My Award Nominations: Best Visual Effects

This is usually one of the tougher craft categories for me to decide my favourites. The photorealism of CGI these days is so evolved that it's hard to assess which effects are "better" than others (unless the effect is noticeably bad).

Inevitably, my own criteria boils down to some vague combination of the effects' technical excellence, their originality, and how effectively they're used to support the much bigger 'effect' of the movie experience. For instance, no one's going to argue that a Michael Bay explosion fest doesn't have highly accomplished effects work, but its always delivered in a visually messy and confusing fashion, essentially wasting the efforts of the hardworking technicians, animators, matte painters, texture artists, etc.

To that end, the following craftspeople nominated for my own Best Visual Effects honour can thank the directors of their respective movies for being filmmakers of taste and substance, who know how to utilize special effects to serve the story instead of distract from it.

My Award Nominations: Best Sound Mixing

You've seen -- well, heard -- which movies had the most well rendered sounds of the year, in my opinion. Now it's time to examine the movies that best put all of their sounds together into a synchronized whole. Behold the Best Sound Mixing of 2014! (You can't fully appreciate the mix of these clips unless you've got a six-channel surround sound system or something hooked up to your computer, but you get the gist.)

My Award Nominations: Best Sound Editing

For today's entry on my ballot, we're lending an ear to the best sound jobs of 2014. Herewith are my nominees for Best Sound Editing, which will be followed later today by my sound mixing favourites. I usually try to minimize overlap between the two categories, although there are always a couple of titles that deserve recognition in both. You'll just have to guess which of these five will double dip!

Godzilla Stepped On by VES Snub

I was expecting this announcement to drop tomorrow, but instead we get a third guild announcement of the day. The biggest thing to note with the Visual Effects Society's list of nominees is the absence of Godzilla... in EVERY category. WTF? Is this effects house politics at play, or a larger bias rearing its head? Remember Pacific Rim. Maybe monsters just aren't in vogue.

Barring a shocking Oscar snub, I'd say this is Interstellar's to lose, but I sure do hope the guild spreads the wealth. There was a lot of excellent effects work this year.

Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Photoreal/Live Action Feature Motion Picture
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Guardians of the Galaxy
Interstellar
Maleficent
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
X-Men: Days of Future Past
Wow. SIX nominees instead of the usual five, and not one of them is Godzilla. The rest of these are on the Oscar shortlist. Maleficent will probably miss, but could I be underestimating X-Men? They've never sprung for that series before. I'd guess Interstellar takes it, but it aught to be Apes.

Review - Godzilla

Run for your lives! After over a decade of dormancy, one of the most literally gigantic figures in cinema history has reemerged from the depths of the development ocean to wreak havoc in movie houses the world over! That said, Godzilla is far more likely to draw people in than to send them screaming from the theatre, delivering as it does on the promise of an immediately enjoyable summer blockbuster... albeit one that, unlike the atomic beastie on the marquee, has a fairly short radioactive half-life.

Anyone who's even vaguely familiar with the films of Toho (the Japanese studio that spawned the daikaiju subgenre) should already understand why Godzilla really is the great great granddaddy of movie monsters. It's survived everything from nuclear bombs to Roland Emmerich bombs, and has persevered through decades of incarnations in its native Japan to become an unmistakable cross-cultural icon. Indeed, so distinctive is the look and sound of this 50-story killer lizard, that it's the most internationally recognizable star in the film's impressive cast, which includes the likes of Bryan Cranston, Juliette Binoche, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Elizabeth Olsen, and David Strathairn.

Sunday Top Ten: Sound effects

Time has been somewhat tight for me this week, so you're getting an abbreviated edition of the Sunday Top Ten; a quick countdown of some of my favourite movie-related sound effects.