The nominations for the 2007 Kaedrin Movie Awards were announced last week. This week, I’ll be announcing two winners every day, culminating in a post with my top 10 movies of the year and possibly some other wrap-up posts. Here are the awards for Best Action Sequences & Best Plot Twist/Surprise:
Best Action Sequences: The Bourne Ultimatum
It almost seems like the filmmakers went out of their way to devise the most complex action scenes possible. The train station sequence was nothing short of brilliant. The foot race and fight in tangiers was less unique, but extremely well executed (great stunt work). And a car chase in New York can’t be an easy thing to film. Greengrass and his crew nailed every scene. Most of the other nominees were also quite good. I wanted to mention Live Free or Die Hard because it was actually pretty entertaining, certainly much moreso than I was expecting (which is to say, I wasn’t expecting much), and the action sequences were well done. 300 had a lot of good action, but by the end, it had become repetitive (I still enjoyed it).
Best Plot Twist/Surprise: The Mist
Minor Spoilers! It’s a controversial ending, to be sure. Apparently the book was much more open ended than the movie. But no matter what you think of the film’s ending, you have to admit, it was a gutsy move. I mean, it’s a movie that wants you to wonder which is worse – humans or the monsters in the mist. It takes a pretty bleak view of humanity… but then, the ending emphasises the price of hopelessness. The other nominees had some good twists as well, particularly The Orphanage and Eastern Promises. A lot of times, twists in movies are ruined by the knowledge that they’re coming. If you know something’s coming, it’s much less difficult to be surprised by it. So the best twists are the ones you don’t see coming. All three of the films I mentioned are kinda like that. Sure, I had an inkling for all of them, but it’s not like I was watching a M. Night Shyamalan movie.
And coming down the homestretch, tomorrow we’ve got the final category: Most Unusual Film (and now that I think about it, Best High Concept Film would probably still work for this category)