thebtskink
CS! Silver
Join Date: Jul 2000
It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
Posts: 19,462 
Likes: 4,984
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:57:17 GMT -5
|
Post by thebtskink on Mar 23, 2021 21:53:12 GMT -5
That final scene with Raci and Ahmed is one of my favorite scenes all year.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 24, 2021 7:22:13 GMT -5
Best Actress
Not a lot of explanation needed, it’s the award for the best actress in a lead role and the competition here was a lot stiffer than the competition in the supporting actress category. Han Ye-ri – Minari: In the role of the long suffering wife Monica Yi in the film Minari, Han Ye-ri has to convey a lot of skepticism and doubt while her character nonetheless remains fairly supportive outwardly. Over the course of the film she goes through an arc where she tries desperately to put on a happy face but must at times also put her foot down and challenge her husband as he sometimes recklessly chases his dreams and this requires a lot of subtle work so the audience follows her through this even when she isn’t saying the quiet part loud. Carrie Coon – The Nest: Carrie Coon has done some big work on television and has had some strong supporting roles in film, but The Nest, in which she plays a woman dragged to a different country by an overbearing husband so he could chase his dreams (in this sense it’s not dissimilar from Han Ye-ri’s part in Minari). Coon’s character is herself something of a hot mess, in part because she’s let herself get into this slightly toxic situation, and you watch her kind of process the fact that it’s come to this kind of messed up place slowly over time. Sidney Flanigan – Never Rarely Sometimes Always: Never Rarely Sometimes Always is apparently Sidney Flanigan’s first and to date only film performance (the director apparently met her when she was 14 and her boyfriend was a subject in a documentary about Buffalo area Juggalos), but this does not feel like a “non-actor” performance. Through the movie you empathize with the pressures she’s feeling and sense a profound sadness about her life which makes more sense the more you hear about what she deals with back home. Frances McDormand – Nomadland: Chloé Zhao has until recently made something of a reputation for working with non-actors and there’s a lot of that in Nomadland as well but at the film’s center is a beautiful and tender performance by Frances McDormand which is yet another triumph in a career that has been quietly filled with triumphs. In the role McDormand needs to make herself believable as someone living this rough lifestyle while surrounded by people who are actually living it and must also carry with her the sadness from the character’s backstory. Elizabeth Moss – Shirley: Elizabeth Moss had quite the good year in 2020; she had one of the year’s few box office hits with The Invisible Man and she was also in the acclaimed if somewhat divisive biopic Shirley, in which she played a fictionalized version of the famous author Shirley Jackson. Throughout the film Moss plays Jackson as something of an enigma, a woman suffering through various physical and mental ailments but who clearly has a cruel side which manifests itself for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. Moss hits both sides of the character and is consistently interesting to watch through the entire film. And the Golden Stake goes to…Nomadland I must say I can only assume it’s the fact that she won an Oscar recently and isn’t “overdue” that McDormand hasn’t been widely hailed as an awards frontrunner for her work in Nomadland, because the performance itself is more than award worthy. McDormand presumably had to essentially live like her character for a certain amount of time while filming the movie and managed to really blend with this subculture while also handling some tricky character psychology well.
|
|
Doomsday
Administrator 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 23,298
Likes: 6,762
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by Doomsday on Mar 24, 2021 10:15:09 GMT -5
Great supporting actor pick. I hope people outside of these boards take notice for how great of a performance that was.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 24, 2021 18:14:32 GMT -5
Best Actor
The Best Actor award is once again a bloodbath this year and I needed to make a whole bunch of cuts to get it down to five and ended up with a slate of nominees who easily could have won in a weaker year, and with certain quirks of the release schedule had worked out differently I suspect it would have been even harder. Delroy Lindo – Da 5 Bloods: Delroy Lindo is an actor who we’ve probably been taking for granted for far too long, or maybe I should say that Hollywood has been taking him for granted for way to long because he’s been in these third or fourth bill roles in a lot of movies and even Spike Lee has been somewhat guilty of this at times. In fact this is the first time Lindo has worked with Lee in twenty five years and it’s quite the reunion as Lindo plainly has the most noteworthy role as the PTSD riddled black conservative Paul and his late movie speech to the camera is an all-time great Spike Lee moment. Gary Oldman – Mank: Biopics tend to be good places to show off acting prowess but unlike his Academy Award winning turn in Darkest Hour Gary Oldman isn’t necessarily playing a figure in Mank whose mannerisms are going to be super familiar to most people. Still he uses the role to explore a rather difficult person and to look at him when he’s at some low points while also conveying how much of a witty genius he could be and let you understand how he’s reacting to what’s going on around him and why he ultimately rebels against the establishment. Chadwick Boseman – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Levee Green is one of August Wilson’s finest creations, a character who represents much of what it means to be young and black: a burning ambition combined with some pretty deep psychological wounds and the events of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom allows him to, in the accelerated language of theater, go from hope to desperation all within the span of an afternoon. To bring him through that journey they brought in Chadwick Boseman, one of the most promising actors of his generation, who gave a performance that would unfortunately be his swan song, but a worthy one. Steven Yeun – Minari: Steven Yeun is one of the more promising actors of his generation even if he’s had to go through some rather unconventional projects in order to display his talents and he’s probably gotten his best showcase yet with the film Minari. In the film he has to play a dreamer who’s desperately trying to build this farm, sometimes at the expense of his family and the performance needs to keep the audience at least somewhat on his side even when he’s doing some slightly questionable things. Riz Ahmed – Sound of Metal: In Sound of Metal Riz Ahmed is playing both a drug addict and a person with a disability, both being characteristics that are prone to “Oscar bait” performances but his work in the movie largely rises above that sort of thing, but it wasn’t easy. He reportedly spent months doing eight hour days divided between learning ASL, learning the drums, doing physical training, and perfecting his American accent and you can see every bit of the work on screen but more important than that you see that he can tap into this sometimes misguided young man’s occasionally frustrating mindset and makes this understandable to the audience. And the Golden Stake goes to…Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
 Whenever Chadwick Boseman wins an award this season I suspect people are going to play the “what if” game and wonder if he would have won had people not felt some desire to award the final performance of an actor who died too soon. While it’s true that we can never know if a living Boseman might have been screwed by some other quirk of award show politics, make no mistake, this performance is more than award worthy and even for my pretend award ceremony which has no pressure to award people on any schedule I still think he should totally win this.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 25, 2021 6:42:59 GMT -5
Best Acting Ensemble
The award for ensemble acting looks at the work of an entire cast rather than individual performances and I like to use this award to reward movies that have a particular emphasis on cast dynamic and also to award movies whose casts aren’t so easily summed up by simply nominating the principal cast members in the individual categories. Da 5 Bloods: Da 5 Bloods is a pretty sprawling movie in the grand scheme of things and has a rather large cast because of it. We’ve got the titular “bloods” who are largely played by Spike Lee regulars like Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, and Isiah Whitlock Jr. as well theater veteran Norm Lewis and Chadwick Boseman in his penultimate performance. Then we also get the actors from the minesweeping crew they meet along the way (Mélanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Jasper Pääkkönen), some key Vietnamese actors (Johnny Trí Nguyễn, Veronica Ngo, and Lê Y Lan), and some other key cast members like Jean Reno and Jonathan Majors. Mank: Herman Mankiewicz wasn’t a household name necessarily but he was certainly surrounded by famous and noteworthy people and this film needs to support a large cast filled with lesser known actors portraying all of them. The Hollywood Mankiewicz inhabits is filled people like Tom Pelphrey, Ferdinand Kingsley, and Toby Leonard Moore playing Hollywood luminaries and of course also people associated with Citizen Kane like Tom Burke doing a great Orson Welles and Charles Dance playing William Randolph Hearst. Combine those people with the main cast and you’ve got quite the assortment of actors. One Night in Miami: There are some other actors to be found scattered through One Night in Miami but of course the ensemble members that the film will forever be remembered for are its central quartet of Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, and Leslie Odom Jr. None of these actors are particularly famous but all of them are tasked with playing some really larger than life figures and need to play them in ways that feel unique from what we’ve seen in previous biopics or in ways that might be a bit different from what you are maybe expecting given the figures’ reputations. All four of them do this quite well and also interact with each other with the energy needed to keep things flowing. Sorry We Missed You: A best ensemble category is in part an award for best casting and one of the more impressive casting achievements of the year came from this Ken Loach film that was in many ways doing exactly what Ken Loach does best: making believable working class characters. The film’s adult cast mostly consisted of professional actors, but not big names and Loach manages to very believably cast his central family and make them behave in ways that have a great deal of authenticity. He also manages to find child actors who are similarly believable and not annoying… or at least not unintentionally annoying. A great example of how an ensemble can be put together without leaning on stars. The Trial of the Chicago 7: The Trial of the Chicago 7 is by its nature a movie that needs to have a lot of characters and Aaron Sorkin managed to fill an absurd number of those roles with celebrities and notable actors. Amongst the titular seven alone we get Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, and John Carroll Lynch as well as Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as the eighth defendant Bobby Seale. Expand it to the lawyers and you get Mark Rylance, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella, and a key guest performance by Michael Keaton. I could list these people for a while but the less famous names are also important and make for quite the who’s who of 60s notables played by talented actors. And the Golden Stake goes to…
The Trial of the Chicago 7
 I knew this would come down to a fight between two movies about activism in the 60s: The Trial of the Chicago 7 and One Night in Miami, and I was close to giving it to the latter on the basis of quality over quantity but the more I looked at the two casts the more I started to be won back over by quantity. The sheer number of tough casting choices that Sorkin needed to make really impressed me and I also liked how he was able to make things that shouldn’t have worked (like aging up Abbie Hoffman) work, and also how even certain weak points (looking at you, Jeremy Strong) manage to become endearing in their own ways.
|
|
thebtskink
CS! Silver
Join Date: Jul 2000
It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
Posts: 19,462
Likes: 4,984
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:57:17 GMT -5
|
Post by thebtskink on Mar 25, 2021 7:57:43 GMT -5
Maybe it was my tired state of mind when watching the movie, but I wasn't blown away by Boseman's performance. The monologue about his childhood is captivating, sure, but all of the other interactions ring hollow to me, and his turn at the end isn't quite believeable.
I'd put Oldman and Ahmed over him from what I've seen so far. Yet to see The Father or Minari.
|
|
donny
CS! Bronze
Join Date: Jun 2004
Posts: 10,631
Likes: 1,332
Location:
Last Online Nov 21, 2024 23:07:04 GMT -5
|
Post by donny on Mar 25, 2021 9:14:03 GMT -5
Still gotta watch Rainey's. Liked most of the acting choices.
Echo the sentiments on Raci, great pick.
|
|
PG Cooper
CS! Silver
Join Date: Feb 2009
And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
Posts: 16,647
Likes: 4,060
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by PG Cooper on Mar 25, 2021 11:33:21 GMT -5
I probably would have put Da 5 Bloods, Mank, and One Night in Miami's ensembles over Trial of the Chicago 7.
|
|
PhantomKnight
CS! Gold
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 20,527
Likes: 3,130
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 0:32:12 GMT -5
|
Post by PhantomKnight on Mar 25, 2021 12:22:03 GMT -5
I'm fully behind that Trial of the Chicago 7 win.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 25, 2021 17:11:48 GMT -5
Best Line of Dialogue
Choosing the best line of the year has consistently been among the most frustrating exercises of this whole fake award show project, in part because I’m often trying to spot clever turns of phrase often to find that they seem a lot less clever out of context and the lines I imagine will be memorable by years end aren’t always the ones that actually have staying power. This year I decided to take a bit of a different approach, instead of nominating a bunch of laugh lines I’m instead nominating lines that strike me as meaningful and sincere quotes that say something about the movies they’re in and make you think. “We won't let nobody use our rage against us. We control our rage.” - Da 5 Bloods: Da 5 Bloods was held up as a majorly important movie of the moment, coming out when it did soon after this summer’s protests despite having themes that weren’t one hundred percent in line with that moment and was actually going off in some similar if not identical directions. But this line, delivered by Chadwick Bosman in a key scene where he’s talking “da bloods” down from becoming violent after the assassination of Martin Luther King, definitely speaks to these times and has a message to tell. “Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope.” - I’m Thinking of Ending Things: This line comes toward the end of a longer speech musing about the nature of hope that’s told via voiceover at a key transition moment in the film shortly after the main characters arrive at their destination after a longish drive and the movie starts to really start getting crazy afterwards. The speech feels like a bit of a non-sequitor when you hear it at first but starts to take on a clearer and more ominous context when you know the secret behind the film and what this character’s thoughts represent. On its own this is just a really incisive piece of nihilism that makes you think. “This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That's the real magic of the movies.” – Mank: This line, spoken by Louis B. Mayer, is something of an embodiment of the film’s general cynicism about Hollywood and the movie industry at large. It’s a line that is spoken pretty quickly in the movie and you almost have to re-read it and think about it to catch what he’s saying, but there is a certain rough truth to it. Of course this attitude, which reduces cinema to a commodity, is in many ways refuted by the rest of the movie and by the product which it’s chronicling the writing of: Citizen Kane. “We don't say ‘goodbye,’ we say ‘see you down the road.’” – Nomadland: This line from Nomadland comes up a few times in the movie and could be viewed as something of a catchphrase of the movie, but one that’s very heartfelt. To the best of my knowledge this line was not the invention of Chloé Zhao but is instead an actual motto amongst people in the vandweller community, but Zhao did pick up on it and use it for a reason because it does a good job of expressing their existential ethos in which they keep things moving rather than letting them end. “The fairest thing in the world is the sun...” – A Sun: The heart of A Sun, the moment from which the film takes its title, is a speech given by a young man in which he answers a riddle he’d posed earlier about what the most fair and equitable thing in the world was. The answer is “the sun” because it gives equal amounts of day and night regardless of latitude. I’m not sure if this observation originates from the movie but it is an interesting insight and it plays into a larger speech in which this character explains his feelings about life. There is a certain immaturity to the whole thing, it’s coming from a teenager after all, but in a way that’s appropriate as it shows this character just beginning to get more mature insights which casts a shadow on his fate. And the Golden Stake goes to…NomadlandI like all five of these nominees and probably would have been happy giving the award to any of them but I ultimately landed on the Nomadland line in part because it’s the line I can imagine having something of a life outside of the movie. It’s a snappy bit of business, but one that packs a wallop and can be applied in a lot of situations and which I suspect will be quoted as long as this movie is still relevant and discussed.
|
|
PG Cooper
CS! Silver
Join Date: Feb 2009
And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
Posts: 16,647
Likes: 4,060
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by PG Cooper on Mar 25, 2021 18:49:05 GMT -5
Competitive field.
|
|
1godzillafan
Studio Head
Join Date: Feb 2017
I like pie!
Posts: 9,480
Likes: 6,217
Location:
Last Online Nov 8, 2024 5:42:00 GMT -5
|
Post by 1godzillafan on Mar 25, 2021 18:50:13 GMT -5
"Here sharky, sharky, sharky! This is some good shit!" "Oh thank god! It's going after him!" |
|
Doomsday
Administrator
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 23,298
Likes: 6,762
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by Doomsday on Mar 26, 2021 0:16:10 GMT -5
“The fairest thing in the world is the sun...” – A Sun
As someone who hasn't seen the movie, that quote followed by the title just reads funny to me.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 26, 2021 12:34:42 GMT -5
Best Adapted Screenplay
A category looking strictly at how well films work on a screenplay level with a focus on screenplays that are adapted from other works, whether they are novels, plays, other films, or works of non-fiction. A film’s status as an adaptation will largely be based on the legal distinction of whether they need to include a “based on” credit. I’m Thinking of Ending Things: Charlie Kaufman is known for making wildly original screenplay ideas but his latest film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, is actually an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Iain Reid. It’s not a completely radical adaptation like Kaufman’s film Adaptation either, as both have the same basic plot and lead to the same essential twist ending but I gather that the way this twist is handled is pretty different and Kaufman adds in a number of his own strange touches that really give the two works pretty different feels. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: I am a little conflicted about nominating stage adaptations for awards like this given that in many ways all the work was done for them by the original playwright. In fact the last August Wilson adaptation was credited only to Wilson himself given that it was so faithful to the original. This screenplay for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is not quite that close and Ruben Santiago-Hudson is credited with the adaptation and does make a couple of changes. The stage version of the story was set during the Chicago winter while the film version moves it to a hot summer day and a couple of film centric ideas like the scene where Boseman walks out the door to find a dead end are also added. Martin Eden: There were two high profile Jack London adaptations this year: the Harrison Ford starring family movie The Call of the Wild which is technically one of the year’s highest grossing movies by virtue of coming out pre-pandemic and the much different Italian epic Martin Eden, which is in some ways a radical re-write and in other ways a pretty standard adaptation. Like a lot of turn of the century literature the novel looks at the worker upheavals of the day and the movie, adapted by Pietro Marcello and Maurizio Braucci, does this as well but moves the action from California to Italy and adds some biographical details from London’s own life. Nomadland: It is my understanding that Chloé Zhao was written in a somewhat unconventional way in which it transformed itself based on the stories of the various people involved in the shoot and allowed for a decent amount of improvising and I’m also not entirely sure the extent to which Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” plays into it. To some extent I can’t entirely worry myself with such things though because at the end of the day I need to focus on what the material that’s actually on screen is like and much of that is in fact really strong and features both some incredibly natural dialogue and a format the beautifully wraps itself up at the end. One Night in Miami: Like with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom I’m a little conflicted about this nomination in that it’s an adaptation of a stage play, but rather than adapting an acknowledged classic of the past this has writer Kemp Powers adapting his own play, which ran into obstacles getting produced on Broadway. The film adaptation is a touch awkward in adding material to its beginning and ending (I’m not sure if or how that stuff played on the stage) but the core material in Miami is really well done in its re-imagining of what certain large than life historical figures would have been like behind closed doors and use their interactions to raise larger questions about the times and about society at large. And the Golden Stake goes to…I’m Thinking of Ending Things
 I’m Thinking of Ending Things is probably not the most perfect example of writing here (that would probably be Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which loses a lot of points simply because it has the advantage of working with great source material), nor is it necessarily the best of these movies, but it does strike me as the most singularly creative work of adapted writing this year and that goes a long way. It’s certainly the screenplay here that I see myself spending the most time really pondering over for the foreseeable future, and that’s what really put it over the top.
|
|
PG Cooper
CS! Silver
Join Date: Feb 2009
And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
Posts: 16,647
Likes: 4,060
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by PG Cooper on Mar 26, 2021 13:01:14 GMT -5
Another good choice. Happy to see that movie getting some wins as it's really stuck with me.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 26, 2021 20:03:19 GMT -5
Best Original Screenplay
Original screenplay was likely the more crowded screenplay field this year (as it has tended to be as of late). As with the Academy I base originality on whether there’s an official “based on” credit and don’t exclude movies based on historical research but otherwise not based on a specific work. Mank: Mank was famously written by David Fincher’s father Jack Fincher before he died nearly twenty years ago. It has been rumored that veteran Hollywood screenwriter Eric Roth did some uncredited re-writes to get the screenplay ready for this iteration, but that is largely speculation. Whoever wrote this and when, they clearly had a lot they needed to juggle between depicting Herman Mankiewicz’s personality, chronicling the writing of Citizen Kane, going into the Hollywood politics of the time, going into the politics politics of the time, and even bringing in Hearst and other important figures of the day. Add to that the tricky chronology their working with and it’s really amazing that the screenplay managed to come out as confident as it did. Minari: Minari is, to my knowledge, the only of these nominees to be overtly autobiographical. I’m not sure exactly how much was drawn specifically from experience and memory as there’s certainly a lot in the film he wouldn’t have been privy to but writer/director Lee Isaac Chung did grow up on a farm in Arkansas and the fictional family in the movie almost certainly mirrors his own family of South Korean immigrants. Chung tells the movie like something of a memoir but manages to have some pretty keen rearview perspective on his parents and the dynamic they must have gone through in making their life in this place. Palm Springs: “Time Loop” movies have certainly been done before and screenwriter Andy Siara certainly drew on previous movies like Groundhog Day when he put Palm Springs together, but even if it doesn’t have the world’s most original high concept any movie doing something like this is going to require quite a bit of legwork on a screenplay level to keep all the rules straight. But beyond that it’s really the film’s qualities as a romantic comedy of sorts that make it stand out. There’s a lot of charm here and you really like spending time with these characters. Soul: From what I’ve gathered the process Pixar uses when putting together their movies is something more akin to brainstorming than traditional writing with a solitary author typing out dialogue on a word processor but one way or another the film was on some level “written” by Pete Docter, Mike Jones, and Kemp Powers and the world they’ve created along with the body swapping antics they’ve come up with are very effective and they also manage to capture a very strong balance in creating characters that feel like actual adults in the world while still essentially being cartoon character who operate on somewhat child-like ideas of how the world works. A Sun: Taiwan has something of a tradition of making long family dramas involving younger generations getting into some trouble and Chung Mong-hong’s A Sun is something of a modern evolution of that “genre” of sorts. It chronicles a family that is sort of torn apart by an act of violence in the opening scene and traces multiple members of that family as they go through separate character arcs in reaction to this, each one of them well thought through and coming together well at the end. And the Golden Stake goes to…Minari I think I could make a pretty good case for giving this to any of these five movies, ultimately when given a tricky choice like that I defaulted to the movie with the screenplay that has the fewest identifiable flaws and whose success seems to derive specifically for the writing. Minari isn’t necessarily a wordy movie, nor is it a movie with an overly complex structure, and most of the dialogue is naturalistic and unflashy, but it makes up for all of this with a keen eye for character and a general understanding of human nature and for the place of a story like this in the larger story of American literature.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 27, 2021 7:54:33 GMT -5
Best Trailer
Oddly enough there may be no category this year more affected by the pandemic than this category about movie trailers because, well, I haven’t been forced to watch dozens upon dozens of movie trailers this year like I normally would have had I been going to theaters regularly and watching a half dozen of the things before every movie. Only seeing these things a couple of time on Youtube probably gives me a different relationship with a lot of these than I might otherwise have had. As always I base eligibility on the year the film was released rather than when the trailer came out, so anything that had its release moved to 2021 won’t be eligible until then. Da 5 Bloods
This trailer for Da 5 Bloods is a good example of how to move off of the usual trailer formula a little without completely breaking the mold. It uses The Chamber Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today” as its backbone and emphasizes the film’s 60s/Vientnam themes rather than its racial politics but doesn’t completely avoid that either. Rather than hiding the film’s shifting between times, aspect ratios, and stock footage it leans into that and adds a couple tricks of its own by including some footage of the backing song being performed and putting some lyrics on the screen and it does all this while still laying out the basic story and presenting the film’s rather large cast. Mank: First of all, double points for commitment to the bit. Netflix went the extra mile to remain in keeping with the film’s retro look and created a custom “Netflix International” logo and even a custom MPAA approval logo for the beginning. But the trailer itself is pretty slick bit of work as well, using some big band music to give the film a slightly comical feel while also choosing some of the film’s more striking visuals and using editing techniques and fonts that feel in keeping with the trailers of the time. Just a really fun exercise in playing along with a gimmick the whole way through. Never Rarely Sometimes Always: Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a pretty spare drama which doesn’t exactly lend itself to a flashy trailer, but I was impressed by this piece’s ability to spin a pretty powerful ad for it. Key to its success is a pretty carefully chosen backing song, in this case a song called “Seventeen” by the indie-folk singer Sharon Van Etten, which really emphasizes the film’s quiet drama while also having some lyrical resonance. Beyond that it just uses some very well chosen moments from the film to both minimalisticly announce what the story is while also building right through to the end when the film’s title is spoken. Promising Young Woman: You can pretty easily tell that the publicity machine behind Promising Young Woman wanted the movie to be something of a female version of another genre film openly rooted in social commentary: Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In fact they also took a page from the trailer to Peele’s Us by incorporating a violin heavy orchestrated version of a pop hit into the film’s trailer, in this case Britney Spears’ “Toxic” which is ostensibly about a woman’s devotion to a dude who isn’t good for her but it re-contextualized here to make the “toxic” person the film’s protagonist, who is shown here as something of an avenging angel. Wonder Woman 1984: This is the kind of blockbuster trailer I miss watching numerous times a week during trips to the theater. Wonder Woman 1984 the movie was quite the messy disappointment, but it did manage to provide the raw material for a very good trailer that is in many ways selling a much better film than the final product. It also sells that 80s setting better than the movie itself in a lot of ways, complete with this remixed instrumental version of New Order’s “Blue Monday” in the background really selling the retro charm of the setting while also working well as dramatic blockbuster trailer music. And the Golden Stake goes to…Promising Young Woman
 This trailer for Promising Young Woman did play in theaters way back in the before times when it was thought that the movie would be released in April (the month displayed at the end of the trailer in question) and even then I knew to take a note of the trailer for future Golden Stake eligibility. You could tell that this movie would be quite the provocation and the contrast between the music at the beginning and that “Toxic” re-orchestration really marks quite the signal as to what this movie would really be. There were more elegantly cut trailers this year, but nothing announced itself as strongly as this one and made as much of a splash… even if it turned out to kind of be a year too early.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 27, 2021 17:43:23 GMT -5
Best Poster
Posters would be another facet of the movie world that has become increasingly theoretical over the course of the pandemic and lockdowns, but studios do still pretty consistently release official posters alongside most film releases so I’m still going to award the good ones. Please note that I stick strictly to official posters for the domestic market and exclude fan works and foreign posters. Also, as with trailers eligibility is based on film release year rather than the year the poster was released and is limited to movies I’ve seen. The Color Out of Space:  The Color Out of Space proved to be a somewhat forgettable movie… literally, I saw it and barely remember anything about it. But one thing that is memorable about it is its poster. The film had disadvantage of having been given a very limited release before going to VOD but this did mean that they could tailor their advertising directly to the whims and desires of genre fans and cinephiles and this heavily Drew Struzan inspired illustrated poster drawn by Tom Hodge, a guy who has apparently created quite the niche for himself designing posters for odd direct to video horror movies and is given a bigger platform to work with here. Da 5 Bloods:  Netflix commissioned a few pretty memorable and striking posters for Da 5 Bloods including one with a soldier crying blood and one of a fist rising up into a helmet, but the one I ultimately went with is the busier poster which most feels like the poster for the film’s “official” release insomuch as it had one. The poster incorporates both the Vietnam elements of the film along with the protest element while also incorporating all five of the “bloods” into the film image. A really solid and memorable image for the movie. The New Mutants:  There were a lot of different posters for The New Mutants over the extended period it was being advertised over several false starts and delays and by the law of averages you’d have to assume that one of those many posters was going to be pretty cool and sure enough I quite like this one, which was presumably made when they were trying to emphasize the film’s horror elements. Using the film’s title to reveal a black and white drawing of the characters’ skulls is a pretty neat touch. Shame that idea couldn’t be used on a movie that’s a little more deserving of the treatment. Promising Young Woman: There’s been something of a trend in poster design, one that I’m frankly getting a bit sick of, where they just put a star’s face front and center on a poster and then put some block text over it. This poster for Promising Young Woman changes that template up a bit though by putting Mulligan’s face out of focus and having the text written in lipstick as if written on a mirror and the kicker is the lip drawing on top of the mouth from the photo. It’s an image that emphasizes femininity but has a clear sinister side and fits the movie quite well. Saint Frances:  These kind of character based indie comedies aren’t usually the source of great film posters but the marketing team at Oscilloscope went above and beyond with their poster for Saint Frances, which builds off some of the catholic themes that are in the film to make this poster which puts the film’s actors in front of this fanciful faux stained-glass window with a modern backdrop and elements from the movie around the edges. I’m not sure it gives people unfamiliar with the movie the best idea of what it’s about at first glance, but it’s certainly a beautiful bit of work that they clearly put a lot of effort into. And the Golden Stake goes to…The Color Out of Space
Does this really require explanation? Look at it, it’s awesome. The poster does some great stuff with the purple color scheme which could be limiting but works really well for the poster and the drawing of Nicholas Cage is quite strong as is the background and the whole thing has a nice symmetry to it that really stands out. I may one day grow sick of this kind of Struzan homage illustrated poster, but that day is not today and I couldn’t resist this one. The only think it’s missing is a better movie to be a representation of.
|
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 28, 2021 11:17:11 GMT -5
Most Under-Appreciated
In the past I’ve had to struggle to come up with satisfying lineups but it wasn’t too hard this year. You would think that all the free time everyone has to watch movies on television would have led to damn near everyone watching nearly everything that was made available, but that didn’t seem to happen and with studio publicity departments really at a loss with how to promote things in this environment a lot of things fell through the cracks. #Alive: #Alive is a Korean zombie movie that sort of got lost in the shuffle despite being widely available on Netflix, and yeah I can sort of see why that happened. For one thing it was probably a bit over-shadowed by the popularity of the other recent Korean zombie movie Train to Busan and its sequel Peninsula, but aside from having the same country of origin it’s pretty original so that’s not really fair… okay, I know the real reason this thing was ignored was that it has a hashtag in the title… I thought that was offputing as well, but come on, it’s a fun movie. Give it a chance. Blow the Man Down: I think out of all the movies here this is the one that suffered most from the lack of theaters… or not. The premiered at a festival way back in the April of 2019 and was picked up by Amazon and just sort of say around for almost a year before being tossed on the service in late March. Critics did at least notice it upon release and champion it a bit, but this was the height of the pandemic and people were distracted by other entertainment stories. I feel like in another world this could have been a pretty good indie counter-programing hit like Winter’s Bone or Beasts of the Southern Wild were… which is to say that in a less distracted world it could have been over-rated instead of under-rated. Greyhound: In raw terms Greyhound got more attention than the other four movies here (having Tom Hanks as your star would tend to do that), but I still feel like it deserved a little bit better. I think the heart of the problem is that the streaming service that picked it up was Apple+, which was probably the worst distributor for it firstly because Apple+ is in its infancy generally but also because most of the people who have it now are tech early adopters, which is not exactly the target audience for this… the target audience is old guys. This is decidedly a dad movie, but it’s a well-made one that manages to function very effectively as a straight procedural and filled a void for modern World War II navy movies I didn’t even notice we had A Sun: The story of how this movie managed to get overlooked has been pretty well documented; Netflix clearly botched the release, but truth be told there’s probably a lot of blame to go around. I don’t remember critics bringing it up much when it played at festivals and they could have been paying more attention when it was unceremoniously dumped on streaming. It’s a good example of how asleep at the wheel a lot of tastemakers are about world cinema when it doesn’t have an established auteur or some kind of high concept story to make it jump out. This would have been something I could have really used around June or July if the people in charge of the discourse had just brought it to people’s attention. Unpregnant: I would say that this is another movie that would have benefited from a theatrical release but I kind of get the impression it was going to be hoarded as early exclusive content for HBO Max no matter what. Regardless it is kind of bizarre that a comedy about teenage abortion is something that should have, like, at the very least been noticed by more people than it was. The type of people who would protest such a thing never took the bait and the critics who would have defended it also didn’t seem too interested. That’s surprising, I would think the fact that it worked as a perfect companion piece to the critical darling Never Rarely Sometimes Always would have at least been a story. More than anything I think the real problem may just have been that no one got to laugh together at a theater at this pretty enjoyable little movie. And the Golden Stake goes to…A Sun This was pretty much fated to win here. Truth be told, over the course of doing these Golden Stakes I kind of feel like I’ve fallen into the same trap the world has when dealing with this movie; it’s good in sort of unspecific ways and that make it kind of hard to “sell” it to people or in my case single it out in certain award categories. But make no mistake this is strong cinema that deserved to be talked about much more in circles that would be interested in films like this.
|
|
PG Cooper
CS! Silver
Join Date: Feb 2009
And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
Posts: 16,647
Likes: 4,060
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by PG Cooper on Mar 28, 2021 11:39:44 GMT -5
Only film in the last I've seen. Love it.
|
|
Doomsday
Administrator
Join Date: Jan 2001
Posts: 23,298
Likes: 6,762
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by Doomsday on Mar 28, 2021 11:47:15 GMT -5
I'll put that on the short list.
|
|
PG Cooper
CS! Silver
Join Date: Feb 2009
And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
Posts: 16,647
Likes: 4,060
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by PG Cooper on Mar 28, 2021 15:19:05 GMT -5
Having now seen Minari, I can second this choice. Edit: Did you consider Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress? You mentioned the pickings being slim but I found her performance a definite highlight. |
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 28, 2021 15:30:36 GMT -5
Having now seen Minari, I can second this choice. Edit: Did you consider Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress? You mentioned the pickings being slim but I found her performance a definite highlight. Eh, I was kind of making a statement. I thought it was kind of stupid that they were elevating her as the performance of that movie when Han Ye-ri was being completely ignored. Almost like critics had some sort of reflex to elevate performances by Asian grandmothers after The Farewell. |
|
PG Cooper
CS! Silver
Join Date: Feb 2009
And those who tasted the bite of his sword named him...The DOOM Slayer
Posts: 16,647
Likes: 4,060
Location:
Member is Online
|
Post by PG Cooper on Mar 28, 2021 15:33:53 GMT -5
Having now seen Minari, I can second this choice. Edit: Did you consider Youn Yuh-jung for Best Supporting Actress? You mentioned the pickings being slim but I found her performance a definite highlight. Eh, I was kind of making a statement. I thought it was kind of stupid that they were elevating her as the performance of that movie when Han Ye-ri was being completely ignored. Almost like critics had some sort of reflex to elevate performances by Asian grandmothers after The Farewell. Ah, fair point. I do think Han Ye-ri gives the stronger, if less 'fun', performance and you made a good call giving her the nod. |
|
Dracula
CS! Gold
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 26,101
Likes: 5,731
Location:
Last Online Nov 22, 2024 13:10:40 GMT -5
|
Post by Dracula on Mar 28, 2021 16:38:11 GMT -5
Best Action Film
If there’s any one genre that’s been kind of decimated by the pandemic it’s almost certainly the action movie since many of them were too expensive to dump onto streaming it was the genre most prone to simply be delayed into 2021 and possibly beyond. Still, some action flicks made it out and I feel like I didn’t need to stretch genre definitions too far to accommodate the category this year. Please note that I there were a couple of movies that I did rule out of the genre categorization, namely Birds of Prey, which feels more like a crime comedy with superheroes than a true action movie, and Da 5 Bloods, which does have a surprising amount of action but that’s not really the film’s strongest aspect and in many ways weakens the film in my eyes. Bad Boys for Life: When I saw this was coming out in January I thought it was a dumb move given that the warm vibes of Miami are so central to this series and putting it out in the winter seemed like a bad move… good thing they didn’t listen to me though because that decision led to this being the official highest grossing movie of this bizarre year. I sort of get why it was successful though because this did do a better job of reverse-engineering Michael Bay’s style than I expected it would and did an alright job of fusing those movies with something of a Fast and Furious vibe to sell it to a new generation. Extraction: I’m a little conflicted about honoring this movie because on some level I think this movie is kind of soulless and perfunctory, a good example of the perils of having stunt coordinators direct your action movies instead of people with a more holistic approach. On the other hand, there are some really damn impressive large scale action scenes in this thing that clearly deserve acknowledgement. Not since The Raid 2 have I felt such a disconnect between the parts of an action movie and the bigger whole, but in a weak year like this it definitely deserves at least a nomination. Greyhound: I generally separate war movies from action movies, but it felt right for Greyhound in part because the focus here is almost entirely on action… by which I mean things happening in large naval battles. It’s a kind of action scene we have not seen a lot of, at least not in a modern post-Saving Private Ryan context. There’s little room in this to stop and get to know people, it’s just non-stop tension, and when they finally are taking on the German submarines it gets pretty exciting and things do blow up real good if that’s what you’re looking for. The Old Guard: Marvel was basically MIA this year and DC was… well DC was DC, so basically what we got in terms of good superhero action this year was this Netflix film based on an Image Comics property which follows what are essentially a group of clawless Wolverines who have lived for hundreds of years and have formed a sort of chaotic good mercenary group. I don’t think this movie quite had the budget to do everything it was hoping to (we like to think of Netflix as the Mr. Moneybags of the entertainment industry, but stuff like this is a reminder that they have their limits), but it introduces its world well and has some pretty successful action scenes. Tenet: Tenet was a blockbuster in a year without blockbusters and its role in restarting film release culture this year will likely be debated for years to come. Also likely to be debated is its twisty and sometimes opaque plot and time reversal concept which certainly takes some thinking to get to the bottom of. But what generally hasn’t been up for debate is that Tenet is pretty badass when looked at simply as an action movie since it contains some pretty undeniable action sequences including the finale, the car chase, and the fight so nice they fought it twice. And the Golden Stake goes to…Tenet Duh. Oddly enough, Christopher Nolan has only won this award twice before (The Dark Knight and Inception). I would have thought it would be more given his prominence in directing Hollywood action films but The Dark Knight Rises lost to The Raid and Interstellar and Dunkirk aren’t really action movies. Tenet is certainly an action movie though and it’s quite a good one and truth be told none of the other four nominees were even close.
|
|
