donny
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Post by donny on Mar 5, 2022 11:01:48 GMT -5
Pig is one of my favorite films of the year. Good to see it nominated.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Mar 5, 2022 13:31:20 GMT -5
I was meaning to put that Nightmare Alley line in the 2021 quotes thread, it's a great endcap to the movie.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 6, 2022 12:38:55 GMT -5
Best Adapted Screenplay
Our first screenplay award is for the best adaptation and will look at the movie that works best on paper when adapted from some other source. This year seems to lean away from the most common source of adaptation (the novel), of which there’s only one example, and instead we have a pair of non-fiction adaptations, a re-adaptation of a stage musical, and a short story adaptation. Benedetta: Benedetta was adapted by Paul Verhoeven and David Birke from a non-fiction book called “Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy” by Judith C. Brown. Verhoeven is of course a guy who has something of an eye for the salacious, but it would be a mistake to view Benedetta as just being a T&A exploitation movie as I do think the director is legitimately interested in this story of Benedetta Carlini and its historical and theological implications and having an actual piece of scholarly history to work off of I think gives his film some legitimacy and structure. Drive My Car: Drive My Car is ostensibly an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami, a massively famous Japanese writer who is often floated as a potential Nobel Prize recipient someday. It is, however, only thirty pages long so it needed to be greatly expanded on by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and co-writer Takamasa Oe who seem to incorporate elements of other Murakami stories into the film. The screenplay uses a very unconventional structure generally and really keeps you guessing throughout, weaving in themes slyly and not really playing all of its cards until very late in the runtime. Dune: I don’t necessarily consider Dune to be the most elegant piece of writing that’s been produced this year, but if we’re looking at Adapted Screenplay more as an award for the act of adapting something then I think it’s actually a pretty major achievement. Frank Herbert’s Dune is several hundred pages of dense science fiction set in a wildly divergent universe with a web of intrigue between various actors that all need to be explained to an audience in the least didactic way possible and in the case of this movie the writers also needed to make a potentially abrupt ending work. I don’t think they manage to overcome all of this perfectly, but the fact that they were able to make it work for “normies” as much as they did is impressive. The Last Duel: Another film based on a nonfiction history book, The Last Duel is based on a book by Eric Jager called “The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France” and was written in a somewhat unconventional way. Reportedly Matt Damon wrote the section based on his own character, Ben Affleck wrote the section from the perspective of the Adam Driver character, and Nicole Holofcener wrote the Jodie Comer one, and then the three combined and re-wrote the whole thing in order to ensure everything worked together. That could have been a mess but they managed to pull it off for the most part and the resulting film has some real knowledge of the social mores of the time because of the source material. West Side Story: When I heard that Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner was being brought in to write the screenplay for this musical remake it seemed kind of like overkill, but he’d done good work with Spielberg before so I wasn’t complaining. Turns out bringing in a great screenwriter was exactly what this movie needed. Kushner’s background in theater gives him a strong knowledge of what it takes to adapt and pace classic musical theater but he’s also not holding the original book as a sacred cow and boldly adds a lot of subtext and modernization to the film, bringing a lot of historical hindsight to the proceedings that wasn’t there in the 1961 version. And the Golden Stake goes to…Drive My Car
 I went into Drive My Car expecting a directorial achievement, and it’s no slouch in that department, but I felt like I was seeing a much bigger achievement in terms of writing. Haruki Murakami’s short stories were also the source for the recent Korean film Burning so I think I might really dig this guy’s work in adaptation, but Drive My Car is a much different beast that has as much Hamaguchi in it as it has Murakami. Taking on a giant of Japanese literature while also heavily invoking Chekov takes a lot of courage and Hamaguchi more than faces down the challenge.
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IanTheCool
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Post by IanTheCool on Mar 6, 2022 13:31:57 GMT -5
That's interesting how Last Duel was written
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 7, 2022 8:39:20 GMT -5
Best Original Screenplay
Something I tend to be interested in keeping track of is how many nominated screenplays are written or co-written by their directors rather than a third party writer. In Adapted I nominated two films written by non-directors this year but in original I nominated… zero. Not sure what that says really, but it’s something I like to note. A Hero: Not to discount his great talents as a director but as a filmmaker I do think it’s fair to call Asghar Farhadi a writer first and foremost and he’s managed to get things back on track after a couple of shaky efforts. Here he’s back to putting together one of his signature movies where characters find themselves trapped in a web of misunderstandings. Farhadi manages this whole situation well and in signature fashion manages to see several sides of everything and creates flawed characters who you nonetheless care for. Licorice Pizza: A lot of people assume this is a movie about Paul Thomas Anderson’s own adolescence but it really isn’t; Anderson would have been about three years old when this movie is set. I don’t doubt that he brought some of the feelings of his own teenage years to the screen but in reality this is a composite of several stories he heard from his friend Gary Goetzman mixed with other storylines of his own invention. The resulting film is this really touching fiction that weaves in the cultural memories of its locations in an affecting way that’s consistently funny and entertaining. Night of the Kings: Night of the Kings doesn’t necessarily have tremendous dialogue and I can’t say that the characters are the most deep, what really sets this screenplay apart is its structure and its conception of its central concept. I’m not really sure how one gets the inspiration to make a movie like this which has a fairly outlandish premise much less how they go about executing on it but this movie manage to combine the local African griot tradition with gritty social realities of the Ivorian prison system in such a creative and interesting ways. The sheer ability to bring something like this into existence makes this worth a nomination. Red Rocket: I’m always a little nervous about nominating Sean Baker scritps for these awards as they certainly seem like movies that are going to have a lot of improvisation to them… but then again maybe that’s just what he wants you to think. Either way my general philosophy about all this is to just judge based on what’s on the screen rather than what I imagine to be on the page and what’s on the screen is a cleverly structured and funny dark comedy with some keen insights into human nature and the ways in which unseen parts of contemporary America functions. The Worst Person in the World: These days even the most original of screenplays tend to rest on high concepts that can easily be summed up in “elevator pitches” but in a very naturalistic way Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World kind of defies such summarization. He and his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt just create this incredibly complicated woman to center their film around and it’s very interested in engaging with all the mores of modern upper-middle class culture. The film is structured into twelve “chapters” along with a prologue and epilogue, which I guess is the film’s one concession to conceptual novelty, and in many ways speaks to how unconventionally structured the film is. And the Golden Stake goes to…Licorice Pizza In some ways Licorice Pizza is the most loosely plotted of all the movies here, but I would argue that that’s more of a strength than a weakness. There’s a special skilling to be found in making a movie flow this freely and yet still having it feel like it knows what it’s doing and isn’t just meandering aimlessly. But more importantly this is just a really funny screenplay filled with amusing diversions and with a really smart and interesting set of insights into human nature and certain realities of adolescence.
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donny
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Post by donny on Mar 7, 2022 11:21:47 GMT -5
Stacked category.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 8, 2022 8:42:44 GMT -5
Best Trailer
I see a lot of movies at AMC theaters, so I see a lot of trailers… and this year a lot of Nicole Kidman messages. That gives me a lot of opinions on the craft of cutting a trailer and this is my place every year to go over the best of them. Keep in mind, I don’t just want to nominate trailers that are cool by virtue of straightforwardly presenting good footage from a good movie, I want to recognize the ones that did something a little extra and a little clever like picking a cool song or cutting in an unconventional way. Belfast: Selling a family friendly movie about sectarian violence during “the troubles” is kind of challenging but I think the people behind this trailer makes some smart choices to make it work. They smartly use the Love Affair version of the song “Everlasting Love” that comes up in a key scene from the film and recontextualizes it to be about familial rather than romantic love and then uses it to score a montage of sorts of some of the film’s most dramatic footage while also showcasing the actors and selling a very exciting movie in generally. I’m also really amused by the choice to use the clip at the beginning to shame people of claiming not to understand the accents in the film. Eternals (Teaser): Man, Eternals looked so promising. I actually liked the movie quite a bit, but there’s no denying that it never really took hold with the public and just wasn’t everything I’d hoped. A lot of that hope came from this beautiful trailer which made use of some of the film’s most striking images and its time spanning premise set against Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World,” a song whose premise seems much more literal in the context of this film’s plot. It promised something wholey unique from what we’ve gotten from the MCU so far and you’d hardly even know it was part of the franchise if not for the comedic tag at the end. Judas and the Black Messiah: This trailer dropped in the August of 2020, a very charged time in terms of racial politics, but perhaps more importantly it was at the height of the pre-vaccine pandemic and a time when it was not clear we’d ever get new movies in theaters again and this bold trailer that defiantly said “Only in Theaters” at the end really gave me a lot of hope… even if the final movie did end up releasing simultaneously with streaming. More importantly the trailer is just really brilliantly cut, there’s no pop song here and instead it uses Fred Hampton’s speeches as a refrain intercut with some really dramatic shots while also managing to explain the overall plot of the movie in a very short amount of time. Licorice Pizza: You know, I’d never really noticed that David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” is ostensibly a song that’s basically describing the experience of watching a movie. That song would be a cool 70s song for a trailer like this in general but this one goes above and beyond to not only use the song but to almost turn this into a music video for it. A lot of the clips selected seem to really comment on the song and vice versa; like when it cuts to Alana right on “to the girl with the mousy hair” or to her father lecturing her on “and her daddy has told her to go” or to Hoffman being arrested right on “take a look at the lawman, beating up the wrong guy.” Then right as the song seems like it’s hitting a crescendo it cuts in to show a joke about touching boobs. Titane (Red Band): I must say this was a trailer that I was surprised to see playing at my local AMC theater in front of The Night House, but I approve. Titane is a movie that benefits greatly from surprise and really shouldn’t be spoiled and I think a lot of why it’s lost a little steam this year is because people are watching it having had too much spoiled. This trailer isn’t responsible for that though as it does a great job of using evocative imagry from the film without really telling you what it’s about and what the twists are. It also has some very cheeky critic quotes in it about the film being either the “most fucked up” or “sweetest” movie of the year, and the use of The Zombie’s second most famous song “She’s Not There” for the second half was really well done. Just a very confident trailer doing a great job of selling this as a really cool film for courageous and open minded audiences. And the Golden Stake goes to…Licorice PizzaPreparing for this I rewatched the trailers for all 130+ movies I saw this year and spent untold amounts of time narrowing down what the other four nominees would be for this but I never for a second doubted that this would be among them and that it would win the category pretty much from the moment the trailer dropped in late September. It doesn’t really have a central “gimmick” and it’s just this absolutely perfect fusion of music and footage and give a great idea of the feel of the movie without giving too much away.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 8, 2022 8:55:29 GMT -5
Some honorable mentions
Army of the Dead (fun use of "The Gambler)
Candyman ("Say My Name" was certainly an apt choice)
Cherry (Does a good job of summarizing this movie's kind of elaborate story, makes good use of "Time in a Bottle," makes the movie look better than it is)
C’Mon C’Mon (nice concept with the story as framing device)
In the Heights (no central gimmick, just a really well cut trailer that gets the spirit of the movie)
Lamb (great use of the Beach Boys)
The Matrix Resurrections (boldly understated, good use of Jefferson Airplane)
Spencer ("Perfect Day" is a bit of a cliche, but it's used well here)
The Suicide Squad (Love me some Steely Dan, but I do think this gives a bit too much away)
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SnoBorderZero
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Post by SnoBorderZero on Mar 8, 2022 13:39:43 GMT -5
While I didn't like The Matrix Resurrections, that trailer was absolutely fantastic. As was the use of the song in the montage in the film itself.
Good call on Licorice Pizza for screenplay. That's a loaded category but I would've chosen the same.
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IanTheCool
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Post by IanTheCool on Mar 8, 2022 18:35:25 GMT -5
Yeah I probably would have given it to Matrix.
You know, I don't think I ever saw the Licorice Pizza trailer.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 9, 2022 8:40:23 GMT -5
Best Poster
I always enjoy this category but often end up having trouble writing it. Once I’ve selected by posters of choice I find myself at a bit of a loss for words about what to say about them, often I find what’s cool about the selections to be a bit self-evident. Note that as with the trailers qualification is based on the year of the movie release, not when the poster itself came out. Also that I limit choices to movies I’ve seen and can judge against the film’s themes. Encanto:  Disney probably could have gone about introducing their newest film in a lot of much more boring ways, instead they opted to do this clever poster which incorporates the central house from the narrative and giving each character their own spot in one of the windows. So, it’s kind of the “Physical Graffiti” of Disney posters. But that idea alone doesn’t really sell it so much as the execution, which is really lush and colorful and sells the movie as being a rich and lighthearted visual experience. The French Dispatch:  It used to be that the posters for Wes Anderson movies would do anything in their power to hide the director’s quirks and make his movies look like conventional comedies and we’d have to wait for the Criterion DVD for something a bit more in keeping with his true sensibilities, but now Anderson has infiltrated the mainstream a bit more and they can be more upfront from the beginning. As such we got this hand drawn poster that draws on The New Yorker style and is made to look like an issue of the film’s fictional magazine. In the Same Breath:  In the Same Breath is a documentary that compares and contrasts the COVID response in both the United States and China and finds both approaches to be fundamentally flawed. China’s response is largely dishonest and silences critics while America’s allows stupidity and misinformation to run out of control. So, it isn’t too hard to interpret this poster as a visualization of that: the Chinese flag covers the one person’s mouth, silencing them, while the American flag covers their eyes, allowing them to be blind to the truth. Old:  When making advertising for Old the studio had a pretty big challenge. The movie itself has a high concept that is easily mockable and the trailer was marred by the fact that it needed to use clips form the not very good movie. However, they had a lot more freedom with the poster and they came up with this lovely piece of work which manages to more clearly sell his as a horror movie using this concept through making the subject young on one half and old to the point of being skeletal on the right half. Creepy stuff. Venom: Let There Be Carnage:  I (correctly) had no excitement whatsoever for this Venom sequel, but I must say even I had to stop and do a bit of a double take when I waked past a print of this poster in the lobby of my local theater. This “through the teeth of the enemy” perspective is just generally a cool idea and it also has the benefit of hiding Carnage until later in the campaign. What’s more, Venom himself is in good form here, he’s got a nice snarl and looks ready for action. Making bad movies look cool is ostensibly the most impressive form of advertising and this certainly does that effectively. And the Golden Stake goes to…OldThis is actually not the first time I’ve given the poster award to a questionable latter-day Shyamalan movie. Split also won the award a couple years ago and Glass was nominated as well and looking back if I had seen The Visit it might have stood a chance as well. Seems like ever since he started making movies with Universal he’s gotten a lot of really interesting high concept posters made for his movies. I’m not sure if he’s influencing this personally of if Universal just has a great poster focus generally that I haven’t noticed, but it’s been working out well.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 10, 2022 9:47:32 GMT -5
Most Under-Appreciated
To be honest this category is always kind of a crapshoot. It’s meant to highlight movies that I think, for whatever reason, have been under-rated by critics and/or less successful at the box office than it deserved and/or just kind of not as heavily adopted by the culture as it deserves. I don’t have a set criteria for this, it’s kind of just a feeling I have about how people are thinking about these movies. Luca: I guess calling this “under-appreciated” is a bit of a stretch as it got solid reviews, snagged a Best Animated Feature slot at the Oscars, and is by all accounts pretty popular in streaming, and yet I still feel like it deserved better. The very fact that it was sent straight to streaming is part of the problem: why is this relegated to that fate while lesser movies like Raya and the Last Dragon was at least simultaneously released? It seems to be sending a message that more intimate and small scale stories, even when rendered with expensive animation, are somehow less deserving of the big screen which is a bad message. What’s more, given that rapturous raves people used to send to Pixar back in the day it feels bizarre to me that they just sleep on movies like this which are, in my opinion, clearly better works. Malcolm and Marie: On some level I’m almost glad this movie is under-appreciated. It’s a movie that feels intended to goad critics and the chattering class generally so if it was some kind of universally beloved movie I feel like it would be a failure. However, I do kind of wish it had been more widely seen and discussed, opening up a wider discourse about it and kind of wish that both the movie’s fans and detractors had generally remembered it for a longer time so that I could argue with them about it. Night of the Kings: I want to blame Neon for the fact that the world isn’t talking about Night of the Kings, and they do share some of the blame given that they kind of dumped the movie in late February after it failed to earn a Best International Film nomination in 2020. But I think there was a larger failure at play as the critics who did see the film never really did the work to hype the film up, they just kind of said “this is neat” and moved on. I… don’t get why that happened. I would have thought Black Panther would have really primed the pump for a more authentic movie about African culture which nonetheless manages to be a highly accessible movie with genre elements. Quo Vadis, Aida: You know, this movie just got dealt a bad hand. Had there been in-person festivals in 2020 I’m pretty sure it would have picked up momentum quicker but it mostly just emerged when it was nominated for the Best International Film Oscar last year after the narrative had already emerged around the inferior Another Round winning, then when it got an actual commercial release in early 2021 it was all streaming and was only thought about in terms of an Oscar it was poised to lose and a year later no one seems to remember that it’s still a 2021 film. What a mess, and such a shame considering that it’s such a powerful movie about an important event that people should know about. Stowaway: Stowaway is a movie that Netflix sort of dumped unceremoniously in April and there wasn’t really much of a hook to really keep it alive in the discussion. It’s this year’s other “small cast in a confined space” movie along with Mass, which was a movie that managed to stay relevant through ultimately fruitless Oscar campaigning, but this one got lost in the shuffle and even I was never really able to find a place for it in my own Golden Stakes categories. That’s unfortunate because it’s a really nicely adult science fiction movie about people making reasonable if difficult choices in a tough situation. It’s a movie that could have easily fallen off the rails and gotten stupid but it never took the bait. And the Golden Stake goes to…Night of the Kings
 … you all knew this was going to be here. I’ve pretty much been yelling into a void about this movie for the last year and at this point even I’m kind of sick of me talking about it. It’s also entirely possible that I’m just seeing something in it the rest of the world isn’t; it might be too exciting for the hardcore arthouse crowd but too conceptual for people looking for simpler pleasures. Maybe someday this will be a cult classic and I’ll be vindicated, but it’s been readily available on Hulu all year and no one else has picked up on it, so at this pace I guess I’ll just have this one to myself.
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Post by Jibbs on Mar 10, 2022 11:31:21 GMT -5
Best Poster
I always enjoy this category but often end up having trouble writing it. Once I’ve selected by posters of choice I find myself at a bit of a loss for words about what to say about them, often I find what’s cool about the selections to be a bit self-evident. Note that as with the trailers qualification is based on the year of the movie release, not when the poster itself came out. Also that I limit choices to movies I’ve seen and can judge against the film’s themes. Old:  |
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thebtskink
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Post by thebtskink on Mar 10, 2022 11:33:37 GMT -5
Best Poster
I always enjoy this category but often end up having trouble writing it. Once I’ve selected by posters of choice I find myself at a bit of a loss for words about what to say about them, often I find what’s cool about the selections to be a bit self-evident. Note that as with the trailers qualification is based on the year of the movie release, not when the poster itself came out. Also that I limit choices to movies I’ve seen and can judge against the film’s themes. Old: I just did the gypsy curse imitation at work. I hope you're happy. |
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 11, 2022 12:49:48 GMT -5
Best Action Film
For reasons that shouldn’t be too hard to sus out this was the single category last year that was most affected by the pandemic with all the big action movies getting pushed out of their original release dates. That would seemingly set up one of the all time great years for action movies… did it? Eh, not really. There were a lot of good action flicks but not many that really excelled to the greatest heights. Still, some good stuff worth celebrating. BTW, I’m ruling that Dune is not really an action movie. Black Widow: I found myself in a funny place when picking an MCU film to be nominated here. Eternals is not really an action film at all, the action elements of Spider-Man: No Way Home are some of its weakest elements, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was really only one great action scene and a lot of filler… and suddenly I started to warm to Black Widow as my choice. As a whole movie I thought that was a bit weak but there were some fun action highlights to be found in it, and while that finale wasn’t exactly original I do think those explosions looked decent. F9: You know, I clown on these movies but the truth is they’re pretty much the only action movies that are consistently going up against the big superhero movies on their terms and hold their own. The last official fast movie was a bit shaky and their attempt at a spinoff faltered a bit at the box office, but this ninth official entry can reasonably be called a return to form. The film has three separate top of the line… I want to call them car chases but the level of chaos on display really exceeds that. I’m not sure how long they can keep this up while still remaining even slightly fresh but this one kind of gets things back on track. The Matrix Resurrections: This fourth installment in the The Matrix series has been something of a love it or hate it affair… which is odd because I’m decidedly in the middle about it. I don’t think it’s the brilliant deconstruction that some people seem to think it is, but I do think it does more than enough to secure a nomination here. The film lacks the mastery and overwhelming coolness of the original film, but there are some decent fights here and that final chase sequence with the human dive bombs and neo deflecting all those bullets. That was pretty neat. No Time to Die: I have massive issues with No Time to Die as a James Bond movie, but as an action movie I mostly approve of it. Cary Joji Fukunaga is a guy with a clear eye for flashy if serious filmmaking and we’ve kind of been waiting for him to make a true action movie and he didn’t really disappoint with his action debut, delivering four or five really top of the line action scenes for Daniel Craig to engage in and the producers seems to have put some serious money into this one even by James Bon standards. The Suicide Squad: What a difference a definite article does. I didn’t even hate the original Suicide Squad as much as some people but there’s no question that this sequel is a significant improvement which manages to match top of the line production values with an extreme attitude and political undertones. As a mere action film it’s also no slouch. The Harley Quinn escape scene is a real gem and we get various other really inventive set pieces along the way leading up to its completely over the top finale where the squad battles a kaiju starfish. And the Golden Stake goes to…The Suicide Squad
 The Suicide Squad is not the most action-packed superhero movie of the year but I think it’s pretty clearly the best one even if that’s only by default. As for its place within action movies as a whole, I think it has a lot going for it. The various different parties of the squad provide different forms of screen combat and the film’s structure provides a great sort of “men on a mission” setup for the movie where they’re constantly in enemy territory and making their way to various different places on this island leading up to a really over the top finale. Good work.
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Doomsday
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Post by Doomsday on Mar 11, 2022 13:31:33 GMT -5
Slow year for action movies. I wasn't the biggest fan of Nobody but I might take it over Suicide Squad.
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PG Cooper
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 11, 2022 13:40:42 GMT -5
The right choice.
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Dracula
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Post by Dracula on Mar 12, 2022 7:32:38 GMT -5
Want to finish on a weekend, so I'm going to speed up and do the last three awards today, then I'll reveal the top ten tomorrow. Best Comedy
This was an odd year for comedy in that the whole genre seems to have completely imploded as a mainstream offering, which would seem to make it harder to come up with five nominees but it really wasn’t, in fact there were exactly enough good options to come up with nominees I was more than happy to bring to the table here but could not for the life of me come up with a sixth. Had one of these movies not come out I would have been forced to either nominate something I straight up dislike or I would have had to cheat and pretend that CODA was more of a comedy than I really think it is. The French Dispatch: The “Wes Anderson movie” is at this point almost a genre to itself to the point where it seems kind of odd calling them “comedies” even if that’s very clearly what they are by any objective measurement. The film’s very concept of a Liberty Kansas newspaper headquartered in a town called Ennui-sur-Blasé has three very dry jokes right in the premise and the film manages to be a wonderful little loving roast of the very culture of mid-century literary journalism and the film is full of Anderson’s fun digressions and leaps of whimsy. Licorice Pizza: Humor has always been in the mix for Paul Thomas Anderson, but sometimes he emphasizes it more than others and I think Licorice Pizza is the first of his films that can comfortably just be called a comedy with very little qualification. At its essence the movie is something of a 70s hangout movie in the vein of Dazed and Confused but with a distinct tone and setting and a lot of the humor comes from the personality mismatches of the leads along with the outlandish personalities they run into while roaming around the San Fernando valley of 1973. Malcolm and Marie: I’m not sure that writer/director Sam Levinson would call Malcolm and Marie a comedy, but I also don’t feel like it’s cheating at all to nominate it. Parts of this screenplay, one could argue its backbone, involves a fairly earnest exploration of the relationship between the film’s two characters. However, the engine that really powers the film is the caustic personality of the John David Washington character and the witty and trenchant dialogue this entail which results in some really funny speeches that sort of delve into various topics within “the discourse” with real sarcastic edge. Maybe the funny stuff is less of the runtime than I remember, who knows, still nominating it. The Mitchells Vs. The Machines: Animation has low-key become one of the last places that large budget movies that could be classified as comedies still get made in much the way they were once the only place Hollywood was still making musicals. The Mitchells Vs. The Machines is the latest animated movie from producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and could kind of be seen as a cross between their The Lego Movie and their Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its own comic identity. It goes a little too far here and there but it’s definitely a funny and clever film. Red Rocket: Sean Baker has something of a super power in that he can make movies about poor and marginalized communities and can find the humor in their kinda ratchet lives and can depict this for comedy but do it without seeming condescending or mean about it. That’s particularly true of Red Rocket which deals with people in a South Texas town who really live kind of sad lives and yet the movie is in fact very much a comedy, albeit a very dark comedy considering that it’s about a guy who is doing some objectively heinous stuff over the course of the film but does it with a sort of shameless snake oil salesman charm that entices and repulses the audience in equal measure. And the Golden Stake goes to…Licorice PizzaThere’s a clever series of TV spots for Licorice Pizza touting that it’s the movie that proves critically acclaimed movies don’t have to make you feel bad and I think in many ways that’s its superpower and why it’s so appealing in this, the year of our lord 2021. It’s made with all the talent of a Paul Thomas Anderson movie but it’s focused in on the surrealism of this summer and all the weirdo like Jon Peters that these two encounter over the course of it. Speaking of which, that Jon Peters scene is hilarious right? That alone more than earns it this prize. |
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IanTheCool
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Post by IanTheCool on Mar 12, 2022 9:47:42 GMT -5
What a weird place we are in for comedies when you are nominating mitchells and the machines, and malcom and marie
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 12, 2022 10:00:15 GMT -5
Yup. Also the right choice. Far and away the most fun movie I saw in 2021 and definitely the hardest I laughed.
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Post by IanTheCool on Mar 12, 2022 10:19:17 GMT -5
Yup. Also the right choice. Far and away the most fun movie I saw in 2021 and definitely the hardest I laughed. Oh, you like that movie? |
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 12, 2022 10:29:00 GMT -5
Yup. Also the right choice. Far and away the most fun movie I saw in 2021 and definitely the hardest I laughed. Oh, you like that movie? It's okay. 7ish/10 |
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Post by Dracula on Mar 12, 2022 15:00:26 GMT -5
Best Horror Film
I have trouble deciding if this was a great year for horror or kind of a weak one. I guess I’d say there were a lot of good horror movies to pick from but a somewhat limited selection at the very top compared to other years where I’d have a real home run to pick like The Witch or Us. A couple of points about qualification: despite its moody A24 trappings I don’t think The Green Knight is really a horror film and I don’t think this is really the place to honor Titane either. Army of the Dead: Zack Snyder started his career making a zombie movie and he’s now revisiting the genre after becoming a big Hollywood hitmaker and brings a more maximalist approach to it. In terms of milieu this is certainly drawing on horror but at its heart this is really more of an action movie with our protagonists shooting their way through zombie Las Vegas and flying around in helicopters and shit. So, not really the scariest zombie movie but I do think it’s a fun twist on the sub-genre just the same including some outlandish things like a zombie white tiger that’s roaming around the city, an idea that almost single-handedly saves the movie despite its shortcomings. Last Night in Soho: It was probably inevitable that Edgar Wright would make a true horror film eventually and I think he did it in very good form with Last Night in Soho. The film has a pretty interesting setup in which memories of the past, which the protagonist taps into with psychic powers, physically and psychologically invade the present. I guess that makes it a ghost story, but a creatively drawn one which goes into giallo territory in the film’s last act. Wright manages to continue using his kinetic visual style but adjusts it just right for this new genre. Malignant: I’ve never been the biggest of James Wan’s horror movies. I think Saw is kind of bad and that his forays into the “ghost makes loud sound effects” genre have been generally overrated. Frankly I was happy to see him move on to the world of blockbuster tent poles like Furious 7, but he came back to horror this year and managed to make a good case for his place in the genre with Malignant, a movie that was advertised like The Conjuring but turns out to be this outlandish Argento riff that he sprung on a mainstream audience that wasn’t expecting it. The Night House: Speaking of haunted house movies, The Night House is probably among these best one we’ve gotten in a while. Here the haunted house is not a place for jump scares though there are definitely moments where you see… things… on screen and it’s creepy. The film is ultimately more in debt to the “elevated horror” style than to the haunted house jump scare genre and the story and what’s going on in the house manages to get more and more interesting as it goes. Rebecca Hall is also great here, bolstering her acting career right as she started moving into directing elsewhere this year. Saint Maud: In several places this was a 2020 film but stateside A24 ended up dumping it in the January of 2021 after several COVID delays onto some kind of premium cable channel called EPIX which I was surprised to learn I was subscribed to. The film is probably the best example of the “A24 Horror” in a year where that style seems to be slowly dying down. The film deals with themes of religious fanaticism and ravages of guilt. I thought it had some pacing issues and a couple of other shortcomings but there are a few scenes and moments that are top of the line horror. And the Golden Stake goes to…Last Night in Soho
 This has been quite the polarizing film and clearly I’m on the “love it” (or at least “really like it”) side of the “love it/hate it” divide it’s inspired. I get some of why people don’t like this but at the very least I feel like its style should be more than enough to get the film a certain degree of approval. In some ways I feel like it was judged on some kind of curve because it was an Edgar Wright project and was dinged for things other horror movies would be given a pass on.
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Post by PG Cooper on Mar 12, 2022 15:26:00 GMT -5
Yeah, I liked it a lot too. Get the criticsms but also feel they were a little over emphasized while the film's many positives were kind of overlooked.
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Post by Dracula on Mar 13, 2022 3:20:59 GMT -5
Best Documentary
I’m pretty sure the number of documentaries I watched was a personal record at nearly fifty non-fiction films watched and despite that I’m not sure I came away with an abundance of diamonds in the rough. I don’t think that’s necessarily because this was a bad year for documentaries, rather I think it’s a bit of a “me” problem. I’ve grown rather tired of a lot of the formulas and trends of the documentary world but I haven’t by and large enjoyed the more abstract “arty” docs this year either. I think the ones that mostly appealed to me were documentaries that were fairly straightforward narratives that had a lot work put into them. Flee: I’m a little weary of calling this largely animated film a documentary given that there isn’t really a lot of actual footage captured of the material they’re covering and there are kind of a lot of actors used in recreating everything. I do think there’s a difference between “non-fiction film” and “documentary” and this is right on the line. Still, once you get past issues of classification this film is certainly pretty award-worthy. It tells this really fascinating story about a guy who has to go through hell and back to escape from war-torn Afghanistan in the 80s only to then go through even more in order to get out of Russia and into Europe. Refugee stories are more prominent than ever in the discourse and this story feels particularly topical. The Meaning of Hitler: The Meaning of Hitler is the one nominee here which you’d call a “video essay” more than a vérité or retrospective narrative. The film uses as its backbone a 1978 book by Sebastian Haffner which was a close analysis of Hitler’s life, but the film is actually much different, more of an analysis of Hitler’s legacy within cultural memory and what it means that people are still so obsessed with this genocidal maniac and if that’s healthy for society. The film looks at Hitler’s biography from interesting angles and questions how much his cult of personality continues to influence the far right and it’s not shy about making the connections between Hitler and Trump. All the while the film has a certain wit to it that gives it some unique flavor without ever undercutting the seriousness of the subject at hand. The Rescue: I wasn’t super-jazzed about the story of the Tham Luang cave rescue operation when it was going on but the whole enterprise proved to be pretty fascinating when all was said and done and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin were hired to chronicle the story for National Geographic. Unlike their mountaineering documentaries, this was mostly done through interviews and archival footage along with some selected re-enactments, it remains a thrilling account nonetheless which really gives you an idea of just how huge this whole situation was and how much had to go right to make it happen. Not unlike their last film Free Solo, this also ultimately proves to be a pretty interesting human story about a group of misfits whose niche isolating hobby allows them to do amazing things, in this case a thrilling rescue operation with the world watching them. The Viewing Booth: The Viewing Booth is probably the most obscure movie nominated for a Golden Stake in any category this year, to the point where I’m not sure where it can be obtained at this point (I watched it during a brief period where it was on the BBC website) and at 70 minutes it’s barely feature length. However, it’s probably the documentary that I found to be the most relevant to the world we’re living in today. It depicts a study that a researcher conducted in which he shows videos from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to gather their reaction, and he ends up focusing on this one student with fairly entrenched pro-Israel views who he views as the kind of person he wants to persuade. He’s not, however able to do so, and the film becomes something of a meditation on just how hard it is to reach people once they’re in something of an entrenched viewpoint and how frustrating that can be to activists and it sure reminded me about a lot of things in contemporary politics. Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage: One of the most acclaimed documentaries of 2021 is Summer of Soul, which depicts a music festival in Harlem in the 60s. I liked that movie but the hype around it seems a bit disproportional to me, it’s a good concert film to be sure… to the point where I kind of wished the talking heads would just shut up and let me hear the music. My preferred documentary about a music festival from this year wasn’t the one about the great festival with great music but was instead the one about the festival that completely fell apart and by and large had music I’m happy not to hear at length. This account of the ill-fated Woodstock revival is kind of like having a camera on the ground in the Lord of the Flies island, but with nu-metal bands playing in the background. The film really goes in depth about every bad decision and cultural trend that led to this riot with a lot of pretty insightful interviews looking back on what led to this mess. And the Golden Stake goes to…The Rescue I’m a little surprised by this choice as this is in some ways the most “basic” choice for the best documentary of the year. It’s a big budget National Geographic production currently located on Disney+ which is not trying to challenge anyone’s notion of the documentary form. It’s also a movie that was hampered by a contract bidding war which left them unable to interview any of the kids who were in the cave and its use of re-enactments could raise some documentary ethics eyebrows. However, despite all that working against it this story still just proved too damn fascinating to be denied. The film lays out the sheer number of people and factors that went into this rescue and how many times it felt like it was going to go wrong and the moments where they finally make certain milestones in the rescue happening are just really affecting. It just worked for me and kind of managed to be a cinematic experience that is bigger than it otherwise could have been.
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