As the I approach the end of my time
studying Journalism at Mohawk College, I look back on how far I’ve come since
2011, as a film critic and as a person. There are myriad things I’ve taken away
from the lessons I’ve learned, the experiences I’ve had, and the people I’ve
met in those three years, but one of the most resonant things has been the
realization of just how much I absolutely LOVE being a film critic. Everything
about the experience of watching movies, of writing about them, of analyzing
them, and of discussing them with people is... Well, I can think of nothing
better.
And with that in mind, I’m very pleased to
announce the new and re-launched form of The Apple Box, at AppleBoxReviews.ca.
Weekly movie reviews, Oscar race updates, videos, lists, tweets, and podcasts
are just some of the content you’ll find at the new site – made possible thanks
to the tireless work of Scott Joseph Summerhayes, who helped design the new
layouts and set it up. Also, be sure to check out or subscribe to The Apple Box
in other forms of social media:
Lastly, to help announce the arrival of the
improved and re-launched Apple Box, I am pleased to reveal The Apple Box’s
anticipated Best Movies of 2013. We may be a little ways into 2014 at this
point, but I hope that you’ll find it worth the wait.
Thank you to everyone who’s helped me
realize my passion, who believes in me, who follows my output as a film critic,
or who just occasionally checks out a review of mine. You have made me who I am
now and shown me what I want to become, and I continuously appreciate it.
The 1980s are popular again at the
movies, especially when it comes to remakes. (This weekend alone, three of the
four new wide releases are remakes of ‘80s movies.) After having exhausted the
catalogue of ‘80s horror movies to remake a few years ago, studios have been shifting
the focus to remaking ‘80s action movies, like Clash of the Titans or Red
Dawn. Now comes RoboCop, a remake
that manages to be close to the original’s quality while not being afraid to
deviate from its origins.
The original RoboCop, released in 1987, was the breakthrough picture for
director Paul Verhoeven, who would go on to make Total Recall, Basic Instinct,
and Starship Troopers in the ‘90s.
Like most of his movies, RoboCop
featured excessive violence that really pushed the R-rating for their day. The
new version does dial down the extraneous blood and gore, but there are still a
few scenes twisted and intense enough to push the boundaries of its tamer
rating and give nightmares to the squeamish.
Photo: Columbia Pictures
The story is mostly the same this time
around. In the near-future, evil corporation OmniCorp manufactures robot
soldiers for every country in the world except the U.S., where citizens are
concerned about being policed by unfeeling machines. OmniCorp’s solution: building
the brain and face of a human police officer into a robot suit. When police
officer Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is nearly killed in a car bomb explosion,
he becomes their test subject.
The rest of the movie toggles between an
overt satire of the mass media/scare tactics and an action-packed origin story
of the robotically enhanced hero. If anything, so much of this RoboCop is origin story, it feels more
like a set-up to future movies than necessarily a complete movie of its own.
The ending feels anticlimactic, in large part because it’s not preceded by a
necessary amount of build-up.
Photo: Columbia Pictures
One thing that can’t be faulted is the
cast. Kinnaman, star of 2012’s Easy Money
and AMC’s The Killing, is great as
Murphy and RoboCop. He’s surrounded by heavy-hitters like Gary Oldman, Michael
Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Jay Baruchel, Michael K. Williams,
and Samuel L. Jackson. The great spread of talented actors allows the remake to
be a more emotionally gratifying movie than Verhoeven’s original.
Plenty more remakes are on the way later
this year, and the odds are most of them won’t be worth watching. RoboCop, though, is one of the few remakes
that stand above the rest. It would be better with less setup and more payoff,
but considering the track record for ‘80s remakes at this point, it’s good
enough that RoboCop is good enough.
Artwork: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
By Chris Luckett
(This
is Part 2 of a four-part series looking at the Oscar nominees in the eight
major categories.)
Ten supporting performances are nominated
for Academy Awards each year: five male and five female. This year’s batch
includes six first-time acting nominees, two previous nominees, and two Oscar
winners.
Best Supporting Actor
BARKHAD ABDI (Captain Phillips)
Abdi, who moved from Somalia to
Minneapolis, MN at the age of 14, had never acted before Captain Phillips. Having spent his childhood witnessing the
desperate lives of many Somalis, Abdi brought personal experience and
perspective to the role of Muse, one of four pirates who hijacked the Maersk
Alabama in 2009. He goes toe-to-toe with Tom Hanks in every scene, completely
holding his own against the Oscar winner.
BRADLEY COOPER (American Hustle)
After scoring his first Oscar nomination
last year for his lead performance in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, Cooper landed his second just 12 months
later for Russell’s follow-up, American
Hustle. As hot-headed FBI agent Richie DiMaso, Cooper gives a subtle
performance, never sure whether he’s the puppet-master of his sting operation
or another puppet.
MICHAEL FASSBENDER (12 Years a Slave)
After giving performances in the
Oscar-nominated Inglourious Basterds,
Shame, and Prometheus that ultimately didn’t receive the Academy’s attention,
Fassbender finally broke into the realm of Oscar nominees for his portrayal of
the deplorable Edwin Epps, a cruel plantation and slave owner. Playing both
quiet lows and raging highs, Fassbender is genuinely frightening as a powerful
man capable of pretty much anything.
JONAH HILL (The Wolf of Wall Street)
After surprising the world with his
dramatic work in 2011’s Moneyball
(and scoring his first Academy Award nomination in the process), Hill returned
to the genre in Martin Scorsese’s The
Wolf of Wall Street. Hill gives his most complex performance yet as Donnie
Azoff, a salesman who becomes the partner of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan
Belfort, joining the titular stockbroker in his spectacular rise and inevitable
fall.
JARED LETO (Dallas Buyers Club)
The character of Rayon, a transgender drug
addict dying of AIDS who goes into business with a homophobic redneck, is the kind
of role almost every actor would kill for, but not everyone would be able to
pull off what Leto does with it. Treating her with true dignity, Leto gives the
best performance of his career as Rayon, losing himself completely in the
funny, proud, scared, heartbreaking, and heart-warming character.
Best Supporting Actress
SALLY HAWKINS (Blue Jasmine)
Sally Hawkins may not be the main character
of Blue Jasmine, but she’s the
beating heart of it. Torn between her hot-headed husbands and her familial
obligation to look after her stuck-up, deluded sister, Hawkins simultaneously
projects effervescence and melancholy as Ginger – a modernized Stella Kowalski,
for those who know their Tennessee Williams.
JENNIFER LAWRENCE (American Hustle)
Hot off winning Best Actress at last year’s
Academy Awards for her stunning turn in Silver
Linings Playbook (as well as starring in the highest-grossing film of 2013,
Catching Fire), Lawrence has already
been invited back to the red carpet for her performance as Rosalyn Rosenfeld,
the mercurial, explosive wife of con artist Irving (Christian Bale). If she
wins, she’ll be the first back-to-back Oscar winner for acting since Tom Hanks.
(Warning:
NSFW language)
LUPITA NYONG'O (12 Years a Slave)
Like Best Supporting Actor nominee Barkhad
Abdi, Lupita Nyong’o scored her acting nomination for very first movie. As the
persevering Patsey, Nyong’o is forced to cope not just with being a slave but
also with being slave master Edwin Epp’s (Michael Fassbender) most prized slave
and his forced mistress. Patsey speaks softly and survives stoically through
horrible conditions, but it’s her outbursts of desperate emotion that haunt the
most.
JULIA ROBERTS (August: Osage County)
Roberts hasn’t been invited to join the
ranks of Oscar-nominated actors since her starring performance in 2000’s Erin Brokovich, but co-starring with
Meryl Streep will bring out the best acting in anybody. As the eldest daughter
of a racist, passive-aggressive, vindictive, dying drug addict (Streep),
Roberts more than holds her own in a cast stuffed with great actors.
(Warning:
NSFW language)
JUNE SQUIBB (Nebraska)
It took six decades of consistently good
work, but at 84 years old, Squibb scored her first Oscar nomination for
performance as Kate Grant, the caring but exasperated wife of a man (Bruce
Dern) who’s convinced he’s won a million dollars. As played by Squibb, Kate’s
character gets the more laughs from audiences than anyone else in Nebraska. If she wins, Squibb will be
the oldest winner for acting in Academy Awards history.
Remember when you played with toys as a kid
and one fantasy scenario would lead right into the next? Wolverine, Donatello,
and Scrooge McDuck could race the Batmobile across the deck of the Titanic,
before suddenly warping to the moon and playing a game of darts with Bart
Simpson, and it all made a twisted kind of sense. It’s that childlike sense of
genius randomness that makes The LEGO
Movie the first great movie of 2014.
Emmet Brickowski, voiced by Chris Pratt, is a happy, normal LEGO guy. He’s positive about everything, his favourite TV show is Where are My Pants?, and he has a construction
job laying LEGO bricks. One day, his uninteresting life is interrupted when he
becomes tangled up in a plot involving the leader of Brickburg, President
Business (Will Ferrell), trying to destroy the world and a Matrix-style prophecy that just might apply to Emmet.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Really, the plot is as present as it needs
to be, but doesn’t spend lots of time dwelling on details like story and
motivations. (Or so it seems, actually – the final act of the movie contains a
number of brave narrative gambles that come out of left field and show just how
out-of-the-box The LEGO Movie was
thinking all along.)
Much like 2012’s underrated The Pirates!: Band of Misfits, The LEGO Movie is made to look animated
in stop-motion, but is actually amazingly detailed computer animation. The LEGO
bricks that make up the characters and settings look completely real; the plastic
bricks even have worn paint and chipped plastic, like most that you played with
as a kid.
Photo: Warner Bros.
The voice cast is so large, there’s not
enough time to go into how great they all are. Suffice it to say, though, that
any movie that lands a cast comprised of Pratt, Ferrell, Elizabeth Banks, Liam
Neeson, Alison Brie, Charlie Day, Will Forte, Anthony Daniels, Cobie Smulders,
Jonah Hill, Dave Franco, Billy Dee Williams, Nick Offerman, Morgan Freeman, Jake
Johnson, Will Arnett, and Channing Tatum definitely knows what it’s doing.
So many family movies nowadays either
pander to children with insulting antics or are too busy being kinetic to
attempt to be clever or funny. The LEGO
Movie has such an effortless power behind it, it’s a sheer joy to behold.
The comedy is really funny, the animation is simple yet intricate, and the
action careens from one random moment of genius to the next. It’s the type of
movie that a kid could come up with, but in treating its whimsy with
thoughtfulness, it also makes you feel like a kid again.
As a director, George Clooney tends to alternate
between making alright movies and making excellent movies. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was okay, but Good Night, and Good Luck was fantastic. Leatherheads was fine, but The
Ides of March was terrific. Unfortunately, the pendulum’s swung back toward
just good with his fifth movie, The
Monuments Men.
Based on a true story, The Monuments Men is about a seven-man military squad that was
organized near the end of World War II and tasked with recovering stolen
paintings and works of art from the Nazis. George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill
Murray, Bob Babalan, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, and Hugh Bonneville make up
the septet (aided a few times by a French art historian/spy played by Cate
Blanchett).
Photo: Columbia Pictures
Nothing much original happens in the movie.
It’s one part The Great Escape, one
part Raiders of the Lost Ark, and two
parts Ocean’s Eleven – with a dash of
the Flying Hellfish episode of The
Simpsons. That sounds like it would be great, but by mashing all of them
together, none of the ideas get done very well.
The
Monuments Men also can’t settle on a tone. There are
moments of stark comedy, but they’re butted up against scenes of main
characters dying tragically. In one scene, the Nazis seem straight of out Schindler’s List, but in the next, they
seem straight out of The Blues Brothers.
Because you can never tell what the tone’s supposed to be, the funny scenes
aren’t as uproarious as they should be and the dramatic scenes aren’t as
powerful as they want to be.
Photo: Columbia Pictures
Those points aside, however, The Monuments Men certainly isn’t a bad
movie. Clooney is a gifted director and a talented writer; while he does resort
to schmaltzy sentimentality a few times and the movie could make a drinking
game out of how many times Clooney’s protagonist orates about the importance of
preserving a generation’s history, the movie never bores.
There’s no powerful climax to the movie,
nor even any rising action, per se. (The movie starts at a leisurely pace and
doesn’t really pick up any speed over its whole two hours.) The game cast makes
it mostly worth it, though. They all work really well together and elevate the
material to a large degree.
The
Monuments Men isn’t anything you haven’t seen
before and it would be untrue to say that it’s a masterpiece. Compared to most
of the movies that come out in January and February, though, it’s one of the
better ones.
Artwork: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
By Chris Luckett
(This
is Part 1 of a four-part series looking at the Oscar nominees in the eight
major categories.)
Ten movies’ screenplays are nominated for
Academy Awards each year: five original screenplays and five screenplays
adapted from another source. This year’s nominees included all nine Best
Picture nominees, as well as the third movie in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, and offer tighter races
than in most years.
Best Adapted Screenplay
12 YEARS A SLAVE (John
Ridley)
Adapted from the 1853 memoir of Solomon
Northup’s agonizing tale of slavery, Ridley’s screenplay manages to juggle a
multitude of characters over a lengthy amount of narrative. More impressively,
it details Northup’s life of freedom before his kidnapping and enslavement, making
the dozen years Northup spends in slavery all the more excruciating.
BEFORE MIDNIGHT (Richard
Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke)
The real-life tale of Richard Phillips, a
cargo ship captain who was taken hostage aboard his ship by Somali pirates in
2009, is perfectly suited for a Steven Seagal-esque action movie, but Ray
smartly turns Phillips’s story into an incredibly tense thriller. Every scene
ratchets the tension more, building to a gripping climax the screenplay takes
its time to earn.
PHILOMENA (Steve Coogan
and Jeff Pope)
Despite the misleading title, Philomena is the true story not just Philomena
Lee, a British woman who was forced to give up her son by as a young girl, but
also that of journalist Martin Sixsmith, who decided to help her track her son
down. Turning Lee and Sixsmith into a modern-day odd couple, Coogan and Pope’s
screenplay is the most crowd-pleasing of the ten nominees.
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Terence Winter)
The fourth true story nominated in this
category creates a drug-fueled thrill ride that powers the crazy rise and
crazier fall of the hubris-courting former stockbroker Jordan Belfort. Despite
the length of Winter’s screenplay, he keeps the story moving at a brisk pace,
with bitingly funny dialogue, memorably vulgar character, and outrageous scenes
of excess.
(Warning:
NSFW language)
Best Original Screenplay
AMERICAN HUSTLE (Eric
Warren Singer and David O. Russell)
In all of David O. Russell’s recent movies,
the characters are so fully developed that they feel completely real, and American Hustle is no exception. A loose
spin on the Abscam FBI sting in the ‘70s, its screenplay also places the
characters in quite interesting and unpredictable situations, like to memorable
dialogue that is both believable and hilarious.
BLUE JASMINE (Woody Allen)
Woody Allen, who holds the record for Oscar
nominations for screenwriting, scores his 24th nomination with Blue Jasmine, a modern-day Streetcar Named Desire. The story of a
rich socialite who finds herself widowed and homeless, Allen’s Jeannette
“Jasmine” Francis relies on the kindness of strangers like her sister, while
also constantly getting lost in thought remembering the life of luxury she
can’t cope with having lost.
DALLAS BUYERS CLUB (Craig
Borten & Melisa Wallack)
The true tale of Ron Woodruff, a homophobic
Texan in the ‘80s who contracted HIV and turned to smuggling drugs from Mexico
for fellow AIDS sufferers, Dallas Buyers
Clubs could very easily have become a depressing movie. Instead, Borten and
Wallack’s screenplay is full of life and hope, allowing Woodruff’s evolution
from gay-bashing bigot to tolerant, caring crusader all the more powerful and
inspiring.
HER (Spike Jonze)
Jonze may have directed the brilliant Being John Malkovich and Adaptation., but they were written by
Charlie Kaufman, not Jonze himself. After flexing his muscles for the first
time with Where the Wild Things Are,
Jonze hit his stride with the ingenious screenplay for Her, a movie that realistically examines what our relationships
with technology and artificial intelligence may very well one day become, while
creating a clear, distinct, and all-too-believable vision of the near-future.
NEBRASKA (Bob Nelson)
Nebraska could have simply been a road trip movie, or a one-last-hurrah
movie, or as a dysfunctional family movie, but Nelson’s screenplay weaves
threads of all three concepts through his dramatic comedy to create something
with a wholly original flavour. The characters are believable enough to be both
riotously funny and uncomfortably familiar.
How many of the nominated screenplays’ movies have you seen? What screenplays do you think should have been nominated but weren’t? Comment below!
In just a few days, I’ll be revealing my
Best Movies of 2013. In the meantime, I can certainly say what isn’t on the best-of list. Below is
every movie I saw last year, ranked from the very worst of the zero-stars to
the very best of the four stars. (Bonus: Any of the titles with an * are clickable links to their corresponding reviews.)
The remaining twenty-six movies are the
Best Movies of 2013, which will be revealed in just a few days. (What can be
said: numbers 26-5 on the list are four-and-a-half-star movies and numbers 4-1 are
perfect fives.)
Stay tuned for The Apple Box’s Best Movies
of 2013, coming soon. In the meantime, how many of the 2013 movies above have you
seen? Would any of them make your
Best of the Year list? What are you hoping will make the final cut? Comment
below!
