Dracula Presents: The Fifteenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

The Green Knight makeup had a little trouble bridging the gap between the makeup and the eyes, once you notice it you can't unsee it.

Pass the water.

Really happy to see The Humans get a nod for sound.

Excellent choice for Art Direction too. Shame on the Academy for missing it entirely.

Best Score
Since starting the Golden Stakes I’ve long said that the award for best musical score has been challenging for me because I tend not to pay a ton of attention to the music in films and also because I can have somewhat unconventional taste in movie music that leads me away from some of the big composers, but I think I’ve formed my taste a bit more firmly these days and settled around some favorite composers. In fact this year is interesting in that four of my five nominees have actually won Golden Stakes previously, with Alberto Iglesias being the lone “newbie.”

Dune:

Hans Zimmer had apparently been a big fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune since he was a teenager so when Denis Villeneuve approached him to compose the score for the new film adaptation of the novel Zimmer was all in on the project. His philosophy for the score was to try to make music that would sound distinct from typical western classical music and would use unique instruments along with choral vocals to create a more alien style of music but he doesn’t go too far in this direction and still turns in a score that is propulsive and exciting in the way Hans Zimmer action movie scores tend to be and when necessary the score really manages to rock out.

The French Dispatch:

Wes Anderson has not really used as many popular music needledrops since linking up with Alexandre Desplat, but we’ve gotten some pretty cool scores for our trouble so I can’t be too sad. Desplat’s work on The French Dispatch is particularly playful and interesting as he uses a lot more brass instrumentation than we tend to get in other scores these days which tend to heavily favor strings, in particular he seems to be using a lot of Tuba, which ups the comic value and kind of makes things seem a bit more French. The music does get serious when needed and does play up some of that nostalgia and melancholy but never overplays its hand.

Luca:

Most of the musical scores for Pixar’s earlier films were either scored by one of the Newmans (Randy or Thomas) or by Michael Giacchino but in recent years they’ve started to branch out a bit more frequently and for Luca they tapped Dan Romer, a composer who’s probably best known in the film world for his collaborations with Benh Zeitlin. He’s something of a master of bold forceful whimsy, which is present here but his score also has a playful side that fits well with the Mediterranean vibes of the film. It fits well with this character who is very much a child but who feels big emotions in the course of the film and has a real longing to him.

Parallel Mothers:

Alberto Iglesias is Spain’s most prominent film composer and Pedro Almodóvar is that country’s most prominent director, so it makes obvious sense that they work together and have done so for the last twenty five years, but Iglesias kind of outdid himself with this one. His score for this movie is perhaps surprising because he emphasizes the darker aspects of the film and almost gives it the score of a thriller, albeit a slow moving one with a sense of intrigue rather, almost like the work Iglesias has done making the music for John Le Carré adaptations. The effect definitely gives the film a slightly different tone than it might otherwise and gives it a few extra layers.

Power of the Dog:

Jonny Greenwood had two major film scores this year (three if you want to include the minimal work he did on Licorice Pizza). His other big score was for Spencer, which was probably the more bold and in your face work from him, but I think I preferred the slightly more diluted work he did on Power of the Dog, which was in many ways reminiscent of the work he did on the early 20th Century business minded western where he got his start: There Will Be Blood. Like with that movie he avoided a lot of traditional orchestration in favor of these really intense string sounds that maybe sound odd in isolation but which work really well when edited into the film.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Yeah, Dune’s was pretty rad.

Best Soundtrack
The Best Soundtrack award is not, as the title might suggest, looking at which film has the best soundtrack album and it’s not really interested in any original music or score, rather it’s a look at the film’s overall use of popular music throughout its runtime. It’s not just meant to be about the best accumulation of music but which movie is best able to pick good songs for its various scenes and also to use its overall musical motifs to shape the film in question. Simply shelling out the movie for a huge number of songs won’t necessarily get you this though, on the contrary there are a lot of movies this year like Cruella and Fear Street which recklessly stuffed themselves with radio hits without any regard for spacing the selections out or surprising the audience and they did not do well here.

Last Night in Soho: Last Night in Soho is very much about 60s London and its legacy on pop culture so it was clearly a must that it have a carefully selected soundtrack and Edgar Wright was more than willing to live up to that requirement. We start by getting some 60s music via the protagonists music collection with stuff like The Kinks’ “Starstruck” and there’s one deep cut by The Who on the soundtrack but for the most part the film avoids your typical British Invasion rock in favor of a wider look at 1964 pop including a lot of songs by female belters like Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Petula Clark, and Sandie Shaw who likely needed to fight a lot of the same sexism that the Anya Taylor-Joy character is shown dealing with in the movie. We also get some nice surprises like James Ray’s version of "Got My Mind Set on You" and, in a break from the 60s motif, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ goth rock opus “Happy House.” These needle drops generally manage to avoid breaking the mood of the film’s horror trappings and display a real depth in its understanding of the 60s.

Licorice Pizza: I almost like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza soundtrack more for what it isn’t than for what it is. With its 1970s setting and its focus on teenagers (and the fact that it’s named after a slang term for vinyl records) it probably would have been easy for Anderson to go full Dazed and Confused with its song selections and fill the movie with “superhits of the 70s,” but while there are quite a few period songs in the film it does dig for some deeper cuts and doesn’t go for that needle drop knock out in every round. Make no mistake there are some big hits here like Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” but there are just as many tunes that the more casual viewer are not going to be able to identify that easily and Anderson also gets that not every people hear in a given year are going to be from that year and that some songs from earlier eras are also going to be in the mix as well. Instead of using one of The Doors’ more commercial hits it uses something called “Peace Frog,” instead of using “Classical Gas” he uses Mason Williams’ “Greensleeves,” and so on and so forth. It shows a much deeper knowledge of classic rock than what we got from a lot of other movies this year.

The Many Saints of Newark: If you’ve seen David Chase’s first and to date only feature film directorial effort you know the guy has very strong feelings about rock and roll. “The Sopranos” was not always the ideal vehicle to show this off as part of that show’s ethos is that it’s about people with dubious taste in music and there weren’t many non-diegetic song selections in it, but this period piece set in the world of “The Sopranos” seems to have set Chase loose as he fills this feature with some really solid choices of period music. It goes from the Frank Sinatra beloved by the old school gangsters to the rock that’s appreciated by the emergent younger generation to the R&B and Funk that’s preferred by the African American characters who also play a role in the film and of course it all leads up to that pointed usage of the original Sopranos theme song in the film’s final moments. Also, the film has a better Van Morrison needledrop than anything in Belfast.

The Suicide Squad: James Gunn came to prominence recently as a modern master of the needle drop with his Guardians of the Galaxy soundtracks and he clearly intended to carry that magic forward into his gig with DC but like the movie itself his soundtrack is a bit more eclectic than on those previous movies. Whereas those movies were pretty steadfastly tied to the 70s AM radio theme the songs here, while still mostly oldies, come from a wider sample of eras and genres. The film’s use of Kansas’ “Point of No Return” likely would have felt at home in a Guardians movie and his use of Louis Prima’s “Just A Gigolo / I Ain't Got Nobody – Medley” would have made sense while Yondu was taking people out with his arrow, but his usage of “People Who Died” by The Jim Carroll Band likely would have a bit too morbid for a Disney movie. Another song that’s a bit too modern for a Guardians movie is the use of “Hey” by The Pixies, which was easily the best use of Pixies song this year and there were certainly some contenders for that. Ultimately the music’s a bit less wall-to-wall here but the selections that are there are well chosen.

The Tender Bar: The Tender Bar is a pretty mediocre movie but it does do a couple things right and one of them is the soundtrack. On some level it’s almost a cheat code to have a movie set in the 60s or 70s when it comes to having a good soundtrack but a good selection of tunes is a good selection of tunes. Part of the film’s story is that the young man coming of age at the center of it is angry at his deadbeat dad, who’s employed as a local radio DJ, so he has a bit of a love/hate relationship to the radio hits of the day. The film has some of the 70s stalwarts like Jim Croce and Jackson Browne but there are other more notable song selections like King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight” and Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Lose Your Lover.” Then of course the film ends rather memorably to Steely Dan’s “Do it Again” which is generally a pretty easy way to get into my good graces. There are some other smaller song usages scattered throughout the film. There’s nothing here which on its own would necessarily merit a “source music usage of the year” or anything but the smart choices do accumulate and the music is ultimately one of the better parts of a not terribly memorable film.

And the Golden Stake Goes to…

Yeah, that was definitely a close second.

Very good category. I might put forth Spencer as a movie worth consideration. The montage heavy stuff near the end is definitely the film at its most showy but it also sets a really strong mood through its slow pace in the first half.

More respect for Green Knight. Here for it. Like the winner too, solid pick.

Best Cinematography
Well it finally happened: after fifteen years of doing this I’ve finally come up with a slate of cinematography nominees that were all shot digitally rather than on film. It almost happened last year until I made a last minute change but this year even most of the finalists were not created on celluloid. Really it’s kind of an odd mix in general: with the exception of Sean Bobbitt we really don’t get a lot of big name DPs here at all and focus instead on some younger or more unsung DPs.

C’mon C’mon: There were a ton of black and white movies this year, to the point where I almost considered having separate color and black and white cinematography categories like they used to have at the Oscars. Ultimately though when I was narrowing things down I decided that I really only had room for one monochrome movie and was surprised to find myself gravitating towards this one. Of all the black and white movies this year this is the one that was looking backwards the least. The film has this very detailed and clear picture to it, almost like a series of fine art photographs and watching it was like a glimpse into what it would be like if monochrome photography was a more common format in this day and age.

The Hand of God: While all of the films nominated here were shot digitally, I believe this was the only one that was actually shot in 8K… and it makes me wonder why more movies aren’t shot in that OP format. But I don’t’ think the use of this format is pure extravagance, it seems like it’s almost being used because no lesser degree of clarity would have succeeded in capturing just how vividly Paolo Sorrentino wanted people to see the Naples of his youth. There’s no real “gimmick” to the film’s cinematography but Sorrentino and cinematographer Daria D'Antonio really went the extra mile to make almost every scene pop in the movie.

Judas and the Black Messiah: You may have noticed that Dune is not among the nominees here. That is largely because I think the lighting in a number of that film’s interiors was a bit too dark and that was just enough to push it out of the top five. I bring that up because Judas and the Black Messiah is in many ways an example of dark interior lighting done right. The film has a generally desaturated look consistent with the sadness of the betrayal at its center and but images are consistently clear and there’s a distinct sheen and high detail to almost every shot. It’s a film whose photography just hits a perfect balance and the film looks great throughout without distracting from the subject matter.

Night of the Kings: There’s a moment in Night of the Kings where the film City of God is referenced by name and that is perhaps an apt comparison, not necessarily because the film looks all that much like Fernando Meirelles’ film (which generally has a shakier camera) but because it’s a crime film from a developing country which is shot with clear ambition and doesn’t leave production values on the table. Whether it’s the prison rooms the storytelling takes place in, the red moon that’s central to the story, or the flashes to the outside world that come from the story within a story the film employs top of the line visuals and employs a style that feels varied and yet unified throughout.

Power of the Dog: It can sometimes be hard to really gauge cinematography in films that have a lot of outdoor shots. How much credit do you give the DP for landscape shots essentially lit by sunlight and how much of that is just kind of hard to screw up. But the interior shots here also look great and they also seem to be of a piece with the exterior shots so clearly I probably shouldn’t underestimate the work that’s being done. Ari Wegner really brings this ranch to life with all the right shades of brown and makes the film a joy to look at for most of its running time.

And the Golden Stake Goes To…

Nice. Did you consider Tony Leung from Shang-chi at all?