Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 12, 2021 8:21:15 GMT -5
For those who weren't here when I did this in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 and 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. You probably don’t need me to tell you that 2020 was a crazy and unpleasant year and of course the film industry was pretty clearly affected by it and the Golden Stakes will certainly be affected as well. In the past I’ve been pretty strict about sticking mainly to films that received a theatrical release in order for them to be eligible for these awards and, well, obviously I’m not doing that this year since theaters were closed. That having been said I haven’t become a complete pushover about the rules, in fact in many ways I’m being a lot more strict than a lot of awards institutions when it comes to release dates. The Academy announced early in the year that they were extending Oscar eligibility out to the end of February in some naïve hope that theaters would be widely open and accessible in the spring and its made kind of a release date mess because of it. I’m not doing that, this will remain an award show for movies from 2020 and 2020 only. As such the following movies (among others) will NOT be eligible this year despite their presence in other award shows: • Cherry • French Exit • I Care A Lot • Judas and the Black Messiah • The Little Things • Malcolm and Marie • The Mauritanian • Music • Saint Maud • Supernova • Two of Us • The United States Vs. Billie Holiday • The White Tiger All of these movies will become eligible for the 2021 Golden Stakes when I do those next year. Another thing many are counting as movies this year which I don’t are Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” movies, which I consider to be episodes of an anthology series rather than films for reasons I covered when I reviewed that series earlier. Nomadland and Minari will be eligible as both got limited Virtual Cinema releases during the 2020 and I watched both within the calendar year. Another movie that would theoretically be eligible this year would be The Father since it got a qualifying theatrical release in 2020, but I haven’t seen that because Sony Pictures Classics is seemingly doing everything in their power to keep me from watching it for some reason so like A Portrait of a Lady on Fire last year it’s just going to have to be “the one who got away” for me and it won’t be eligible next year. 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. So, without further ado I'll give out the first of the scene based awards: Fight of the Year
Picking out the best action scenes of 2020 is a more difficult task than usual, mainly because the genre of cinema most affected by the pandemic has almost certainly been the Hollywood action film, a type of film so expensive that it has the most incentive to wait until all this is over in order to recoup as much of their large budget as possible through theater revenue in the future. So, a lot of the kinds of movies that would normally stock these action scene categories didn’t happen. However, Hollywood has never had a complete monopoly on sequences like these and there were just enough movies this year with fight scenes for me to scrounge something together. Sprinkler/Cocaine Fight - Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn): This is kind of a fusion of two fight scenes that play back to back. The first is a fight between Harley Quinn and a bunch of recently escaped prisoners in a jail room where the sprinklers are going off, which focuses on a lot of grappling moves and has some cool looking splashing water visuals. The second is even wilder with Harley going ham on a bunch of leather jacketed thugs in the GCPD evidence room and begins with a rather subversive moment where she’s energized after accidentally inhaling a bunch of cocaine. This fight is notable in its casual brutality with Harley really fucking up some skulls with her baseball bat blows and then inverting a dude’s knees. Prison Fight – Corpus Christi: This is the only of the nominees here to not come from an action or genre film and is instead the final scene from the Polish drama Corpus Christi. In it our main character, Daniel, has returned to prison, where the brother of the man he’s accused of murdering is also present. This results in a brief but impactful fight between the two. The brother is notably larger than Daniel but Daniel is scrappier and after being bloodied by his opponents blows he retakes the upper hand and gets in some very brutal head-butts which look like they very severely injure his opponent. Director Jan Komasa puts the work in to make this sequence visually interesting, doing most of this in a single shot, and he makes this climactic scene a shockingly violent jolt at the end of an otherwise staid drama. Rake vs. Rav – Extraction: This is kind of an unusual nominee because it’s a fight scene that sort of emerges out of a section of a longer chase scene that goes on for a real long time and is meant to look like it was done in one shot. In the middle of this chase the film’s villain Saju Rav (played by Randeep Hooda) ambushes the film’s protagonist as he’s running through the second story of a building and then meets him on the ground where the two engage in a brutal little knife fight (complete with pedestrians going past them) before the fight is sort of brought ot a halt when Rake is hit by a car. Moss vs. Invisible Man – The Invisible Man: This brief but impactful fight scene comes shortly after a memorable jump scare where Elisabeth Moss dumps paint on the titular transparent entity, finally indisputably revealing his reality. From there she chases after him to find he’s (rather conveniently) washed all the paint off and he gets the drop on her. From here we get the rather unusual sight of an unseen person tossing this woman around, so she kind of looks like she’s violently levitating but she gets some licks in as well, seemingly hitting nothing but actually hitting the invisible guy. The whole thing takes on greater power when you consider that it’s essentially a supernatural allegory for the film’s underlying themes of domestic violence. The Protagonist vs. The Reverse Protagonist – Tenet: This very interesting scene is notable in that we see it play out twice in the film (with about an hour of runtime between the two “runs”) first from the perspective of one combatant going forward in time and then from the perspective of the other combatant (who turns out to be the same person) going backward in time. Like most of the best action films in the year there’s something absolutely fascinating about watching this choreography play out with certain moves going backwards while the other moves forward and there’s something remarkably disorienting about watching these two fighters make their way down a hall that really feels like something we haven’t seen before. And the Golden Stake goes to…Tenet This was not close. While some of the other nominees did some interesting things this Tenet fight was mind-bending. In particular I admire just how different the two different version of this fight feel despite ostensibly being the same scene. The first time around you’re completely disoriented, you don’t really know how this world works and the fight itself seems to come out of nowhere, but the second time around you (like the protagonist) are finally starting to understand this technology and you know exactly what the main character is trying to do. Here the fight seems less like a gut punch and more like an obstacle to be overcome as he runs to a bigger goal and simply seeing it all play out in the opposite direction really changes the feel of it. |
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 12, 2021 16:17:51 GMT -5
This shit's been up for 7 hours and I'm just noticing now? Shame on me. The Oscars<The Golden Stakes.
Psyched to see how you navigate this given the whole pandemic thing. Your first category may not have been close, but the winner is a very worthy pick.
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Post by thebtskink on Mar 12, 2021 16:23:39 GMT -5
I'll be bouncing in and out here based on if I've seen the titles I skim.
Haven't seen the winner of this one yet.q
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 13, 2021 7:02:34 GMT -5
Best Musical Performance
This music scene category focuses on scenes in movie where characters on screen actively perform a song. The category focuses on the entire scene in question and isn’t necessarily meant to be an objective selection of the best singers or performers so much as a focus on the best integration of music into a film’s story. Final Concert – Bill and Ted Face the Music: I generally stick to performances with vocals for this category but I’m making an exception for this climactic moment from Bill and Ted Face the Music because, well, because it stands out. The scene has Bill, Ted, and co finally coming together and having a sort of jam session for the ages led by their kids and also featuring various historical musicians they rounded up… and the grim reaper. The moment proves so righteous that it unites the world and everyone in history, sort of ridiculously, because it rocks so damn hard and undoes a weird cosmic rift that had been forming. Really though it’s meant to be sort of a culmination of the story threads from the movie and from the whole strange series. Title Track – Blow the Man Down: If the trend-pieces are to be believed sea shanties have apparently become “a thing” on Tik Tok. This indie movie came out almost a year before that tend started up and for all I know it may well have sparked it considering that it rather notably uses sea shanties as part of its soundscape. These shanties are sung semi-diegetically by these fishermen side characters who almost act like a sort of Greek chorus for this odd crime story and their use of this traditional music in the opening scene really helps bring you into the world of this tiny New England fishing town. Trump Rally Song – Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: This scene is something of a highlight of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat sequel in which he infiltrates an actual trump rally in this ridiculous hillbilly getup and manages to get onto the stage, where he performs an outlandish pro-Trump song which, predictably, the audience eats up and begins singing along with horrendous lyrics about “chopping up [journalists] like the Saudis do.” Cohen pulled a similar stunt with his famous “throw the Jew down the well” song from his old TV series, and that was shocking at the time, but this crowd’s reaction was almost depressingly predictable. Still, it’s a stunt that took some real chutzpah and was delivered with panache. Title Track – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Though it’s set in a recording studio and is ostensibly about the recording of some blues records there really isn’t a lot of actual music in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom until this scene almost an hour into the film where, after several delays and false starts, they actually record the titular song and the audiences is quickly reminded of the power of this blues music and how great it can be as a cultural force when removed from all the politics and bullshit that’s been holding it back in the rest of the movie. “A Change is Gonna Come” – One Night in Miami: While you watch One Night in Miami and see Malcom X spend an hour berating Sam Cooke for not being political enough with his music it does not take a rocket scientist to guess what song we’re going to hear before the film’s end: his 1964 anthem to social change “A Change is Gonna Come.” The performance is a recreation of his debut of the song on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show and this is then intercut with epilogues of what went on with the film’s other three characters in the next couple of years. It’s not exactly the boldest filmmaking choice but this song is endlessly powerful and it still gets you even if you’ve seen this coming. And the Golden Stake goes to…Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
 In the grand scheme of things I think this was kind of a weak year for the category and I had to dig up some nominees I have mixed feelings about but I feel like this was a scene I pretty unreservedly remember feeling energized by. I’ve already discussed how it brings “what really matters” about the music to the film’s surface, but it’s also just really cool how it depicts the band finally coming into sync and creating something and it was also interesting to see the mechanics of this 1920s recording equipment. Just a really great oasis before things start to get very serious again in the film.
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Post by 1godzillafan on Mar 13, 2021 7:11:39 GMT -5
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Post by donny on Mar 13, 2021 8:53:18 GMT -5
Ma Rainey's Bogus Journey.
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Post by thebtskink on Mar 13, 2021 8:58:28 GMT -5
"After Midnight" has a fantastic one
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Post by IanTheCool on Mar 13, 2021 11:13:59 GMT -5
Nice, its back. So Minari is 2020? I was questioning whether it was or wasn't.
Problems aside, yes Tenet absolutely deserves the fight award.
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Post by Dracula on Mar 13, 2021 11:32:34 GMT -5
Nice, its back. So Minari is 2020? I was questioning whether it was or wasn't. It's a little questionable, I was able to pay to see it without any sort of special invitation through a virtual cinema thing on December 17th, that's a public exhibition, so I think it counts, or at least it counts as much as those one week NY/LA qualifying runs people have been doing for years. |
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Post by Neverending on Mar 13, 2021 14:40:17 GMT -5
The real winner is Chloe Bennet in leotards. |
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Post by Dracula on Mar 14, 2021 9:54:40 GMT -5
Shootout of the Year
Shootout of the year is a category dedicated to Hollywood gunfights, which is to say any sequence where two groups are shooting at each other with some sort of projectile weapons. I do however make a (slightly subjective) distinction between “shootouts” and full on battle/war scenes, which is mostly a factor of the number of people on both sides. There was a shortage of action movies this year, but many of the ones that did come out had at least one scene that fit the bill so I’m reasonably happy with the roster I’ve put together. GCPD invasion - Birds of Prey: I’ve applied the shootout label to scenes involving non-firearms like bows and arrows before but I think this is the first time it’s been given out to a scene based on non-lethal projectiles. In this scene Harley Quinn is tasked with breaking a kid out of a police station, but isn’t quite enough of an antihero to straight up waste all the pigs in the station so instead she uses this pellet launcher thing to shoot various beanbags, smoke bombs, paintballs, and even glitterbombs at the various officers and manages to take them out with a sort of chaotic ballerina grace. Flashback Shootout – Da 5 Bloods: There are about three major shootouts in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods which are all accomplished in their own way even if I have some tonal issues with one or two of them. This early Vietnam scene ticks most of the right boxes though. In it our five protagonists are in a helicopter that is downed by the Vietcong and need to shoot it out with them until they finally make it out. It’s the battle that essentially sets up the whole movie and it’s the ramification of this sequence that haunts the characters, but it’s also an accomplished action scene unto itself with some pretty impactful shooting that manages to excite the audience in its own way. Bridge Shootout – Extraction: Though maybe not the most elegant shootout here this is certainly has the most shootout material of all the options here as it’s kind of a number of separate shootouts one after the other, some of them happening simultaneously. In it the film’s villain is trying to move the child he’s extracting across a bridge when all hell breaks loose and people on all sides start shooting like mad. That villain proves to be pretty badass before being taken down, there’s a helicopter in the mix shooting like mad, there’s some sniper action. Just a whole lot of bullets flying everywhere. Bluffs Shootout – News of the World: This shootout comes about a third of the way through News of the World and is in many ways characterized by the fact that its main character is under armed in the encounter. In it three assailants run our protagonists off the road and force them to try to take refuge in a nearby bluff. He has the high ground but he’s only armed with a pistol and a shot gun loaded with birdshot, neither of which are terribly useful at long range. So it’s a real standoff until the main character’s companion comes up with the idea of loading shotgun shells with coins. The scenery that provides the scene its backdrop is beautiful and the sequence makes full use of the terrain. Escape from lab – The Old Guard: The Old Guard ends with a sort of escape scene in which our protagonist needs to break into a high-rise laboratory and free her colleagues and then have them all shoot their way out of the place. Given that the heroes of this movie are these Wolverine-like immortals who get back up after being shot things do not go well for the captors. This is probably the most “John Wick-like” of the shootouts here and kind of engages of the recent trend of shootouts where a lot of the people are being shot at kind of close range, which can give the shootout something of of a martial arts movie feel and give little punctuations of brutality to each shot. And the Golden Stake goes to…News of the World
 Some of the movies here were just chock-full of violence and death (seriously that Extraction shootout resembles World War III) and that might have led me toward the sequence that had a certain quality over quantity quality to the shootings. Only three people get merked in this scene but each of the killings is impactful because you’re in a lot of suspense about what will happen to our hero and you see the resourcefulness he needs to put into earning each one of those kills.
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Post by IanTheCool on Mar 14, 2021 10:15:53 GMT -5
Sounds like an interesting one.
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Post by Jibbs on Mar 14, 2021 13:18:32 GMT -5
Too bad the rest of the movie is bad and boring.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 14, 2021 14:35:52 GMT -5
I really should see that. Is it on Apple TV? I've been thinking of signing up for a free trial so my girlfriend can see that Billie Eilish documentary so that might be a good time.
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Post by Dracula on Mar 14, 2021 14:41:26 GMT -5
I really should see that. Is it on Apple TV? I've been thinking of signing up for a free trial so my girlfriend can see that Billie Eilish documentary so that might be a good time. I don't think so. I had to shell out for a $20 PVOD rental, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone who doesn't have a pretend award show to put together. It's on Netflix in some countries, but I don't think Canada is one of them. It's getting a physical media release in a couple weeks, rental prices will probably go down then. |
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 14, 2021 14:47:36 GMT -5
I really should see that. Is it on Apple TV? I've been thinking of signing up for a free trial so my girlfriend can see that Billie Eilish documentary so that might be a good time. I don't think so. I had to shell out for a $20 PVOD rental, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone who doesn't have a pretend award show to put together. It's on Netflix in some countries, but I don't think Canada is one of them. It's getting a physical media release in a couple weeks, rental prices will probably go down then. Damn. Thanks for the heads up. |
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Post by Dracula on Mar 14, 2021 14:56:02 GMT -5
I don't think so. I had to shell out for a $20 PVOD rental, which I wouldn't recommend to anyone who doesn't have a pretend award show to put together. It's on Netflix in some countries, but I don't think Canada is one of them. It's getting a physical media release in a couple weeks, rental prices will probably go down then. Damn. Thanks for the heads up. Greyhound is on Apple, so there is some Tom Hanks dad movie content. |
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Post by Dracula on Mar 15, 2021 9:23:27 GMT -5
Best Use of Source Music
As always this is a category that looks at individual uses of pre-existing pop music in search of scenes that manage to really enhance themselves by finding just the right song to really hit the moment. I must say, I’m not happy with the nominations I’ve assembled this year. I don’t know if licensing got more expensive this year or something or the year just suffered from the lack of some masters of the form like Tarantino or Wes Anderson but for whatever reason the movies that came out this year either leaned more on original scores or they didn’t use their song selections to their full potential. Still, I did my best to highlight the ones that did stand out. “Cissy Strut” by The Meters – Another Round: There are two standout music moments in Another Round, there’s the finale (which is probably more defined by Mads’ Mikkelsen’s dance moves than by the song selection, and then there’s this scene a bit earlier when the film’s central quartet imbibe these strong absinth derived cocktails and start acting like fools while this foundational funk song by The Meters plays in the background. The dichotomy of these dorky intoxicated Danish high school teachers strutting around the room while this profoundly funky bassline is in the background is just amusing in and of itself and is one of the more lighthearted moments of drunkenness in a film with many such scenes. “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye – Da 5 Bloods: This is a song choice that is perhaps a bit more notable for its very selection than its use in a particular scene. “What’s Going On” is of course a monumentally important song and is almost certainly the most prominent anti-Vietnam anthem from a black perspective, so it made all the sense in the world that it would show up in Spike Lee’s Vietnam epic, but rather than just play the song Lee opted to use a special acapella version of the song and placed it at a point in the movie where the characters were at their most defeated while also using a framing technique where the record is being played by the “Hanoi Hannah” propaganda DJ. “Bound for the Floor” by Local H – Hillbilly Elegy: I’m kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel here as Hillbilly Elegy is a heinously terrible movie that I’d like to just forget, but there was one scene that kind of stuck out to me because of a fairly clever song choice in it. The scene is one of the flashbacks to the main character’s childhood where his mother took him to a sports memorabilia story but they end up making a scene and are kicked out to the sound of the song “Bound for the Floor” by 90s alt rock one hit wonders Local H. The song, which is mostly notable for the repeated use of the word “copacetic” kind of fits with the movie’s themes of feeling like you can’t escape your place in life right down to the song’s title and its use in the film helps to show how happiness for this kid can be rather fleeting as this one upbeat moment is followed by a depressing scene of child abuse. “Mr. Lonely” by Bobby Vinton – Kajillionaire: “Mr. Lonely” is a ballad that’s considered something of a classic of early 60s pop. Personally I’ve never been a fan of it, the dude singing it just sounds pathetic and frankly I associate the tune with an irritating chipmunk sampling by Akon in the late 2000s. But Miranda July found some good use out of the song and made it something of a theme for the movie, even commissioning a cover of it for the trailer, but it’s the original recording that she uses for her ending, which is perhaps meant to be a slightly ironic usage because that’s when the character is at her least lonely given that she’s finally connecting with the Gina Rodriguez character. “Angel of the Morning” by Juice Newton – Promising Young Woman: “Angel of the Morning” has been used pretty prominently in pop culture before and even showed up memorably but imperfectly not too long ago in Deadpool and It: Chapter 2 but it finally really got used well this year as the closing track for Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman, where the “post one night stand” milieu of the original song gets reframed as a morning after that is decidedly less accepting of being abandoned and the angel of the morning is transformed into something more akin to an avenging angel. And the Golden Stake goes to…Promising Young Woman
 Big Spoilers on this one
There’s a lot about the ending of Promising Young Woman that does not make a lot of sense either logistically or thematically (How was this investigation coordinated? Why is she putting this much faith in “the system?” Is there really even that much evidence here?) but the scene still works in spite of all that, largely because this song selection works so perfectly. It’s not just the lyrical allusions either, the orchestral production proves rather cathartic and the film picks up a certain martial theme to the drum fills that punctuate the song and kind of perfectly time out the way that finale progresses.
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donny
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Post by donny on Mar 15, 2021 10:48:29 GMT -5
Mmm, was pulling for Another Round. I loved that movie.
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Post by Doomsday on Mar 15, 2021 11:12:14 GMT -5
Damn. Thanks for the heads up. Greyhound is on Apple, so there is some Tom Hanks dad movie content. PG Cooper will be way more interested in Greyhound when he's 35 and his knees start aching. |
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Post by Dracula on Mar 16, 2021 9:49:36 GMT -5
Chase of the Year
Of all the discipline of action scene the chase of the year feels like the one that has been least compromised by circumstance. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but the right movies seemed to come out to allow me to find five nominees for this award that I’m pretty happy with. As always, chase of the year looks at scenes based around people chasing each other in an action settings and can encompass car chases, foot chases, and chases involving other vehicles as well. Roller Skate Chase - Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn): Birds of Prey is a comic book film that generally focuses more on comedy than on blockbuster thrills but there are certainly sequences that do deliver on that front including this late film chase scene where Harley Quinn has to catch up with a pair of cars filled with Black Mask’s goons. To do this she puts on roller skates and hitches a ride on Helena motorcycle. Roller skates are a kind of a unique vehicle to use in an action chase like this, but one that fits Harley as a character and which allows her to do some fairly cool stunts where she leaps up onto cars and kicks the shit out of the people driving them. One Shot Chase– Extraction: The central set-piece in Extraction is this bravura sequence that’s shot to look like it was all done in a single shot. It’s a little tricky to classify because it’s essentially a car chase that turns into a foot chase but also incorporates elements of the shootout and fight before turning into a car chase again. I’ve ultimately decided to declare it a simple chase and will be ignoring some of the more shootout and fight based moments for the sake of fairness, but just as a simple chase there is a whole lot to love about the scene. Chasing the Escaping Body – Soul: This is a bit of a different kind of chase scene in that it’s brief and not necessarily using the language of the action movie, but has enough novelty to be worthy of hanging here. In it Twenty Two is briefly overcome with selfishness while inhabiting Gardener’s body and tries to run away with him and he pursues while in cat form. Getting a down low feline view on a chase through New York’s streets like this is unique and there are some neat obstacles put in his way like running into the cat’s owner and quickly getting away from her and then finally Terry gets in the fray as well ending the chase by ensnaring both parties, which is itself a very memorable visual. Retrieving the Case – Tenet: This centerpiece of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet occurs in Tallinn, Estonia and begins as a sort of daring heist on the open road when the Protagonist and Neil arrange to attack a convoy transporting an artifact by essentially sandwiching in a pair of security cars and then using a firetruck’s ladder to get into the transport truck through the roof. It then becomes a highway car chase with said protagonist forced to weave through traffic and negotiate on the road with the villain. But what really pushes this over the edge comes some ten minutes later when we see the whole thing all over again in reverse. Cairo Chase - Wonder Woman 1984: This sequence from Wonder Woman 1984 is almost more of a moving fight scene than a chase but it’s on a road, they’re trying to catch up with someone, it’s a chase scene. Clearly a riff on the famous truck chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the scene begins with Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor rather conveniently passing Maxwell Lord’s convoy driving down an Egyptian highway and turn their cab around to pursue it. Diana then runs ahead on foot and begins taking down the various tanks and armored trucks. We get a very cool truck flip along the way along with some fairly impressive stunt work. And the Golden Stake goes to…
Tenet
I actually came surprisingly close to giving this to Extraction as that whole sequence was quite the achievement in action filmmaking but at the end of the day it wasn’t really giving us anything terribly new and unique while Tenet was giving us something kind of new while also executing at a very high level. The whole sequence makes use of Nolan’s signature IMAX photography and in typical Nolan fashion does not lean on CGI. But really it’s that second time through which really puts this over the top, it’s the moment where the film’s “backwards/forwards” gimmick really sort of clicks into place and starts to work.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 16, 2021 9:56:43 GMT -5
I'm glad this movie is getting the proper awards love from someone.
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Neverending
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Post by Neverending on Mar 16, 2021 12:33:40 GMT -5
I'm glad this movie is getting the proper awards love from someone. lol |
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1godzillafan
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Post by 1godzillafan on Mar 16, 2021 13:14:23 GMT -5
Give it whatever award you want. Just don't give it one for sound mixing.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 17, 2021 7:29:39 GMT -5
Best Set-Piece
My last “scene” award is kind of a miscellaneous category for notable large scale scenes that don’t fit well into the usual fight/shootout/chase categories I normally use. Some scenes will sort of combine elements of those other categories, some just plain don’t fit in any of them. Second Submarine Sinking – Greyhound: Greyhound is in many ways structured around three sea battles of which this second battle stands out the most for me. In it the Greyhound and another ship in the convoy called the HMCS Dodge (aka “The Dicky”) try to take on a U-boat that has just been exposed by one of The Dicky’s depth charges. Forced to emerge, the German submarine needs to engage with its more conventional surface weapons and almost gets away with it by scraping up against the two ships hulls, going under their guns and making it difficult for either ship to shoot without hitting the other. The film rather wisely cuts to birds eye shots of the battle at key moments to make what’s going on clearer and captures a great deal of the tension of this fight. Jailbreak – The Invisible Man: This scene is essentially the finale of The Invisible Man and comes after the Elisabeth Moss character has been put in jail after being framed and comes to find that her invisible stalker is even present in her cell. She stabs him, causing his suit to malfunction slightly and after a guard is drawn into the room she runs into the hall where the invisible man uses his powers to take out several guards and then chase her into the rain outside. Here is where we see the full extent of how powerful these invisibility powers as he takes out several cops before they know what hit them and Leigh Whannell uses great ingenuity in depicting this. Rubble Dragon – Onward: Onward is a movie that’s all about taking high fantasy tropes and kind of re-envisioning them in a more modern context. Of course the king of all high fantasy tropes is the dragon during the finale the film finally tackles that creature in its own way. In the scene the characters let out a magic red smoke which then pulls in rubble to take the form of a fire breathing dragon and even uses the nearby school’s sports logo in order to form the creature’s face. From there we get a reasonably exciting action scene where much of the film’s central family takes this thing on and culminates in the protagonist using most of the spells he learned earlier in the film to finally take it down. Birth – Pieces of a Woman: This is not a conventional choice for the “set-piece” category as it’s not any kind of “action scene” but nominating something like this is not unprecedented as I nominated a scene from Roma with similar subject matter. The sequence follows a husband and wife as the wife goes into labor and they’re planning to have an at home birth with a midwife but they need a replacement midwife at the last minute and things seem to be going wrong. The whole sequence is meant to look like a single shot, which isn’t just done as a stunt as the chronology of what happens in the scene matters and it makes this really feel like a major moment in the lead-up in a way a more conventional shooting style wouldn’t. Temporal Pincer – Tenet: It’s a bit of a grey area for me as to when an action scene goes from being a shootout (or a fight) to being something that can better be described as a battle scene, and thus be more appropriate for this set-piece category. This scene was a close call in that regard but I ultimately decided that our protagonist kind of being part of a small army put it in that battle territory. The scene has our heroes engaging in a strange kind of warfare where multiple teams engage in a conflict, one going forward and one going backwards, toward a single goal and it is quite the mind-bending sequence complete with explosions going off in all temporal directions. And the Golden Stake goes to…The Invisible Man
 When I saw this film back in March I certainly didn’t expect this scene to not be topped the rest of the year, and even going into the process of writing out this category I didn’t necessarily expect this one to come out on top, but ultimately this was the nominee that just executed most flawlessly. It certainly lacks some of the size and bombast that the winners of this category usually have but it makes up for it with technique. In many ways it pays off on the promise that the fight scene in Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade showed and makes it bigger and better.
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