David Fincher and Gone Girl

David Fincher is an expert director in technical terms, but he’s often at the mercy of his scripts.  He’s capable of making a weak script formally interesting, but not profound.  He also has a cynical sensibility that tends to cheapen and bog down his projects, keeping them from achieving genuine masterpiece status--Se7en being the prime example.  (Zodiac and The Social Network come the closest to greatness.)  If he’s one of our great directors, his understanding of human nature is limited.

Gone Girl does nothing to dissuade me from this judgment--it’s not a masterpiece, it’s characters are profoundly awful human beings--but it’s still a heckuva movie, and worth revisiting and discussing.  And since I listed it as one of the best movies of lat year, but never got around to writing about it on the blog, let's do just that.

Fincher’s technical precision is evident from the opening credits, a montage of buildings in a sleepy midwestern town: words are pressed down in surprising corners and shots end an instant before you expect them to.  It perfectly sets the scene and establishes tension, and we haven’t even been given any narrative information yet.  The whole film proceeds in this utterly precise, clean, rigorous fashion, like a well-oiled handgun.  

The film doesn’t really have much to say about actual marriage, though apparently the feelings of drifting apart and the concerns about disappearing jobs, judgmental in-laws, costly mortgages, etc. hit home with a lot of people.  I suspect, though, that the large number of think-pieces inspired by this aspect of the film were at least somewhat due to the writers’ inability to discuss the second half of the film for fear of spoilers--even though the second half completely undermines everything those pieces said about the film’s economic topicality.  In terms of gender politics--such a flashpoint at the time of the film’s release, with accusations flying about the film’s misogyny left and right--I actually found it to be more of a misandrist revenge fantasy gleefully skewering worthless entitled lugs and playing back and forth with power relationships and the battle of the sexes.

But maybe the best way to look at it is as a second-coming of Hitchcock à la Brian De Palma.  After all, the influence on Gone Girl of Psycho, Vertigo, and Suspicion is deep and obvious.  Suspicion is about the possibility that a spouse could be a murderer, Psycho unfolds with a similar structure of twists and reveals, and Vertigo is also a mesmerizing investigation of one particular woman who is not what she seems.  More than that, we can read Gone Girl as drawing on Hitchcockian imagery in surprising and evocative ways, deriving meaning from these images where more topical themes seem insufficient.  Amy is in fact a Hitchcock blonde who decides to reject the role imposed on her, take over the story and become a protagonist.  Rather than be trapped in the gaze of her husband and her neighbors like Kim Novak trapped by James Stewart, an idealized image of beauty and womanhood doomed to crack and drown, she executes an elaborate plan to control the nature of her own image and write a new ending for herself.  Her image is her power, and the more she resembles a Hitchcock heroine the more power she has.  She loses her blondness when she goes undercover, and consequently loses her power and is robbed and humiliated.  When she goes to Neil Patrick Harris’s house she regains her blondness and then her power, seducing and murdering him like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, another Vertigo riff.  As her madness is exposed her power paradoxically grows, until she has rebuilt her life with herself in control.  Ironically, that new life is simply a renegotiated version of the role already predestined for her, a rebuilt image of perfected beauty and womanhood.  The difference is she’s now in control of it, she defines the limits and manipulates the media’s gaze to strengthen.  In fact, she is now in control of every element of the image, including her “perfect” husband.  In a sick joke representative of Fincher, Ben Affleck ends the movie as an abused spouse still hopelessly attracted to his abuser, forced to stay in the relationship for the good of the child.  There’s a situation you don’t see many leading men get into in movies.

___

If I could return to that De Palma comparison, though, I must say I find the juxtaposition intriguing.  Both Fincher and De Palma love manipulating their audiences.  Both have been influenced by Hitchcock--De Palma more so, but De Palma loves Hitchcock more than anybody; half his movies seem to be tributes.  Fincher gets that formal perfectionist streak from both Hitchcock and Kubrick; he tends to be more socially relevant than Hitch, but not as cosmically authoritative as Kubrick.  All four directors get a perverse satisfaction from punishing their audiences, though not all for the same reasons.  All four have been accused of misogyny.

Both Fincher and De Palma have been heavily influenced by the Zapruder film.  Paranoia, surveillance, and conspiracies are recurring themes across both of the oeuvres.  Lisbeth Salander’s hunt through digital photos on a computer in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo finds its analogue (heh) in John Travolta’s reconstruction of magazine photographs and sound recordings in Blow Out.  De Palma’s style is generally more wild, featuring baroque camera movements and a love of excess.  Fincher is more locked down, occasionally even stately--the exception is Panic Room, where he employs digital effects to make his camera execute impossible movements even De Palma couldn’t have managed before.   Interestingly, it’s the elder director who likes to live in Movie-Movie Land, while the younger wants to seem like he’s in the real world most of the time.  But Fincher likes games and manipulations, too--see The Game and Fight Club.

In Gone Girl, many tropes that De Palma employs are evident: a bifurcated narrative, replays, cameras, ruses hinging on what people see or don’t see, a blonde woman of mystery, lust and consequences, the flipping of gender roles, femme fatales, and shocking sexual violence.  It’s a slow burn rather than De Palma’s usual florid emotionality, but by the end Fincher has left reality behind.  The violence achieves a certain Gothic grandeur appropriate to the director of Alien³ and Se7en.

In the end, perhaps the most important distinction between them is this: Brian De Palma is a filmmaker of the 20^th century; David Fincher belongs to the 21^st.

On the Road (2012)

Some old (2012) notes, half-formed and messy:

-I saw this film in a special advance screening at the IU Cinema with Walter Salles in attendance. The audience gave the movie a standing ovation, and he answered questions for a while afterwards.

-The film is obviously the result of a great deal of research and thought and discussion about the book. Salles said he started working on it in 2004, stalled by financial crisis, used the original typewritten scroll and interviews with actual participants/friends/family members to find out exactly what happened in reality to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady, etc.
-But this, to my mind, is missing the point: The book is not inspiring and beloved because people just like reading about people getting drunk and taking drugs, but because of the way it is written --if you can't capture the energy of the book in your cinematic style, why even adapt it? You might as well go for a biopic of Kerouac or a historical study of the Beats if you're just gonna strip things away.

-What really happened only matters because the book found the poetry and spirituality and beauty in the events.

-The novel doesn't have traditional scenes, plot, etc., instead all about language, texture, flow. Movie keeps trying to make traditional scenes, plots, and gets sucked into doldrums of "real" life.

-The movie's journey across America should have had more visual creativity and interest. Something like Into the Wild was far more vibrant and alive. If film was really going to take the challenge of the prose seriously, it probably should have gone for a more Malick-like aesthetic--flowing, but with few real scenes, and emphasis on fragmentary cutting. To my mind, the Levi's commercials that quote Whitman or show Braddock, PA, have caught more of the best spirit of the book than anything in this film.

-Salles said that adapting the book was difficult and never going to satisfy everyone because the novel is so "polyphonic." He's probably right. Some of the themes/interpretations he could have gone with: the search for the American dream, the last of the pioneer/cowboy spirit, the search for spiritual meaning, the story of the sons of immigrants looking for a place of their own, the rebellion against postwar cultural complacency, a radical call for a new social order, etc.
-Instead, Salles entirely ignored these and went for a coming-of-age story, with the focus on a friendship that ends.
-Apparently he lacked the inclination (and I would say the ability) to make this story genuinely American, or say anything about America at all. Sure he said he had read it and been deeply affected as a young man, and noted that the book had had impact around the world, but I'm going to come right out and say that a Brazilian filmmaker was probably the wrong choice to adapt a book so quintessentially and inescapably American.

-Where the book reveled in larger-than-life characters and outrageous exploits, the movie paradoxically seems to tone everything down, avoid any hint of exaggeration, and consequently it is dull.

-Riley quite good as Sal, Sturridge good as Carlo, Viggo Mortenson strange and perfect--too bad he's only there for a few minutes, Stewart=meh.
-Hedlund isn't bad exactly, Salles says he put his all into the role, was awed by his commitment.--But he isn't Dean. He isn't part Gene Autry, part Harpo Marx. He isn't a motormouth, not constantly going wild and exciting you into going along. He seems too often depressed, and he goes for a more modern idea of cool which Dean doesn't fit.

-These characters have noting admirable and little exciting about them. Why should we care?

-For some reason, after stripping out so many interesting incidents, the movie includes almost every sex scene from the book, plus ones that weren't mentioned, plus gay sex scenes and fights between Dean and Camille which the book slides over. If this was some sort of critical expose on what the Beats were *really* like, this might make sense, but it's not.

-The whole film seems slowed down, ignoring the weird rhythms of event and human speech that gives the book momentum. Focused on the quiet nights after the party rather than the excitement during it. It all adds up to a more pervasive feeling of loneliness, alienation, exhaustion.
-For Kerouac, "beat" meant down and out but full of intense conviction, beatific. But here when Sal suggests there might be something holy about Dean, Bull shoots it down angrily and the film seems to agree.

-For this movie, "beat" just means lost. But the novel has moments that reach higher, moments when they're found.

The Great Dictator, Rumble Fish

The Great Dictator (Chaplin, 1940) Rating: 9/10 stars.

I'm just gonna quote Jonathan Rosenbaum here:

"As a friend has pointed out, Chaplin doesn't really belong to the history of cinema; he belongs to history.  What for another artist might only come across as misjudgment, naivete, or bad taste often registers in a Chaplin film as personal-historical testimony of the most candid and searing sort.  Thus the total inadequacy of his impassioned speech at the end of The Great Dictator--as art, as thought, as action, as anything--becomes the key experience that the film has to offer, revealing the limitations of human utterance in the face of the unspeakable.  For roughly two hours, Chaplin has been trying to defeat Hitler by using every trick he knows; finally exhausting his capacities for comedy and ridicule, and realizing that neither is enough, he turns to us in his own person and tries even harder, making a direct plea for hope.  But although he effectively annihilates the Tramp before our eyes, he simultaneously re-creates him in a much more profound way, exposing the brutal fact of his own helplessness. Seen with historical hindsight, there are few moments in film as raw and convulsive as this desperate coda.  Being foolish enough to believe that he can save the world, Chaplin winds up breaking our hearts in a way that no mere artist ever could."

Rumble Fish (Coppola, 1983) Rating: 9/10 stars.

Those romantic young boys, all they ever want to do is fight.

This is a movie where the street's on fire in a real death waltz between what's flesh and what's fantasy. There's an opera out on the Turnpike, and there really is a ballet being fought out in the alley, where kids flash switchblades just like guitars hustling for the record machine.

Matt Dillon thinks he can walk like Brando right into the sun and dance just like a Casanova, but he runs into a 10th Avenue freeze-out, and his pretty dreams get torn. He thinks he really loves a girl because he's too loose to fake, but she like a late Juliet knew he'd never be true, and unfortunately she does mind.

Mickey Rourke is a ragamuffin gunner returning home like a hungry runaway; he might as well be Jimmy the Saint. With his blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet, he's the prince of the paupers crowned downtown at the beggars' bash, the pimp's main prophet, he keeps everything cool. When the two brothers are together laughing and drinking, nothing feels better than blood on blood, but Rourke keeps staring off into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born . . . until he sees a hand he knows even the cops can't beat. While he used to ride headfirst into a hurricane and disappear into a point, this time he lets the Maximum Lawman run him down, and there's nothing left where his body fell, that is, nothing that you could sell. Was he just lost in the flood? In any case, it's hard to be a saint in the city.

By the end, the one poet down here can't write nothing at all, he just has to stand back and let it all be. And young Matt Dillon's left to ride to the sea and wash these sins off his hands.

Down in Rumble-land.

(Rumble Fish poster from here.)

The Most Dangerous Game, The Getaway, Dressed to Kill, Gunga Din

The Most Dangerous Game (Schoedsack, Pichel, 1932) Rating: 7/10.

A classic piece of pulp adventure that still retains some power to thrill despite its low budget and visible seams.

It stars a young Joel McCrea, who, bless him, hasn’t really figured out how to act yet--Fay Wray acts rings around him with a glance and a few words.  Leslie Banks as the villain Count Zaroff is pretty effective without being quite great.  There’s no doubt the film would be elevated significantly by a different lead, and if you changed out a couple of the sportsmen at the beginning, Fay’s obnoxious brother, and maybe replaced Banks with Karloff or Lugosi, you might have something like a masterpiece on your hands.  Because that chase finale is really gangbusters, with evocative sets (used for King Kong weeks later) and thrilling POV shots and some pretty intense violence courtesy of the pre-Code release date.  Schoedsack knew how to get some atmosphere and fear with his camera.  McCrea’s strategy during the chase is pretty weak from today’s perspective, but I’m sure at the time it must have thrilled 10-year-old boys no end.  And isn’t that the objective they were going for?

Anyway, my point is the thing is influential and worth watching.  The themes of civilized man vs. barbarian and human vs. animal are eternally rich, if barely tapped here.  Beneath the cardboard sets and even-more-cardboard people there is something primordial bubbling; an underground spring of pulp-myth that has trickled in all directions and has yet to dry up.

The Getaway (Peckinpah, 1972) Rating: 5/10.

You'd think a movie based on a Jim Thompson novel, adapted for the screen by Walter Hill, starring Steve McQueen, and directed by Sam Peckinpah would be more tight and thrilling than this. Unfortunately (with that lineup, tragically), you'd be wrong.

The characters are admirably ruthless, the opening sequence is atemporally edited with brilliance, and there are several strong scenes, but none of that can obscure the fact that I was ready for this to be over long before it was. Peckinpah's shaggy qualities get the best of his storytelling here.

Dressed to Kill (De Palma, 1980) Rating: 6/10.

I got interested in De Palma after watching Blow Out last year on a whim, and realizing I’d seen a masterpiece.  (I’d seen Mission: Impossible and The Untouchables long before, of course, but neither led me on to his other work.)  I’ve since seen Obsession and this movie, and I confess I’m a bit flummoxed.  If Obsession is practically a remake of Vertigo, then Dressed to Kill is something like a fan fiction retelling of Psycho.  (Think 50 Shades of Grey’s famous relation to Twilight made explicit.)  Neither seem to exist on their own, but at least Obsession feels like an actual plot with actual characters, even if they’re (intentionally) unbelievable.

Dressed to Kill opens with a sequence of pure softcore porn, and tosses in a couple more as it goes along.  But of course no porn director, not even in the ‘70s, ever moved his camera or cut his footage the way De Palma does; the movie is always visually interesting, often virtuosic.  And along the way, he scores points for (and against) seemingly every single team in the sex and gender debates.  (If you think watching Angie Dickinson soaping herself and moaning is offensive and objectifying, De Palma can respond that we’re watching her dream, after all, so he’s really just being frank about the sexual desires and needs of the middle-aged housewife.  Right??)  The first act is impossible to take seriously (you either have to use it like porn or laugh defensively), but then it turns into a genuinely exciting thriller for a while, and turns a hooker and a nerdy kid into pretty lovable protagonists--before diving back into ridiculous sleaze at the end.  That sequence in the museum is mesmerizing!  That chase on the subway is terrifying!  That fake-out ending is stupid!

I just don’t know.  I can’t take it seriously, like I said, but then it’s probably all a big meta joke anyway.

Gunga Din (Stevens, 1939) Rating: 8/10.

Here is a movie that would have instantly become a favorite, if it weren’t so racist.  There’s an argument to be made that over the course of the narrative, the English fun and games are gradually invaded and taken over by the Indians--Din moves from dumb lackey to sacrificial hero, and the Thuggee Guru from freakish pagan priest to eloquent critic and honorable/brave adversary--but the ethics of representation surrounding them are too compromised from the beginning (they’re both white actors in brownface, after all) for me to embrace such a reading.  And the way our heroes treat all Indians they encounter is so filled with contempt and suspicion (though Din is eventually tolerated/patronized like a child), so clearly evident of colonialist cruelty, that it’s disturbing the movie never takes the time (even at the end) to punish them for it, or suggest a change of heart.  Indeed, their attitude is fully justified by the Thuggee activities.  (Again, you could make an argument that this is just reflecting the way the soldier acts in Kipling’s poem, and change of heart is implicit in the final shots, but this is undercut too strongly by the trio’s practical joking in the middle of the battle--after Din is already dead.)

All that aside, the rest of the movie is still pretty swell.  The darker elements are all smoothed over by the slick swashbuckling surface, surely among the most joyous and entertaining of such swashbucklers made in classic Hollywood.  The Adventures of Robin Hood is what most comes to mind in comparison, and while Gunga Din lacks the Flynn-de Havilland romance, the team of Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. is considerably funnier than anything Robin’s Merry Men get up to.  This was clearly an important movie for a lot of directors who saw it young; it’s immediately apparent as a primary source for Indiana Jones, The Lord of the Rings, and probably Star Wars as well.  There are a couple action scenes here that must be among the finest in history to that point, and the climax especially appears to be a model for the Battle of Five Armies.

It’s basically a perfect movie for a 10-year-old boy: girls are icky, fist- and swordfights are cool, elephants are funny, and heroes can walk into the swarming enemy’s camp alone and come out alive.

(Gunga Din poster from Doctor Macro.)

Jupiter Ascending and Kingsman: The Secret Service

If The Matrix and its sequels were cyberpunk/anime/martial-arts/John Woo mash-up commentaries on the Hero’s Journey, Jupiter Ascending is a mid-century-sci-fi-paperback-cover/30s-40s comics/modern-YA-fiction mash-up exploration of Cinderella.  The story of Cinderella is not quite as deeply embedded in human storytelling as the Monomyth, but it’s close.  Numerous fairy tales from multiple cultures follow the same pattern, a set-up and progression still visible in everything from Jane Eyre to Twilight to Fifty Shades of Grey.  The whole “princess” fantasy has been under attack for decades for its supposedly destructive effect on the dreams of young girls (and there’s certainly been some terrible versions out there), but it’s far too universal an archetype to ever go away.  So in JA, the Wachowskis decide to celebrate the story, retelling it with all the over-the-top gusto they can muster.  The result is a massive, over-long space opera, filled with weird make-up, unpronounceable names, campy performances, and cheesy dialogue.  I pretty much loved it.

Here is a movie made on a massive Hollywood budget about stuff so geeky it will never be cool, but filmed with such unabashed love it will always have a cult audience.  It’s like Guardians of the Galaxy played (mostly) straight (and with an admittedly weaker cast), with a big ol’ homage to Brazil and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tossed in the middle for no reason.  And that action sequence through the buildings of Chicago is the best use of the city’s skyline I’ve ever seen, with Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum bouncing off the Sears/Willis Tower, the Old Chicago Water Tower, and the tracks of the L, in such a tangible way that anyone who has ever visited the city should get a little thrill of recognition.  (Now if only it was edited a little cleaner so I could tell what was happening, I’d call it one of the best action sequences in years.)  

As for Cinderella (here called Jupiter Jones), the Wachowskis decide to avoid doing the obvious “feminist” thing by making her a kick-butt action hero.  Instead, she remains a regular, working-class girl to the end, even keeping her old job cleaning toilets.  The central appeal of Cinderella has always been her ordinariness, and here the Wachowskis get to use that to affirm lower class life in the face of the evil industrialist space-aristocrats.  It’s the kind of simple populist leftism they always engage in, but here it ends up kind of sweet.  The question they seem to be posing is, Why do only boys get to have big special effects movies where they can imagine themselves being superheroes with secret identities who save the girl and beat the bad guys?  Why can’t girls get a fantasy about being secret royalty, and end up with a hunky space-boyfriend who calls them “Your Majesty” and can kick bad guy butt if they ever need him to?

Somewhat like the Wachoswkis, director Matthew Vaughn and original-comic-writer Mark Millar have filled Kingsman: The Secret Service with a mash-up of things they love about James Bond and the whole super-spy genre: suits, gadgets, supervillains with mountain hideouts, henchmen with strange deformities, etc.  They pack their movie with giddy references and in-jokes, bright colors and loud music, and numerous wild action sequences (Vaughn is partial to that speed-ramping/camera-whipped-’round in the middle of the fight style that pal Guy Ritchie pioneered, and Edgar Wright parodied in The World’s End).  Vaughn is intent on becoming a real stylist, and Kingsman is a far more stridently and, I would say, successfully directed and edited film than Jupiter Ascending.

Thematically Vaughn+Millar even set up a clever opposition between old-school gentlemen spies, nattily suited and code-named after the Knights of the Round Table, and the housing project hooliganism of young recruit Eggsy (Taron Egerton).  This sets up Colin Firth as the avatar of all that was admirable in the old English aristocracy (stiff upper lip, calm under fire, courtliness of manner), while allowing Eggsy to assert the proper rights and abilities of the under class in the face of the other snobby toffs in the Service.  The problem is Vaughn+Millar don’t actually care about this theme, or much of anything concerning actual human beings, and any sense of gentlemanliness as a virtue is tossed aside by the filmmaking in favor of aggressive vulgarity.  The movie feints at some form of emotional connection (both Firth and Egerton are strong, and have excellent chemistry), but by the climax, the very idea of treating characters as people has been laughed off the screen.  Eggsy is set up as a kid who loves his mum but is cowed by his abusive stepdad, and when the movie drags in the hoary legend of spies required to shot their pet dogs, we’re meant to consider his failure a moral victory.  But the movie itself exhibits no such sympathy toward any of its human characters; within five minutes of that scene, we’ve watched an entire congregation of Westboro Baptist-types be mind-controlled into slaughtering each other with their bare hands.  And we are absolutely meant to get off on this spectacle, because it’s just so awesome.  Sure, the whole thing turns out to be a lefty-populist attack on the 1% just like Jupiter Ascending, if that's what you're into, but here the big political statement is delivered by watching hundreds of (wealthy and powerful and therefore evil) heads blow up like fireworks set to Pomp and Circumstance.

The general crassness at the heart of the movie hits its peak during the grand finale, when Eggsy requests a kiss from an imprisoned princess and she offers him anal sex instead.  After saving the world, he runs back to her cell where she lies waiting, and in porny POV shot we watch her flip over and lift her naked butt to him and--cut to credits.  It’s exactly the kind of nasty little joke Mark Millar specializes in (whether he’s the one who came up for it here or not), and it curdles the rest of the film for me.  I’m on record on this blog as enjoying Matthew Vaughn's past work, but (aside from X-Men: First Class) I think I’ve outgrown him.

Each of these movies is a potpourri (too fancy a word)--a goulash of ingredients I enjoy, but one of them is sweet in the middle and one is just nasty, and I know which I prefer.

Jupiter Ascending:  Rating: 7/10.

Kingsman: The Secret Service:  Rating: 5/10.

If I Gave the Oscars: 2014 Edition

Same premise as the last couple years: these are how I would give out awards to the movies of 2014, if that was a power that I had.  I'm not going to go through all the exact same categories as the Academy Awards, because some of them are just tiresome and others require inside knowledge that I do not possess.  This post is obviously meant to be complementary to my Best of 2014 post, where I listed all my favorites, so I have left out Best Picture nominees here; they would be the same as the top 10 from that post, so no need to list them twice.  

Each category is listed in order of preference, with the first director/actor/etc. being my choice for the winner.  Things should be fairly self-explanatory from there.

Best Director

1. Isao Takahata (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya)

2. Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

3. Christopher Nolan (Interstellar)

4. David Fincher (Gone Girl)

5. Brian Glazer (Under the Skin)

Best Screenplay (Adapted or Original, doesn't matter)

1. Wes Anderson, Hugo Guinness (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

2. Steven Knight (Locke)

3. Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)

4. Isao Takahata, Riko Sakaguchi (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya)

5. Paul Webb (Selma)

Best Actor

1. Tom Hardy (Locke)
2. Ralph Fiennes (The Grand Budapest Hotel)
3. David Oyelowo (Selma)
4. Michael Keaton (Birdman)
5. Bradley Cooper (American Sniper)
HM: Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler), Brendan Gleeson (Calvary)

Best Actress

1. Scarlett Johansson (Under the Skin)

2. Essie Davis (The Babadook)

3. Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl)

4. Emily Browning (God Help the Girl)

5. Agata Trzebuchowska (Ida)
HM: Emily Blunt (Edge of Tomorrow)

Best Supporting Actor

1. Ethan Hawke (Boyhood)

2. Edward Norton (Birdman)

3. Tyler Perry (Gone Girl)

4. Josh Brolin (Inherent Vice)
5. Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler)

Best Supporting Actress

1. Katharine Waterston (Inherent Vice)

2. Kim Dickens & Carrie Coon (Gone Girl)

3. Agata Kulesza (Ida)

4. Rene Russo (Nightcrawler)

5. Patricia Arquette (Boyhood)

Best Cinematography

1. Robert Elswit (Nightcrawler)

2. Daniel Landin (Under the Skin)

3. Hoyt van Hoytema (Interstellar)

4. Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman)

5. Jeff Cronenweth (Gone Girl)

Best Editing

1. Lee Smith (Interstellar)

2. Kirk Baxter (Gone Girl)

3. Paul Watts (Under the Skin)

4. Barney Pilling (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

5. Gareth Evans (The Raid 2)

Best Musical Score

1. Hans Zimmer (Interstellar)

2. Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

3. Joe Hisaishi (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya)

4. Antonio Sanchez (Birdman)

5. Mica Levi (Under the Skin)

Best Scene (I got carried away here.  There were just too many great ones this year that needed to be recognized!)

1. Docking (Interstellar)

2. Running Away through the Night (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya)

3. Video Messages from Home (Interstellar)

4. Car Chase--Switching Vehicles (The Raid 2)

5. Meeting an Elephant Man (Under the Skin)
6. Time in a Bottle (X-Men: Days of Future Past)
7. Filming a Home Invasion (Nightcrawler)
8. Nick Fury's Car Under Attack (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)
9. Shasta's Return (Inherent Vice)
10. The Ski Chase (The Grand Budapest Hotel)
11. Shootout in a Sandstorm (American Sniper)
12. The Big Roundtable Discussion (Guardians of the Galaxy)
13. Heaven Comes to Earth (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya)
14. Filming a Car Chase (Nightcrawler)
15. Tank Attack (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes)
16. Final Face Off/Reveal (Under the Skin)
17. Axe-Fight in the Dark (Snowpiercer)
18. When Everything Turns Gold (Under the Skin)
19. Flying (The Tale of the Princess Kaguya)
20. First Confession (Calvary)
21. Christmas with the New Grandparents (Boyhood)
22. What Amy Was Up To (Gone Girl)
23. Nightclub Shootout (John Wick)
24. Call Home Interrupted (American Sniper)
25. The Book Came Back (The Babadook)