Dracula Presents: The Eighth Annual Golden Stake Awards

Oh, really.



Deexan

Here's where were at:

Boyhood - 4
Birdman - 2
Gone Girl - 2
Mr. Turner - 2
The Raid 2 -2
Captain America: The Winter Soldier - 1
Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes - 1
Godzilla - 1
Guardians Of The Galaxy - 1
Inherent Vice - 1
Nymphomaniac Vol:1 - 1
Selma - 1
Snowpiercer - 1
The Babadook - 1
The Grand Budapest Hotel - 1
The Rover - 1
Top Five - 1
Whiplash - 1
Wild - 1
Winter Sleep - 1


I've been trying to stay out of this because 2014 has been the one year where I've probably seen the least amount of movies that year in the past 2 decades, and I've probably only seen half of the winners, but I am up to speed on this thread, and I'll keep my comments to what I do know based on what I have seen this year.

Best Action Movie - The Raid 2 - While Captain America had some great action sequences, and might have been an overall better finished product (to the majority), there's no denying that there was not one single weak action sequence in The Raid 2. Every sequence was choreographed to perfection with little CGI (mainly blood). This movie knew what it was and executed it, while not flawlessly, better than the rest of the films on the list.

Best Horror Movie - The Babadook - Good to see this movie get some recognition. I would agree 100%, but I still haven't seen Under The skin.

Most Under-rated - Wild - I don't know if I would call this film under-rated. The was a lot of buzz about the book, the film, and Reese Witherspoon's performance before it even became wide release, plus it's garnished two major Academy Award nominations. Maybe it didn't break any box office records, but this isn't the last we've heard of this film. Also, I would've chosen The Babadook over Oculus for being one of the nominees. You chose it as a superior horror film, and it was. The Babadook was a good concept done well, and Oculus was a great concept done bad. Plus, The Babadook didn't have half as much the marketing power in the states that Oculus had. It might not have won the most under-rated, I honestly haven't seen most of the movies on the list, but it did deserve to be on that list more than Oculus.

Just my opinions above. This thread made for a pretty good read on a late Tuesday night.

Best Documentary

The documentary category, slightly more than most categories, is dependent on how many eligible documentaries I manage to get to over the course of the year. Truth be told I probably haven’t scratched the surface of the many docs that got made this year, but still, I think I did a pretty good job seeing the main contenders. I missed a couple titles like Point and Shoot, The Salt of the Earth, and Art and Craft but overall I think I had a decent grasp of the category.

Citizenfour: Citizenfour is a great example of how you can make a movie that takes a clear point of view while not feeling like manipulative propaganda. It doesn’t hurt that Laura Poitras was with the Edward Snowden story pretty much from day one and was able to capture the behind the scenes moments of his story just as it was breaking. There were limits to how much she could do, but she worked around them pretty damn well.

Life Itself: I know a lot about Roger Ebert. I followed his career pretty closely for the better part of fifteen years and even read his autobiography, so there really wasn’t a whole lot in this film about his life that I didn’t already know, but there was still some value in seeing it all presented on film. It’s a bit more talking head oriented than most of director Steve James’ films, but it fits in with his other chronicles of Chicago life rather nicely.

Particle Fever: Science documentaries are often dry and serve only to be informative, especially when they’re about complicated theoretical physics. That isn’t the case with the Large Hadron Collider documentary Particle Fever which is extremely effective both in explaining the science at hand in an interesting but never over-simplified way and also at presenting the lives of the scientists involved in the project. The passion that these guys show for science that most people barely understand is really inspiring.

Return to Homs: One of the most important resources in documentary filmmaking is “access” and this movie has a lot of it. The guy who made this was straight-up embedded with a band of Syrian rebels as they plan operations and hide from government troops. It isn’t the most even-handed of documentaries and I do question what its maker’s motivations were, but still, it’s undeniably interesting to be in the same room as these young men are thrust onto the battlefield.

Virunga: When I heard that this was a film about saving a gorilla preserve in the Congo I kind of rolled my eyes and dismissed it as some kind of doe eyed tree-hugger movie. In actuality, the conflict here feels less like an environmental issue and more like a civil war with rather courageous park ranger defending this preserve from rebel soldiers. It’s also probably the most cinematic and visually interesting of these five nominees and was produced rather exquisitely.

And the Golden Stake goes to…

Top Ten Time!

10.

Really good stuff so far.

I'm sort of shocked to see Ida pop up so high in your list.

It makes me even more interested to watch it for the Film Club.

4.