Dracula Presents: The Sixteenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Best Score
I always go into this category with trepidation as I’m not really much of a “score head” and don’t generally spend a lot of time listening to film scores in my free time and am not always paying the most attention to them while watching movies. Still I think I’ve gotten better at this over the years and music streaming technology has allowed me to review scores more closely and I’m reasonably confident in my choices this year. As always, this award is for how well the scores work in the context of the film and how well they accentuate the storytelling and style moreso than how they sound separated from the work that originated them

Babylon:

It will probably come as no surprise that when Damien Chazelle, the most vocal jazz aficionado in filmmaking, made a film set in the 1920s he opted to use jazz extensively to score it. Longtime collaborator Justin Hurwitz managed to outdo himself with this one and like the movie he was scoring he opted to ignore all subtlety and give us this really upfront soundtrack which is often being performed right on screen by a jazz ensemble. Some of the hot jazz being played is bold and energetic, but the film does have some repeated themes, many of them meant to emphasize the fast pace of the lives the characters lead but there is a melancholic theme to be found as well which emphasizes their sadness as things start to go south.

The Batman:

Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, Michael Giacchino’s score for The Batman has the most instantly recognizable theme out of any major movie this year and certainly amongst the nominees here. The film’s impactful four note motif pervades the whole film, almost like a sort of funeral dirge really drilling in the piercing melancholy Batman has both about his lost parents and about the plight of his city, but that dirge does eventually manage to transform into something more positive towards the end as Batman makes certain realizations about his purpose in the fight. It may not have quite the creative staying power of Danny Elfman’s music from the original Batman but compared to the limp scores we usually get for superhero movies it stands out.

Bones and All:

I suspect that Luca Guadagnino went to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to score his movie Bones and All to give it some goth cred what with it kind of being a movie about teenage vampire-like beings. Instead what he got almost sounds more like the score to a western, which is sort of fitting with its largely rural road movie qualities. The score is heavily rooted in acoustic guitar plucking, often very slow guitar plucks tuned in such a way as to give it that vibe, but there are certainly some of Reznor and Ross’ signature electronic elements behind it. In fact it almost sounds like that song off of Ghosts that ended up getting sampled by Lil Nas X, so maybe he’s angling to use this score to land some royalties off of the next country-rap tiktok hit. Whatever his motives, it sounds great and fits the movie perfectly.

Crimes of the Future:

David Cronenberg returned to filmmaking this year, and while I wasn’t personally that fond of the film he made I was impressed by the score his longtime collaborator Howard Shore composed for it. The score is down tune and atmospheric, meant to emphasize the mystery of this strange world and scores like that often lack in identity and blend together but this one embraces melody a bit more and has a very distinctive theme that really gives this score its own identity and helps it stand out.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio:

Alexandre Desplat’s score for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is kind of a clinic in how fairy tale music should be done. During the film’s more lighthearted scenes the score is uncompromisingly light and jaunty, heavily emphasizing instruments like flutes. The music rarely fully loses this lightness and whimsy but when things start to get dark in the movie the score does follow suit and start to take on some of the martial qualities of the scenes involving the fascists and the war and some of the scenes involving death and darkness do take on some of the existential quality needed, but the music never goes all the way to the dark side and does manage to maintain some of that fairy quality entirely.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

The opening number is catchy as hell...





But I found this theme that was way overused to be extremely annoying after a while...





Even though I really enjoyed it when the exact same theme was slowed down and put to an old ragtime piano.





But yes, Babylon had a really good, fun score.

No, the elephant shitting is about 2 minutes in. Welcome is during the party/orgy that’s the very next scene.

Best Soundtrack
This is a distinct category from Best Score in that it focuses on a movie’s use of source music rather than its original music or newly recorded songs, and it’s specifically looking at the use of this music within the context of the movie rather than how it plays on an album. Needledropping is more popular than ever and yet I somehow found the pickings kind of slim in this category this year. There were a lot of movies that had one or two impactful song choices but not necessarily a lot that go all in on licensed music throughout while doing it right. So I did the best I could with what I was given.

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood: There’s a certain pantheon of directors who are known for needle drops and Richard Linklater is the only one of them to have put out a movie in 2022. His animated Apollo 101/2: A Space Age Childhood is something of a minor achievement for Linklater both as a movie and as a soundtrack but that still makes it better than most in the needledrop department. The film is all about the sights and sounds of being a suburban kid during the late 60s and that means playing a lot of the music that was on the radio at the time and Linklater takes special care to include a lot of the songs time forgot a little along with the heavy hitters and seems particularly interested in the instrumental hits of the time that the Herb Alperts and Laurence Welks of the world were making at the time.

Bones and All: Bones and All is primarily rooted in its original score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross but it also makes use of some existing needle drops, most of them within that 80s New Wave era that Luca Guadagnino tends to draw from with tracks from Duran Duran, Joy Division, New Order, and A-Ha. The film also has some country music befitting its middle-America setting, and of course there’s the rather comical use of the dumb unmasked era Kiss single “Lick it Up.” It’s kind of an odd mix of songs that shouldn’t work but sort of does because it’s less focused on setting than it is on the complicated emotions of its characters.

Cha Cha Real Smooth: As one would expect from a movie about a DJ, albeit someone who exclusively DJs at parties for thirteen year olds, the film is pretty loaded with licensed music. The film makes good use of the usual wedding/bar mitzvah staples like “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc and “The Cha Cha Slide,” the song containing a line the movie is named after. But there are also some songs in there meant to entertain the partying youths of today (namely “WAP”) and some less known party songs as well. But beyond those party scenes this soundtrack has a lot of the indie rock you traditionally expect from these indie quarter-life-crisis movies, so it’s pretty well rounded.

Don’t Worry Darling: The 50s and 60s can be easy time periods to make soundtracks evoking since the music of that era was so good and so evocative but it can also be fraught because a lot of the stuff from that era has been done to death. The Don’t Worry Darling soundtrack does a good job getting around this by have a very specific aesthetic it’s targeting: songs that reflect the middle class faux-sophistication that the makers of this community are interested in. So they avoid the rock stuff and go for big band jazz stuff like Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bang Bang” along with some doo-wop and R&B. It’s filled with songs like “Comin Home Baby” and “Sleep Walk” which you might not know by name but will recognize, which fits the theme that these are being selected by people who aren’t as sophisticated as they think they are but do have some taste.

Spiderhead: Science fiction movies set in experimental prisons aren’t exactly the most obvious medium for pop music but this Netflix film commits to them just the same and incorporates a pretty wide array of music and features tracks as disparate as “You Make My Dreams” by Hall & Oates and “I’ll Take You There” by The Staple Singers and “More Than This” by Roxy Music. Some of the selections like “Logical Song” by Supertramp and “She Blinded Me with Science” by Thomas Dolby reflect directly on the science fiction themes of the movie but other picks here just kind of feel like songs the team wanted to hear in one movie or another. None of the picks in particular are super creative, but there is some cleverness to putting them all together in one place.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

I don’t know if Ana De Armas tits helped but those 3 hours flew by. On the other hand, I fell asleep during the Irishman, woke up, and somehow there was another 6 hours left.

Good set of nominees, great write-up for a winner that I can definitely get behind. But I must once again wave the flag for Blonde. It's a lonely job but someone's gotta do it.

Villain of the Year

Villain of the year is a seemingly straightforward category and yet one I always need to set parameters one. The character in question must actively be an antagonist in their movie, so I’m not counting malevolent character who are nonetheless the one you’re following in the film like Lydia Tár. Additionally villains must essentially be human or at least human-like in their form and intelligence, so no animals, no forces of nature, and no abstract concepts like “war.” I also tend not to nominate particularly supernatural entities like the demon from Smile.

Barbarian-

Jobu Tupaki – Everything Everywhere All At Once: Jobu Tupaki is the alternate universe version of Joy Wang, the daughter of the film’s protagonist who is played by Stephanie Hsu. Tupaki comes from a universe where the Wangs have full access the universe jumping technology and Evelyn pushed her daughter to use it right to a breaking point and it turned her into this Akira-like being of immense psychic power who sees all universes and its driven her into this nihilistic place where she wants to die and possibly end all reality in doing so. It’s a little odd to call her a “villain” given that there are good versions of her and it all resolves eventually but she’s definitely an antagonist through the film and a really good one at that.

Saeed Hanaei – Holy Spider: One of my rules for this category is that we aren’t looking for bad characters who are nonetheless the protagonist we’re following and the character of Saeed Hanaei is dangerously close to being that as we are following him for large portions of the film, but I do think he’s ultimately framed as a foil to the true protagonist Arezoo. Hanaei is a fictionalized version of a real life serial killer and is a profoundly disturbing character because he feels entirely justified in his murder of prostitutes because of his religious convictions and once caught argued openly that he did nothing wrong and does not feel any shame at all. He’s an embodiment of what religious fanaticism combined with entrenched misogyny can do and his effect on his own family is even more disturbing.

Chef Slowik – The Menu: Though certainly a villain and not a point of view character, the character of Julian Slowik gets a lot more screen time in The Menu than the average film villain usually gets and lots of the film has him front and center essentially performing and pontificating in front of his “audience” at this isolated restaurant. Slowik is essentially meant to be an avatar of everything wrong with “celebrity chefs” and the way people fawn over them, but he’s also self-aware of all this and his ultimate villainy comes from his scheme to rage against the people who worship his skills. His actual scheme is also rather devious in the level of psychological torture involved and the sheer level of planning involved in this revenge is impressive in its way.

The Northman

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Best Supporting Actress
Here we come to the supporting actress category, which is normally pretty self explanatory. The big news here is that, for the first time since 2014 (when I nominated two supporting actors in Foxcatcher) I am nominating two performances from the same film, something I try to avoid as much as possible but felt inescapable here. Please also note that I’m strict about designations, so I will be considering Keke Palmer in Nope and Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans to be leads.

Kerry Condon - The Banshees of Inisherin: Kerry Condon is an actress who’d kind of gone under the radar for me over the years but has been consistently working pretty consistently for the last twenty years. In The Banshees of Inisherin Condon plays the long suffering sister to the Colin Farrell character and throughout the movie she’s something of a voice of reason amidst all the chaos. Condon has the somewhat challenging job of feeling like someone who’s actually related to Ferrell’s character and to convey, without much material on the page, why she’s stuck by this dimwit’s side for as long as she has while also making it clear to the audience how conflicted she is when considering leaving the island.

Stephanie Hsu - Everything, Everywhere, All At Once: Like a lot of actors in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, Stephanie Hsu has something of a double role in the film given the multiple universe versions of her character but it’s probably even more dramatic for her than it is for some of the other characters given that the main version of the character and the villainous Jobu Tupaki version are so diametrically different. The “regular” version is meek but lovable and the alternate version is this brash if cold blooded trickster, but there are certain commonalities between them nonetheless which adds a nice bit of nuance to the double role. But even looking past all the theatrics, the regular version of Joy is plenty charming and loveable to begin with so that’s an accomplishment in itself.

Janelle Monáe – Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery: There’s this phrase in show business that goes “dying is easy, it’s comedy that’s hard” and I think it says something about Janelle Monáe that at this early stage in her acting career she’s already shown some real affinity for both drama and comedy. She isn’t necessarily cracking jokes in Glass Onion but this is definitely a comical performance, or perhaps I should say performances because it’s eventually revealed that she’s doing a double role in the movie, which is actually a triple role because she also needs to play one of the characters playing the other one. She pulls it off beautifully though and has a much better Southern accent than her co-star Daniel Craig.

Hong Chau – The Whale: Our first nominee from The Whale is Hong Chau, who plays the best friend and former sister in law of the protagonist who also works as a nurse and applies those skills towards him though not in an official capacity. The role she plays is meant to be a stand in for what it means to be the friend of someone who is engaged in self-destructive behavior and must ask one’s self if they’re acting as an enabler or if the compassion they’re providing is the more important thing for their friend than the tough love they could be showing. Over the course of the film Chau perfectly conveys the stress and betrayal the character goes through in this ordeal and really brings the character to life.

Sadie Sink – The Whale: And for our second The Whale nomination we look to Sadie Sink, the actress made famous for playing video game savant and Kate Bush enthusiast Max Mayfield on “Stranger Things,” but who makes a great turn as the rebellious daughter of the protagonist in this movie. In the part Sink needs to basically play a juvenile delinquent who’s been sent down a very negative road by abandonment issues and other problems and she says some really rather hateful things to her father and to seemingly everyone else. She would seemingly be a wildly unlikeable person, and yet, you can see something beneath the surface in Sink’s performance that makes this character redeemable. When Brendan Fraser’s character says she’s “amazing” despite all evidence to the contrary you so sort of see what he’s getting at and Sink deserves a lot of credit for that.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Sometimes it's just that simple.

Great pick for supporting actress.

Best Supporting Actor
I must say, supporting actor feels pretty weak this year, to the point where I had to allow a little category fraud into the mix just to have a competitive lineup. It is what it is.

Brendan Gleeson – The Banshees of Inisherin: I will say, I do think Brendan Gleeson’s position as a supporting actor is a touch dubious as he has a very large part in The Banshees of Inisherin, but he’s not the point of view character so I do think this is at least justifiable. In the film Gleeson’s character is something of a question mark, a person who is not acting rationally but who is not exactly showing obvious signs of mental illness in his day to day interactions. That’s a careful balance to walk, knowing whether or not to give too much away through the performance, and Gleeson pulls it off nicely.

John Turturro – The Batman: A rather overlooked and underappreciated element of The Batman is John Turturro’s performance as Carmine Falcone, a character who debuted in Frank Miller’s “Batman: Year One” and also played a big role in “Batman: The Long Halloween,” meaning he’s a big part of any year one or year two batman story, which is why he’s in Batman Begins played by Tom Wilkenson, but Turturro gives this character new life here. His performance displays a great deal of regret and intelligence and really lights up the screen whenever he shows up.

Ke Huy Quan – Everything Everywhere All At Once: We all know that story: Ke Huy Quan gained a certain form of fame through his work as a kid actor in a pair of widely beloved 80s classics only to then drop out of acting for years only to make a rather triumphant return in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. But focusing on that does sort of ignore Quan’s achievements as an actor here, which are not insubstantial. Quan’s character, with his fanny pack and his sometimes dorky demeanor is meant to be something of a stand in for how fathers can sometimes seem kind of embarrassing for their children but over the course of the movie you get a better idea of the depths of this character and Ke Huy Quan really manages to pull this off well.

Paul Dano – The Fabelmans: If there’s one thing everyone knows about Steven Spielberg it’s that he has complicated feelings about his father, so I have to imagine that getting offered a job to essentially play Steven Spielberg’s father in a Steven Spielberg movie would be… intimidating. So credit to Paul Dano for even taking the role and double credit for pulling it off as well as he did. Even if you ignore the famous family angle Dano manages to just generally pull off a believable version of what I would expect an IBM company man from the 60s to be like. Dano isn’t really an actor I’ve always been a fan of but he’s done a lot to catch my favor this year.

Ben Whishaw – Women Talking: Ben Whishaw has been working in film for the last twenty years or so and it’s taken me a while to really put my finger on what his “thing” was but it eventually became clear that he was going to specialize in performing a certain brand of gentle non-threatening masculinity and that makes him pretty perfectly suited to play the token man in Women Talking. As a teacher who’s been tasked with recording what happens during the discussion at the center of the film Whishaw needs to depict his character as being someone kind torn between two worlds and feeling a sort of guilt by association for being part and prcel of the same community and gender group responsible for the violence against these victims.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Yup.