructed it is made it pretty hard to deny.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 3, 2018 13:34:07 GMT -5
Again, I've seen everything but your winner. Tough category. As an action scene, John Wick might be my favourite for the sheer excitement of the scene, but that sequence from It Comes At Night is also pretty great. The War for the Planet of the Apes shootout out is also great, mainly in terms of how the camera takes it all in.
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Feb 3, 2018 17:57:12 GMT -5
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frankyt
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Post by frankyt on Feb 3, 2018 18:20:41 GMT -5
I hate how much love wind River is getting
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 4, 2018 9:15:59 GMT -5
I haven't heard much about Hollywood being criticized for gun violence this year.
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 4, 2018 10:17:04 GMT -5
I probably would have gone with Star Wars for fight and John Wick for shoot-out.
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 4, 2018 10:42:46 GMT -5
It's hard to call it a "snub" given how tight the Best Fight category was, but I really dug the showdown between Officer K and Luv in the final act of Blade Runner 2049. Location plays a big part here, but there's a lot of tension and the ending is great.
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 4, 2018 10:56:36 GMT -5
It's hard to call it a "snub" given how tight the Best Fight category was, but I really dug the showdown between Officer K and Luv in the final act of Blade Runner 2049. Location plays a big part here, but there's a lot of tension and the ending is great. Nah, it was drawn out too long. |
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Post by FShuttari on Feb 4, 2018 11:13:54 GMT -5
I don't care what anyone says I could rewatch Rey and Kylo take out the gurads all day!
Also I need to see Wind River. It's been on my list
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 4, 2018 11:23:43 GMT -5
I liked Wind River, but not as much as everyone else, personally. I would've probably given shootout to War for the Planet of the Apes or John Wick.
As for Atomic Blonde, it's in my Netflix Disc queue. Primarily for the action sequences.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 4, 2018 11:27:41 GMT -5
I don't care what anyone says I could rewatch Rey and Kylo take out the gurads all day! Also I need to see Wind River. It's been on my list Maybe with some musical tweaks |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 4, 2018 11:29:00 GMT -5
As for Atomic Blonde, it's in my Netflix Disc queue. Primarily for the action sequences. They're the only reason to see it. |
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Post by IanTheCool on Feb 4, 2018 11:30:01 GMT -5
I saw about 10 minutes of Atomic Blonde and it was enough to tell me I didn't care to see any more of it.
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Post by Dracula on Feb 4, 2018 18:01:14 GMT -5
Best Musical Performance
Best Musical Performance is a category where I reward scenes in movies where a character performs a song live on screen. The award is for the overall scene and how it plays into the movie, not necessarily how good the song or the performance are. It’s a category that has always given me trouble. Every once in a while a bunch of real musicals will come out in a year and I’ll have a lot of material to work with but other times I really need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find nominees and this is one of those years. Please note I haven’t seen Coco or The Greatest Showman, both of which potentially have scenes that could fit. “Hit ‘em Up” – All Eyez on Me: In 2009 I nominated the film Notorious for a scene where Biggie Smalls performed his alleged diss track “Who Shot Ya” in front of a hostile Los Angeles crowd, essentially sealing his fate. It would seem only fair to do the same for the movie about Frank White’s rival for the scene where he performed his own diss track, the significantly less subtle “Hit ‘em Up.” It’s probably the best live performance in the movie and Demetrius Shipp Jr. really channels Makaveli effectively while doing it. “Burn” – The Killing of a Sacred Deer: Here’s a weird scene from a weird movie. In the middle of a rather strange moment where Barry Keoghan’s takes the daughter of the Colin Ferrell character for a walk and asks her to sing for him. She then leans against a tree and starts singing the Ellie Golding song “Burn” a cappela. The song choice is bafflingly mundane. It’s exactly the kind of bland top 40 song you’d expect a fourteen year old girl to know, and yet it’s still a surprise because the movie has you expecting the unexpected. There’s also something oddly haunting about the way she sings it. Just a very strange calm before the storm which is the rest of the movie. “You’ll Never Know” – The Shape of Water: Guillermo del Toro is an aficionado of many Hollywood genres, a guy capable of talking authoritatively about both obscure horror films and Frank Capra. But even knowing that I can’t say I anticipated his latest monster movie to feature an old school Hollywod musical number at a pivotal point. Right as she’s ready to let go Elisa has a fantasy where she sings the musical standard “You’ll Never Know” despite being mute, everything turns Black and White and we’re suddenly transported to a set that looks not unlike the finale of The Artist and she continues singing and dancing to the number complete with the fish man right in the middle of it all. A daring choice and one that pays off. “Genius Girl” – They Meyorowitz Stories: The concept of Adam Sandler singing isn’t exactly the most shocking thing in the world. He is, after all, the creator of the Hanukkah song and he was once Opera Man, but the idea of him singing something with tenderness and sincerity is pretty unexpected. Yet early in the film we see him in a duet with his character’s daughter with a song that they clearly wrote together called “Genius Girl” about their own family experiences. The song establishes that this father and daughter have a close relationship but also gives a bit of a window early on into how this is a family where people have high expectations of each other. “No More Catholics Left” – T2: Trainspotting: Making a sequel to Trainspotting was probably a bad idea for a number of reasons and T2 (as it was inexplicably titled) was overall a pretty bad movie, but there was enough talent involved to mean that there was some good in it. Take this scene where Renton and Sick Boy find themselves at a gathering the protestant Orange Institution that frankly resembles the kind of people you’d see at a Brexit/Trump kind of rally. To impress them and distract from a heist that’s going on he finds himself improvising a song about the Battle of Boyne in a moment that kind of reminds me of the famous “Throw the Jew Down the Well” Borat sketch. And the Golden Stake Goes To…
The Shape of Water
 This was a pretty easy choice given the field here. “You’ll Never Know” was first sung by Alice Faye in a mostly forgotten 1943 movie called Hello, Frisco, Hello. Here it actually isn’t sung by Sally Hawkins, who remains mute throughout, but by a woman named Renee Fleming who worked with Alexandre Desplat on a new recording and Hawkins lip-synchs throughout. Lyrically the song choice is perfect with its exaggerated expressive description of the singer’s feelings and its melancholic recitation of lines like “you went away and my heart went with you.”
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Feb 4, 2018 18:28:48 GMT -5
One of my favourite scenes of the film and the clear winner, but I think you assembled a pretty good batch of nominees. "Burn" is very creepy (the trailer uses it to amazing effect), and "No More Catholics Left" is possibly the best scene in T2.
Also, fourth time in a row I'm going 4/5 on your nominees.
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Post by Neverending on Feb 4, 2018 18:46:11 GMT -5
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PhantomKnight
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Post by PhantomKnight on Feb 4, 2018 20:17:24 GMT -5
What a shame that you haven't seen The Greatest Showman.
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Post by Deexan on Feb 5, 2018 0:07:25 GMT -5
I watched T2 fairly drunk and have no memory of that scene whatsoever. I'm gonna go ahead and assume they inexplicably cut it from the uk edit.
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1godzillafan
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Post by 1godzillafan on Feb 5, 2018 0:21:47 GMT -5
The greatest musical performance last year was easily my drunk aunt at that wedding.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 6, 2018 18:22:41 GMT -5
Best Chase
And the third of the specific action categories is for chase scenes. As always these don’t specifically need to be car chases but they do need to be scenes where someone is being pursued by someone else, preferably at a very fast speed and with a healthy amount of destruction occurring in the wake of said pursuit. Berlin Streets – Atomic Blonde: Immediately after the gigantic Golden Stake nominated fight scene from Atomic Blonde the movie decides it’s not done just yet and begins a really cool car chase through the streets of Berlin. The scene remains entirely inside of the car that she’s driving and seems like it’s largely done in one shot. It’s like the famous car scene from Children of Men but more action packed and crashy. Setting it to Flock of Seagull’s “I Ran” was also kind of a neat touch. First Robbery – Baby Driver: The opening action scene from Baby Driver needs to do a lot of things. It needs to show Baby’s skills behind the wheel, establish the film’s unique music based film grammar, and also introduce some of the characters who would show up later in the film. Of course it also has to be a lot of fun. Set to “Bellbottoms” by The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, the scene depicts a fairly straight-forward heist escape but the way the car drifts in and out of traffic looks great. Dom in New York – The Fate of the Furious: “Now I know how cops feel when they’re chasing us” is said by Ludacris midway through this chase scene where “the family” finds itself chasing their rogue brother Dominic, who for reasons too convoluted to explain is working for the bad guys at this point. In the scene they are chasing him through New York and as flashy as their various sports cars are Dom’s insanely powerful modified Plymouth GTX still manages to out-muscle most of them. Escaping in Limo- Logan: Limousines are not exactly known as high efficiency vehicles for chase scenarios but Logan needs to make it work here lest he and his compatriots be killed by their pursuers. Also working against him: he’s in a fenced off area with only a couple of exits. Still he’s able to break the pursuit of a couple and despite the multitude of jeeps that are after them he’s ultimately able escape by rolling passed a train. Chasing the Van- Spider-Man: Homecoming: This fun little scene is based around a surprising admission: that Spider-Man’s web shooters are kind of useless if you’re anywhere other than Manhattan Island. In the scene Spider-Man interrupts a weapons deal only to have the van drive off, forcing Spider-Man to take a shortcut through the neighborhood that has him interacting with various people along the way. He seems like he’s finally closing in when The Vulture swoops in and pulls him into the sky. And the Golden Stake Goes To…
Baby Driver
 The opening of Baby Driver serves as a sort of blue skies version of the (Golden Stake winning) opening scene from the movie Drive, but that was hardly the first movie about a getaway driver that opened on a getaway scene. The scene establishes how the driving in this movie would be fast and over the top but usually not quite as crazy as the stuff we see in movies like The Transporter and the Fast and Furious franchise. A very fun scene that totally gets the movie off on the right foot.
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Feb 6, 2018 23:36:17 GMT -5
Drac, these threads are great.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Feb 7, 2018 7:43:31 GMT -5
Best Use of Source Music
One of my favorite categories, the Best Use of Source Music category looks at the way certain movies use pre-existing pop songs to enhance certain scenes. This isn’t just a matter of picking cool songs, it’s also about building entire scenes around said songs and making one play into the other. The song itself doesn’t necessarily even need to be “good” necessarily, it just needs to enhance the scene in question properly. “Hocus Pocus” by Focus – Baby Driver: Baby Driver is a film made up of great song selections and this is probably the greatest of all of them. To score a great foot chase that comes at a turning point of the movie Edgar Wright selected an odd little song from the 70s called “Hocus Pocus,” which cuts between more conventional hard rock and straight up yodeling. Wright does an amazing job of syncing up the various movements of the song to changes in the nature of the onscreen action and more than anywhere else in the movie he’s able to make gunshots work in sequence with music here. “Love My Way” by The Psychedelic Furs – Call Me By Your Name: “Love My Way” could be said to be the special song for the couple at the center of Call Me By Your Name. We first see Oliver doing a sort of crazy 80s white guy dance to this at a outdoor makeshift disco that Elio is too self conscious to take part in until Oliver pretty much pushes him into it and it's one of the first moments where Elio really seems to catch Oliver’s eye. The song comes back later in the film when they hear the song playing in a car on the street and Oliver jumps at a chance to dance to it again. It shows just how much their relationship has changed in such a short time. This is of course a very 1983 kind of song to have as the soundtrack to a summer fling but it’s memorable and certainly the kind of cool that fits with this movie. “Come a Little Bit Closer” by Jay and the Americans – Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: If not for Baby Driver the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie would have been one of the most song-filled blockbusters of the year. Of its many needle drops in the film the most unexpected is this song by a mostly forgotten 60s band called Jay and the Americans. It’s older and a bit more obscure than most of the other songs in these movies but it does fit in quite well in this scene where Yondu massacres a bunch of space pirates with his mind-controlled arrow thing. The arrow really seems to move with the rhythm as it kills and it’s quite a sight to behold. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” by Joan Baez - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri: Awards worthy song usage usually involves action set pieces and/or highly edited montages, but this sequence is instead a rather slow moving scene and one that’s actually pretty pivotal to the plot. In the scene we see Dixon, in the middle of reconsidering his life, turns a day drinking away his sorrows at a bar into an investigation into a possible suspect to the film’s central mystery. In the background is this cover of the song made famous by The Band about the surrender of the Civil War and those lyrics almost certainly tie into the possible redemtption arc of this southern racist. “Space Oddity” by David Bowie - Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets: Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is in many ways a weird mishmash of ideas, but some of those ideas do actually work and one of them was this opening credits sequence which must serve to provide a bunch of background information using visual language. It’s the same basic trick that the Watchmen movie pulled off and in this case the song they chose was David Bowie’s space exploration anthem about the fate of Major Tom. At first this just seems like a logical song choice for the 1960s space launch we see but it continues to play as we witness centuries worth of events that resulted in the construction of the titular city. And the Golden Stake Goes To…
Baby Driver
Firstly the foot chase in this scene is amazing on its own, one that easily could have won in the Best Chase category if not for the fact that I knew I’d be talking about it here. This is simply the point in the movie where Wrights vision of a musical action movie is brought to life most masterfully. The song noticeably kicks into the yodeling section just as Baby hides behind a tree and again right as he tries to lose police in a convenience store and so on. It even ends in dramatic fashion when Baby’s iPod is shot abruptly cutting off the song.
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Post by Neverending on Feb 7, 2018 11:03:07 GMT -5
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