Dracula Presents: The Sixteenth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Still haven't seen that one actually, though I should be catching up soon.

Best Acting Ensemble
The acting ensemble award looks at casts as a whole to see which film has the strongest roster of actors across the board. It’s not just about having a sheer number of celebrities on board but a look at what film did the best overall job of casting and managed to have the fewest weak links along the way and which casts gelled together to form the best whole. Also I’m looking for casts of a certain size here, so if I feel like I’ve already covered the important players in individual awards I’m probably going to look elsewhere.

Babylon: Babylon is by and large an ensemble film that follows several characters over a number of year. Some of these are major stars being played by major stars like Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, but the cast goes a lot deeper than that. The film introduces most audiences to Diego Calva and also follows major characters played by Jovan Adepo and Li Jun Li. But what really fills out the cast are people playing various Hollywood business people like Jean Smart, Jeff Garlin, Flea, Lukas Haas, and Max Minghella. Plus there are random side figures played by the likes of Tobey Maguire, Eric Roberts, and Spike Jonze who come in for a brief moment and make an impression before leaving. Honestly I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface on this absolutely stacked cast.

The Batman: One of the great challenges of re-establishing a franchise is it brings you back to square one when it comes to casting. In the case of The Batman that obviously meant bringing in Robert Pattinson as the titular character (and overcoming the Twilight jokes that entailed) but it also meant bringing in people like Jeffery Wright and Andy Serkis to play some of Batman’s regular supporting characters and other people like John Turturro, Peter Sarsgaard, and Jayme Lawson to portray the major figures of Gotham City. Then of course there’s the rogue’s gallery, which the movie fills out quite successfully with people like Paul Dano and Colin Farrell and also Zoë Kravitz as Batman’s anti-heroine Cat Woman. The movie really just nails most of these castings and laid out a great foundation for them to work off of going forward.

The Fabelmans: I can’t quite imagine the pressure a cast must be under to get hired by Steven Spielberg of all people and then have to play either him or members of his family, but these brave souls did it and they managed to pull it off too. For starters, you’ve got a child actor and a young adult actor basically being asked to start off their careers by playing the world’s most famous filmmaker. Then you ask Michelle Williams and Paul Dano to play the guy’s parents and Seth Rogen to step in as his home wrecking family friend and Julia Butters (of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fame) as his sister. Oh and also get Judd Hirsh and David Lynch to do some amazing cameo work on top of that just as the cherry on top.

She Said: The movie She Said had a lot of trouble getting traction in award season in part because it’s a movie led by a pair of female co-leads (Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan) and it was hard to try to settle on one or the other as the one to consolidate around, but this probably speaks to how spread out the acting is in the film on a larger level and extends out to actors like Patricia Clarkson and Andre Braugher as editors on the central piece as well as Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, Angela Yeoh, and others playing various victims of Harvey Weinstein. It’s also got a great assortment of character actors like Zach Grenier and Peter Friedman playing various witnesses and Weinstein collaborators. The whole cast all seem to be right on the same page throughout and seem in step with the film’s realist style.

Women Talking: As you may be able to tell from the title, Women Talking has a lot of women in it. It’s another film which has this extreme ensemble quality to the cast to the point where it would be hard to pick out any one actress as a “lead” but the closest one would probably be Rooney Mara. Close behind her are Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley, who are both playing particularly angry and vengeful characters compared to other people who are a bit more forgiving or perhaps a bit more timid. There’s also a small but notable part for Frances McDormand, but the film otherwise fills out its cast with less recognizable names who also do strong work. And of course we can’t ignore the film’s token dude played by Ben Whishaw, who’s also quite good.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Well-deserved Fabelmans win.

I think I'd go with that Fabelmans line. Sitting in the theater, I couldn't believe Spielberg was going there, and that line (along with the scene that follows) is the biggest thing making me wanna bump up my score and rewatch the movie.

Best Adapted Screenplay
Lately the trend has been for the Original Screenplay category to be a bit stronger than the Adapted Screenplay category and I don’t think this year is an exception to that by any means but I am reasonably happy with the lineup I came up with. Interestingly there’s something of a theme of women’s rights running through the category this year with three selections pretty directly touching on that theme.

Happening: The screenplay for Happening was written by director Audrey Diwan alongside co-writers Marcia Romano and Anne Berest and is based on a novel called “L'Événement” by Nobel Laurite by Annie Ernaux, which was most likely based on her own experiences needing to obtain a then illegal abortion while living as a student. The procedural elements of the script basically outline the many challenges of being a woman during this period and the various roadblocks that the government and the medical establishment put up to prevent them getting proper medical care in these situations.

Living: There’s a very short list of writers that I would have considered to be acceptable choices to remake Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru. Fortunately for the producers of Living Kazuo Ishiguro is on the list. Ishiguro is the Nobel prize winning author of The Remains of the Day and has been a chronicler of both Japanese and British life during his career and the particular brand of “stiff upper lip” that the later culture employs which probably makes him rather perfectly suited to translate a this particular story. Ishiguro does not make the mistake of trying to change too much from the original movie here and also manages to tighten things up a bit.

She Said: She Said, is based on the Pulitzer winning investigation that journalists Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey made into Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct and on the non-fiction book of the same name the two wrote about that experience. It was adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, a writer who has a fairly impressive body of work for a writer who doesn’t direct. For this movie she needed to make a watchable narrative out of a series of interviews and research work and turn it into a canny procedural about the journalistic process which feels well informed and also finds sly ways to incorporate the reporters’ personal lives in ways that make unobtrusive statements about the work-life balance that working mothers need to deal with.

The Whale: The Whale is a film that fits so well into Darren Aronofsky’s usual themes that you would think it comes straight from his mind, but its screenplay was actually written by a guy named Samuel D. Hunter and was an adaptation of his own stage play of the same name. Hunter hadn’t written a feature film before but had written several other stage plays and did some work on the TV show “Baskets” and he does seem to understand how something like this should work on film. That having been said, he doesn’t hide his screenplay’s stage origins either and is willing to let it remain a pretty contained and dialogue driven piece of work that retains its power.

Women Talking: Women Talking feels in some ways like a stage play given that it largely involves, as the title would imply, dialogue sequences between women located at a single location. However, it was actually based on a novel written by Miriam Toews which was in turn inspired by actual events that occurred in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. The original novel is presented as being taken from the minutes taken at a meeting of Mennonite women taken by August Epp, the Ben Wishaw character, making him essentially the point of view character, which is something that a screenplay needs to adapt with care and Sarah Polley does that very effectively.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Best Original Screenplay
The original screenplay category is pretty stacked this year. Like, really stacked. Four of the nominees here are strong movie of the year candidates and I managed to sneak a clever little pick in there in the fifth slot.

The Banshees of Inisherin: I think even his biggest fans would agree that Martin McDonagh is a bit more of a writer than a director, in no small part because of his background in theater. The Banshees of Inisherin is something of a return to Ireland, the setting of many of his early plays. That setting appears to have been chosen to form a parallel with the Irish Civil War that’s going on in the film’s background, but in many ways this feels like it could have been set anywhere, or at least any semi-isolated small town type of community. McDonagh’s trademark dry wit is front and center in the screenplay and fits well with the darkness of the story.

Everything, Everywhere, All At Once: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are probably known more as visual stylists than as writers but Everything, Everywhere, All at Once may change that to some extent. This screenplay is first and foremost a triumph of structure and vision. All of the film’s multi-verse shenanigans needed to be meticulously planned on the page long before it had to come to the screen and the two needed to work extra hard to make sure audiences don’t get lost in all the twists. Additionally just about every one of the film’s many visual gags needed to be planned for ahead of time during the writing stage. Between all of that and the film’s emotional beats you’ve got a pretty impressive script.

The Fabelmans: Prior to The Fabelmans Steven Spielberg had only received writing credit on two of the films he directed: Close Encounters of the Third Kind and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and he also has a co-writing credit on Poltergeist which he didn’t direct (if you believe the DGA). He did however need to put his writer hat back on in order to pen this highly personal work and he teamed up with previous collaborator and Pulitzer and Tony winning dramatist Tony Kushner, who’s one of only a few people with quite the gravitas to go toe to toe with a living legend like Spielberg. The resulting screenplay is smart and reverent but also playful at times and makes for a great watch.

Good Luck to You Leo Grande: This nominee might be a bit of an odd-man-out here given that it’s not the screenplay to a much talked about and Oscar nominated film but I still think it definitely belongs here. The film consists almost entirely of conversations in a hotel room between a woman of a certain age and a male escort she’s hired and had you told me that this was an adaptation of a play I would have believed it, but it’s actually an original screenplay written by Katy Brand, a comedian who’s probably best known for appearing on panel shows in the UK. The screenplay itself is a smart take on aging and sex and manages to propel the film despite its minimalism.

Tár: Though this was Todd Field’s first film in sixteen years, and by extension his first screenplay to become a film in that time period, he was apparently working and writing in that time but mostly on projects that never ended up seeing the light of day and he seems to have been very willing to just move on to the next thing in the wake of failure rather than try to push something that’s out of date. Because of that he has made his comeback with an extremely fresh take on very modern concerns, but one that’s also a layered detailed character study, and also the outline for a highly visual film that makes use of silence and subtlety.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Good call on this one.  Totally agree.

100% in agreement.  That trailer is fantastic and has stayed with me ever since it came out.

For me, The Batman is the clear winner, but I'd also throw some love to The Banshees of Inisherin, which I thought did a great job selling the film's premise, humour, despair, and hints of the eventual violence which would emerge. I also found the trailer for EO pretty mesmerizing.

Most Under-Appreciated
I had a lot to choose from this year as critics, audiences, and “the culture” did a lot of movies dirty this year. I’ve ultimately decided for this category I’m going to stick to movie that really never had their shot at all and just got ignored more than they should. As such I’m going to be shying away from movies that got a lot of attention even if it was polarized attention (The Whale, Babylon, Blonde), and I’m also not going to be including movies that I agree were bad but not that bad (Amsterdam, Don’t Worry Darling), or movies that might have done okay but we don’t really know because of the vagaries of streaming releases (Not Okay, Hellraiser, Good Luck to You Leo Grande).

Armageddon Time: James Gray has pretty much made a career out of making movies that are under-appreciated and even when he makes a movie that feels like a comeback it ends up getting few champions and then really coming and going win theaters without making even two million dollars. It’s ironic because in many ways this is not a dissimilar movie from Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, which has run into its own box office challenges but has at least been saved by critics and awards bodies. I wouldn’t say Armageddon Time is as good as Spielberg’s movie but if someone wanted to make the argument that it’s better I wouldn’t bat an eye as it is in many ways a more relevant and self-critical film with more pointed criticisms about the era its depicting.

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes: Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes is a micro budget Japanese movie that’s not dissimilar from One Cut of the Dead. It made its stateside debut on Amazon Prime Video very early in the year and outside of The Filmcast Podcast (who I learned about it from) I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say a word about it. But it’s a really cool movie! A very clever little sci-fi comedy with a lot of that little movie that could charm. I would have thought that it would have at least gotten a little bit of a cult film status like the aforementioned One Cut of the Dead did but it hasn’t even gotten that.

Happening: In a lot of ways, calling Happening underappreciated seems off-base. It won the Golden Lion in Venice, was nominated for the César Award in France, and has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes… and yet once it finally opened in American theaters it was crickets. The movie failed to make even $200,000 theatrically and critics basically said nothing about it come year end and this is baffling given that this abortion themed movie could not possibly have been more relevant in this country having come out just a couple weeks after the Dobbs decision was leaked. People should have been rallying around this thing and yet it just came and went without much fanfare at all.

Strange World: If there’s any failed release this year that made me most fear for the future of films in theaters it was probably Strange World, a movie that made absolutely embarrassing amounts of money in theaters, which along with the rather tepid theatrical business by Encanto suggests that Disney may be in a deep hole when it comes to getting people to show up to theaters for their animated products. Then they dumped it on Disney+ within a month, training audiences further to just wait for a bit to get Disney product for free. It’s a shame because Strange World is a cool movie filled with progressive messages that Disney was completely unrewarded for including, which will likely make them more conservative (both politically and creatively) in the future. Honorable mention to Lightyear as well, which is also better than people make it out to be and will similarly hurt Pixar’s future in theaters.

Three Thousand Years of Longing: I hesitate to put Three Thousand Years of Longing in this category because its somewhat tepid response isn’t entirely undeserved. The movie does have kind of a messy ending but it maybe says something that movies that try to do anything outside of the formulaic norm need to basically be unimpeachably perfect before anyone really rallies around them. This is after all the follow-up to George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and was essentially an original IP of the kind that critics should be real excited about but very few of them really went to bat for it. I sensed a certain cowardice out of critics this year, it’s like they were deathly afraid of sensing anyone to anything that was “weird” and getting blowback over it and I think this movie was a victim of that.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Best Action Film
And here we get our annual category for the best in action cinema. It wasn’t too hard to come up with nominees I was comfortable with this year as there were certainly a handful of worthy films and a lot came down to categorization decisions. Ultimately I decided that while it had clear action elements it did seem a bit odd to call Everything, Everywhere, All At Once an “action movie” and that its presence here wasn’t necessary. And while The Northman is certainly a violent movie with a couple of scenes that could be called action sequences, it ultimately wasn’t really a movie driven by action primarily and didn’t quite make sense here but that was a close call.

Avatar: The Way of Water: With the possible exception of The Abyss James Cameron has never made a film that can’t be called an action movie at least in part, though some like Titanic are other things as well. Avatar: The Way of Water does not change that trend and while there are certainly long passages of the movie that don’t have action or that seek other forms of visual stimulation, when the action scenes come in they come in hot and heavy. That final battle scene and sinking ship sequence is plainly one of the most extensive bits of effects spectacle this year and will leave most audiences more than satisfied.

The Batman: While the action scenes in The Batman aren’t necessarily its very best aspect, they’re certainly no slouch either. That car chase between the batmobile and the Penguin is just an absolute showstopper that earns the film a nomination here pretty much on its own. Beyond that it’s got some pretty brutal fight scenes and also less easily categorized action sequences like the wingsuit moment or the scene that’s lit by machinegun fire or the disaster movie that breaks out in the last half hour with the flooding. Between it all we get more than enough to get our Superhero’s worth out of the movie but it makes more than enough time for everything else and makes for a well-rounded package.

Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness: This MCU film feels like it was kind of overlooked by the culture, who was so used to Marvel apathy that it kind of shrugged when handed an actual good one. Whatever complaints that could be leveled against it are with the script and not with the spectacle because this movie takes most of the cool trippy visuals that was given to it by the first movie and ups the stakes in pretty impressive ways and gives us a lot of really cool action scenes like that early movie duel with the one eyed tentacle monster or the various battles with the Scarlett Witch. This is a very good superhero adventure movie that more than deserves its due.

Prey: Hollywood has been trying to turn Predator into a franchise pretty much from the moment the original film came out but it’s been pretty much nothing but false starts from the beginning but after several tries it looks like they finally cracked the code by taking the prequel approach. Set on the great plains in the 18th Century, this movie envisions a showdown between a Predator and a Comanche and later a group of voyageurs. As with the original film the emphasis is more on quality kills and gore than it is on kinetic high body count action sequences but it’s still plainly within the lineage of the action movie and does the genre proud.

Top Gun: Maverick: Though it has action, I’m not entirely sure that I’d call the original Top Gun a true action movie as it almost plays out more like a sports movie in which that sport just so happens to be flying military aircraft. I do think this sequel fits the bill a bit better though, in large part because there is an actual mission it’s building up to and that mission is a full on set piece plus a second set-piece of sorts as a result of the first one kind of going wrong. Of course the film’s execution of these action scenes has been widely hailed for its use of real airplanes and its ability to build suspense throughout these sequences and then blow some shit up real good.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Hmmm... depends on if we count The Abyss as an eligible action movie, if I did it would have surely lost to either Batman or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  Also Speed probably would have put up a good fight against True Lies.