Dracula Presents: The Twelfth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Best Documentary
This has been a great year for documentaries, but frankly damn near every year is a great year for documentaries and it’s been a very long time since I’ve had to struggle to find five solid nominees for this category. However, this was one of the first years where even the general public seemed to get in on the action and a bunch of movies earned record box office for the genre. Pretty cool turn of events.

Active Measures: If you only see one borderline agit-prop documentary about how Donald Trump is probably a criminal see this one. Assembling an impressive roster of experts, director Jack Bryan lays out in pretty good detail the argument and timeline that Trump was in league with the Russian mafia and how he eventually became an asset for Putin. I don’t know that it contains a lot of new information and I’ll grant that at the end of the day it’s basically advancing a conspiracy theory before all the facts are fully in, but if you’ve been looking for a concise layout of the bits and pieces from the Mueller investigation this is exactly what you’re looking for.

Free Solo: Documentaries about mountain climbing have been surprisingly common recently and with Free Solo Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi pretty definitively pretty definitively established themselves as the leaders of the pack among filmmakers in the form. Following the life of climber Alex Honnold leading up to his death defying attempt to climb the El Capitan cliff face without the safety of ropes, the film explores the mindset that would lead someone to attempt to do something like that as well as the complex mechanics involved in such a climb.

Minding the Gap: Minding the Gap is one of those documentaries that started out as one thing and sort of morphed into another thing as its filming went on for years. Shot by a guy named Bing Liu who had been filming his friends as they hung out and did skateboard tricks in their free time as teenagers and at a certain point it became a much more serious portrait of the city of Rockford Illinois and the cycles of domestic violence and child abuse that seem to affect this entire friend group in one way or another.

They Shall Not Grow Old: This Peter Jackson directed film made up of restored archival footage from the First World War takes the form of an oral history which is structured around archival interviews with war veterans. The film does act as something of a technical showcase for just how much hundred year old silent movie newsreel footage can be restored to look modern, the real appeal is how they were able to edit it together to sort of reconstruct the experience of the common British soldier in the trenches. It’s not perfect as a historical document as it does sort of bias itself in certain ways but as an experience it’s worth seeing.

Three Identical Strangers: Three Identical Strangers is probably the film out of this bunch that’s most interested in replicating the beats of scripted cinema and yet many of its techniques including talking head interviews are very much rooted in the documentary form. The film basically delves into one of those great “news of the weird” stories that can occasionally become a media topic for a week or so to find that there was actually a whole lot more weirdness going on and the film eventually becomes a very direct look into the age old nature vs. nurture debate.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Drac and I don't see eye to eye on a lot of things, but I will side with him on this: Halloween sucked.

Nice list.