Super Bowl Trailer: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Arleigh

It’s becoming a sort of yearly occurrence to have a Marvel Studios film premiere a special trailer during the live-broadcast of the NFL’s latest Super Bowl event. Last year, it was a special Super Bowl trailer of Iron Man 3 (an extended version soon coming out after). This year it will be Captain America: The Winter Soldier that will get the special Super Bowl treatment.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has been gaining some major buzz since the release of its first teaser trailer from a couple months back. Where Thor: Dark World used fantasy as an overall theme for its look and story, with the sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger the filmmakers have taken on the look and feel of a techno/conspiracy-thriller. The Winter Soldier looks to be like something that wouldn’t seem out of place if made during the cynical and distrustful era of the 1970’s when conspiracies and distrust of those in power dominated the headlines.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is set for an April 4, 2014 release date.

Also, we have the UK and Ireland version of the trailer which show a brief glimpse of Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) who is the descendant of Peggy Carter from the first film.

Film Review: Gangster Squad (dir by Ruben Fleischer)

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Do you remember Gangster Squad?

This film, which tells the story of hard-boiled cops and psychotic gangsters in 1940s Los Angeles, was originally meant to be released in September of 2012 but the release date was moved back because the film originally featured a gun battle in a movie theater. After the real-life movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, that scene was reshot and the release of Gangster Squad was delayed until January of this year. The critics absolutely hated it, audiences stayed away, and Gangster Squad was the first high-profile flop of 2013.

I was among those who ignored the film when it was first playing at theaters. After all, it was January and I was more interested in following the Oscar race than going to see a film that, by all accounts, was somewhat terrible. However, now that Gangster Squad is showing up on a nearly nightly basis on Cinemax, I recently got a chance to see the movie and you know what?

The critics were wrong.

Gangster Squad tells a familiar story. In fact, the film features not a single character or plot twist that hasn’t shown up in another movie. The setting is Los Angeles in the 1940s. Ruthless gangster Mickey Cohen (a totally over-the-top Sean Penn) is the king of the city’s underworld. How crazy is Mickey Cohen? He’s so crazy that, when we first see him, he’s watching as another gangster is literally ripped in half. He’s so crazy that, in the middle of a gun battle, he yells, “Here comes Santy Claus!” as he fires his machine gun. That’s how crazy Mickey Cohen is.

Seriously crazy.

Fortunately, righteous police chief William H. Parker (Nick Nolte) refuses to allow a little thing like due process to keep him from pursuing Mickey. Parker calls Sgt. John O’Mara (Josh Brolin) to his office and, after delivering a long and flowery monologue that verges on incoherence, he finally explains that O’Mara’s mission is to put together an elite squad of cops and to take Mickey out by any means necessary! (Usually, I try to exercise some restraint when it comes to punctuation but Gangster Squad is one of those films that demands exclamation points.)

This is followed by a series of properly colorful scenes in which O’Mara recruits his gangster squad.

Jerry Wooters (Ryan Gosling) is a cynical World War II veteran who is, at first, skeptical of O’Mara and his squad. Wooters, however, changes his mind after a saintly shoeshine boy is gunned down in front of him. Wooters is also having an affair with Grace Faraday (Emma Stone), who happens to also be Cohen’s girlfriend.

Coleman Harris (Anthony Mackie) is a black cop who is good with a knife and who lost his cousin to the heroin distributed by Cohen’s mob. Watching the friendly and playful interaction between Harris and all of the film’s white characters provides us with one of our first clues that Gangster Squad is not necessarily aiming to be a historically accurate portrait of America in the 1940s.

Conway Keeler (Giovanni Ribisi) is a wiretapper and a family man. Keeler’s fate is pretty much sealed the minute that he tells O’Mara that he’s willing to risk death just to make the world a better place for his son.

Max Kennard (Robert Patrick) is a former old west gunslinger who now spends his time killing gangsters. Max, we’re told, may be old but he’s also personally shot over a 100 gangsters. Max also has a younger partner, an honest cop named Navidad Ramirez (Michael Pena).

The Gangster Squad

As you can probably guess at this point, there’s not a single cliché that is not employed by Gangster Squad. However, and this is what I think several critics missed, the film deliberately takes its clichés to such an extreme that they go from being flaws to being strengths. By so enthusiastically going overboard in its embrace of the conventions of the gangster film genre and, at the same time, acknowledging the fact that the audience is also familiar with those clichés, Gangster Squad creates its own vibrant and compulsively watchable fantasy world. The world of Gangster Squad has little to do with any sort of historical reality. Instead, it’s a world constructed solely out of other gangster movies.

Taking all of this (and the fact that the film is directed by Ruben Fleischer of Zomieland and 30 Minutes or Less fame) into consideration, it’s pretty obvious that Gangster Squad is not a film that’s meant to be taken seriously. And yet, that’s what so many critics did when the film was first released in January. Instead of appreciating the film for paying over-the-top homage to the gangster films of the past, critics attacked it for being an example of style over substance.

And, to give the critics their due, they were exactly right. There is no substance to Gangster Squad. Instead, the film is a total celebration of style.

And what style! In Fleischer’s hands, 1940s Los Angeles is a colorful wonderland of pure excess, a vibrant landscape of dark alleys and swanky nightclubs that literally glow on-screen and are populated by tough men and sultry women in clothing that might not have been found hanging in every closet in the 40s but should have been. (Seriously, when Emma Stone first appears on-screen, she’s wearing a red gown that is simply to die for.)

This Christmas, I want both Ryan Gosling and the dress.

For the viewer who is willing to give themselves over to the film’s over-the-top aesthetic and are willing to appreciate it for what it is (as opposed to condemning it for what it isn’t), Gangster Squad is a watchable, entertaining, and fun movie. And what’s so bad about that?

I’m glad that I finally got a chance to see Gangster Squad. Is it one of the great gangster films? No. The great gangster films have both style and substance but, quite frankly, if I can only have one than I would prefer something stylish and fun like Gangster Squad to something like Killing Them Softly.

(Then again, I would prefer just about anything to sitting through Killing Them Softly for a second time.)

So, enjoy Gangster Squad. Watch it for the style. Have fun. And most importantly, remember that critics are as often wrong as they are right.

Trailer: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Official)

Posted on October 24, 2013 by Arleigh

We take a brief break from all things horror here at Through the Shattered Lens to bring to you the first official trailer for Marvel Studios second film in their Phase 2 of their Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier sees the return of Steve Rogers aka Captain America (The first Avenger) post-Battle of New York. He’s now an official member of S.H.I.E.L.D. but soon realizes that his 40’s ideals may not mesh well with the all-encompassing and super-secretive intelligence organization. From the look and feel of the trailer it looks like the film’s directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, are going for the conspiracy thriller tone for this new Captain America entry.

This is a good choice considering that the screenplay has been heavily influenced by Ed Brubaker’s run on the Captain America comics which also introduced the Winter Soldier of the film’s title.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is set for a Spring, April 4, 2014, release date.

Review: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (dir. by Timur Bekmambetov)

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Arleigh

Timur Bekmambetov is one filmmaker that can never be said to hold things back visually on any of his films. He has a style that can be called a combination of the Wachowski Brothers and Zack Snyder. Now one can read that and just groan. The Wachowskis and Snyder are not what one would call the paragon of the filmmaking community. What they do tend to do are create pop-friendly and consumer-friendly films. Whether thse films are of high quality is another thing altogether.

Bekmambetov is an interesting filmmaker from Kazakhstan (who could easily pass for what we imagine Genghis Khan to look like if he was still alive) whose brand of action films tend to focus on all style with little to no substance. For some audiences this just means dumb, brainless fare that has no reason to be paid to see, but I tend to think these same people who shout loudest about how these type of films are dumbing down it’s audiences secretly watch them like crack addicts once they’re on cable. Bekmambetov’s latest film, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, definitely follows his unique action and storytelling template he’s established with past films as Nightwatch, Daywatch and Wanted.

The film lives and dies on the simple conceit that one of the United States’ greatest Presidents was also vampire hunter of some skill. We see how an encounter with the vampire which led to the death of Abe’s mother (who had died of the condition known at the time as milk sickness) propels him through the intervening years to plot revenge on the same vampire. It’s during a failed attempt at revenge that he’s noticed by one Henry Sturgess (played by Dominic Cooper) who sees another potential vampire hunter in the young man (adult Lincoln played by one Benjamin Walker who could easily pass for a very young Liam Neeson). We get the usual training montage where Sturgess teaches Abe the finer points in vampire hunting and killing. It’s only proper that Abe would end up picking the rail-splitting axe he’s more comfortable in using than the more practical firearms.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is almost a straight adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s novel of the same name. Some minor subplots are discarded to keep the film moving in the one path the filmmakers and screenwriter (Grahame-Smith himself) decided to concentrate on. It’s this one thing that really pushes the film into a level that would win an audience to it’s cause or lose them altogether. This thing I speak of is the idea that slavery was due to the vampires who have set themselves as the so-called shadow aristocracy of the South and needed a ready source of food to keep themselves hidden from the humans. Yes, slavery was started and made into a near industrial level by vampires. This in turn moves Lincoln to move beyond just vengeance on the vampires who have affected his life from such an early age and instead go towards abolishing slavery from the country as a way to destroy the vampires once and for all.

These are heady ideas that doesn’t seem to fit well with historical facts and figures. Yet, the film does a good enough job of keeping things serious with just the right amount of over-the-top action sequences that Bekmambetov has become well-known for. One such action sequence involves Lincoln and a vampire having a chase scene involving a huge horse stampede. They fight in and amongst the stampeding equines and then on and above them. It’s a sequence that’s equal parts exciting and ludicrous that one just has to either sit back and enjoy it or stand up and walk out. Which is the film in a nutshell. One either goes all-in on the film’s story or folds mentally.

This is not to say that the film has no flaws. It has some glaring flaws that threatened to push the film over the edge of being a fun action flick into all-out dreck. For starters the vampires themselves made for good villains, but Rufus Sewell as the leader of the American vampires (who happens to call himself Adam) looked bored with the whole proceedings. There were brief moments when the charm that we expect from vampire leaders show, but it’s far and few between. Most of the time Sewell looks to be just standing in a particular scene looking bored. The rest of his clan of vampires are no better though Marton Csokas asBart, one of Adam’s lieutenants and main supplier of slaves, did such an over-the-top performance that one wouldn’t be surprised to catch a glimpses of scenery stuck between his teeth.

It’s really the performance by Benjamin Walker in the title role that keeps the film afloat. He has a commanding presence on the screen and he’s able to be convincing as Lincoln both as a young man and then as the elder statesman (some very good old man make-up effects that put the elder Peter Weyland make-up in Prometheus to shame). Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Mary Todd Lincoln also does a good job in what could’ve been a thankless role, but she didn’t look out of place in this peculiar period piece.

The action sequences themselves were choreographed well even though Bekmambetov was still relying a lot of his own brand of slo-mo to accentuate the cool kills Lincoln makes with his silver-coated axe. After awhile this gimmick began to get repetitious, but then again one shouldn’t be surprised to see such a thing over-used in a Bekmambetov film. If one has seen his three previous films then they should know what to expect. Yet, even this doesn’t detract from what this film ultimately turned out to be and that’s just plain fun despite lacking in the acting in certain roles and the sensational, some would say tasteless, use of the Civil War and slavery to tell a story about a vampire-killing President.

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter will not make filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Lars Von Trier and Michael Haneke quake in their shoes. It’s not a film that was made to win awards (though I can see it being nominated for best fight sequence in the MTV Movie Awards). What this film does seem to succeed enough in doing is be a fun and exciting film that rises above it’s source material on the strength of it’s lead and the action created by it’s filmmaker. For a genre film it certainly did a better job of mashing together disparate ideas than last year’s Cowboys & Aliens. Maybe if this film is enough of a success we’ll finally get some movement in the planned film adaptation of Seth Grahame-Smith’s other literary classic mash-up: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. One can only hope.

Film Review: Man on a Ledge (dir. Asger Leth)

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The newly released film Man on a Ledge is about a man (played by Sam Worthington) who checks into a hotel room in New York City and then climbs out on a ledge and threatens to jump off unless a specific hostage negotiator is brought in to talk him off the ledge. We quickly discover that Worthington isn’t just a depressed jumper. Instead, he’s got a really lengthy and overly complicated back story. It turns out that he’s a former detective who used to moonlight for a venture capitalist and then one day, he was accused of stealing a priceless diamond and destroying it. This resulted in him getting sentenced to 25 years in prison but when his father is reported to have died, Worthington is released from jail for a day so he can attend the funeral. So, Worthington escapes and then ends up out on a ledge as part of a massively complicated plan to prove his innocence. His name, by the way, is Nick because people named Alvin are never the stars of action movies.

Meanwhile, the cop that Nick demands to speak with is a hardened, veteran hostage negotiator and she’s played by Elizabeth Banks. Yes, you read that correctly. Anyway, Nick asks for her because he knows that the last guy she tried to talk out of jumping apparently jumped off a bridge. Since Banks failed her last time out, her efforts to talk Nick off the ledge are cautiously observed by another detective, this one played by Edward Burns. Banks is totally and completely miscast here and she has next to no chemistry with Sam Worthington. However, she does have really good chemistry with Edward Burns. Seriously, they would make a really cute couple and I would buy any issue of Us Weekly that had them on the cover.

Meanwhile, the guy that Nick is accused of stealing from just happens to be in a building across the street where he’s conducting some sort of generically evil business deal. He’s a painfully thin, almost sickly man and, whenever he was on screen, I found myself wondering how his head managed to stay balanced on his body. At first, I thought maybe it was the Red Skull waiting for the sequel to Capt. America to start filming. However, on closer inspection, he turned out to be respected character actor Ed Harris. In this film, Harris plays a ruthless capitalist who would have gone bankrupt if not for the insurance money he got as a result of Nick supposedly destroying that diamond. Anyway, Harris appears to be enjoying playing a bad guy and he’s so over-the-top in his evil that you don’t really mind that he’s another one of those “I-should-kill-you-now-but-first-we-talk” type of villains.

Meanwhile, there’s two other people who are taking advantage of all the chaos caused by the man on the ledge to break into Harris’s building. They’re played by Jamie Bell (who looks a lot like Casey Affleck in this film) and telenova veteran Genesis Rodriguez. As you watch Bell and Rodriguez sliding down heating ducts and scaling elevator shafts, you can’t help but marvel at just how overly complicated everyone is making things. Still, Bell and Rodriguez have a lot of chemistry and they’re fun to watch.

Meanwhile, NYC television reporter (played by Kyra Sedgwick) is running around the streets of New York, asking random bystanders how they feel about the prospect of Nick jumping. Apparently, she is an old enemy of Elizabeth Banks’ though that whole plot line is dropped as soon as its brought up. Still, the audience in my theater chuckled when Sedgwick dramatically rolled her r’s while introducing herself as “Suzie Morales.”

Meanwhile, there’s a bearded guy watching Nick up on the roof and he suddenly decides to go all Occupy Wall Street on the movie’s ass and starts shouting, “Attica! Attica!” before then blaming it all on the 1%. Unfortunately, he doesn’t put on Guy Fawkes mask at any point during all of this.

Meanwhile, the entire city of New York is obsessed with the man on the ledge and, if nothing else, they all end up acting exactly the way that people who have never been to New York City (like me) assume that people in New York act. By that, I mean all the extras are all like, “Yo, Paulie! There’s some man on a ledge! Stop breaking my balls!”

Meanwhile, there’s one final twist to the film’s plot that I can’t share without spoiling the film. So, I’ll just say that it involved someone working at the hotel and I figured out the twist about 3 minutes after this character first appeared. This is one of those twists that if you can’t figure out on your own then you need to hang your head in shame. Seriously.

This film packs a lot of plot into 90 minutes of screen time and, not surprisingly, the end result is a bit of a mess. This is one of those films where every single character attempts to solve his or her problems in the most needlessly complicated and implausible way possible. Still, almost despite myself, I enjoyed Man on a Ledge. It’s just all so silly and stupid that it becomes oddly likable. The film also has two nicely done chase scenes and some of the scenes where Nick attempts to manuever about on the ledge made me go, “Agck!”

Seriously, I don’t do heights.

Trailer: Real Steel

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Arleigh

I’ve been hearing about this film called Real Steel for some time now and a trailer had even come out a couple months earlier, but it’s only with today’s release of the latest trailer that I’ve stopped to actually check it out.

From what I can see in the trailer this looks like a live-action, big-budget adaptation of that classic toy called “Rock’em, Sock’em Robots”. This being Dreamworks who have already turned one classic toy franchise into a major blockbuster film franchise then why not another toy. It stars Hugh Jackman who looks much slimmer and not as bulky as his former Wolverine self. Real Steel looks to be a father-son story that has been done so many times before, but this time with big giant boxing robots.

Further research on this film had me discovering that it’s actually based on a Richard Matheson short story called “Steel”. That story was actually a much darker, colder dystopia tale. Script changes since the screenplay and project was bought by Dreamworks in 2003 has toned down the dystopia and instead the project going more for a form of Americana nostalgia. I’m not sure if those changes were necessary. In fact, I wouldn’t have minded seeing this film go the original Matheson route.

I have feeling that despite my doubts about this film it will do quite well in the box-office. It’s a heartwarming tale with fighting robots and fathers will be taking their young sons to see this in droves. Well, except those fathers who happen to also be on-line film bloggers who may think this film not the kind of drivel and tripe to be showing to their young boys.

Real Steel is set for an October 7, 2011 release date.

Film Review: The Adjustment Bureau (dir. by George Nolfi)

Posted on March 7, 2011 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This weekend, I saw The Adjustment Bureau, a film that I’ve been looking forward to ever since I first saw the trailer back in November.

In The Adjustment Bureau, Matt Damon plays a New York politician who loses a race for the U.S. Senate and falls in love with Emily Blunt on the same night. Inspired by some advice from Blunt, Damon gives a concession speech which, to me, sounds kinda whiney but apparently, the voters of New York find it to be amazingly compelling. You should understand, of course, that this is a mainstream Hollywood version of the American political system. What that means is that Damon’s character, of course, is a Democrat who would have won that election if not for the fact that apparently, a newspaper ran a photo of him mooning some people in college. Now, seriously, consider that. Not only does this movie start out by asking us to believe that a Democrat could lose a statewide election in New York but it also asks us to believe that he would lose for that reason. Meanwhile, in the real world, Massachusetts (one of the few states more Democratic than New York) is electing a Republican who used to be a Playgirl centerfold to the Senate. Anyway, the film continues to show its political sophistication by having Damon give a speech in which he says that political consultants have too much influence in the American political system and apparently, every voter in New York goes, “Oh my God! He’s right!” I don’t claim to be an expert on politics but seriously, all of the “political” scenes in this film just ring so amazingly false.

Anyway, Damon’s speech is apparently so amazing that his career is revived and soon, he’s being spoken of as a front-runner for the other senate seat (apparently, this film takes place in a world where New York would not only elect one Republican to the Senate but two). In fact, some people are apparently talking him up as a future President. But Damon doesn’t care about that. All he cares about is winning the heart of Emily Blunt.

The Adjustment Bureau, however, has other ideas. What is the Adjustment Bureau? Well, the movie tries to keep it all ambiguous and mysterious but essentially, the members of the Adjustment Bureau are angels and the Chairman they answer to is God. And God has already mapped out Matt Damon’s destiny and Emily Blunt is not meant to be a part of it. (How Calvinistic.) However, Damon insists on pursuing her until eventually, he finds himself being continually pursued by three members of the Adjustment Bureau — the blandly corporate John Slattery, sympathetic Anthony Mackie, and finally the cold and intimidating Terrence Stamp. The whole thing finally culminates in an Inception-like chase through the streets of New York City with Damon insisting that he has free will and the Adjustment Bureau insisting that no, he does not.

What a frustrating film! The plot is intriguing and potentially thought-provoking but the film doesn’t bother with following any of its themes to any sort of real conclusion. In the end, all of the questions raised simply turn out to be an excuse to film Matt Damon being chased across various New York landmarks. Don’t get me wrong. I’m always more than happy to spend money to watch Matt Damon get chased. He looks good running for his life. But still, it’s hard not to look back at the movie and think, “After all that set-up, that’s it?” The Adjustment Bureau is like Inception without that spinning dreidel.

Still, I enjoyed The Adjustment Bureau despite myself and I can’t exactly say that I’m proud of that. With each of its vaguely New Agey themes and its rather simplistic emotional content, this is the type of film that invites me to be cynical. However, I enjoyed the movie even if I did find myself rolling my eyes during some of the more “sincere” moments. A lot of this had to do with the chemistry between Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. They made a likable and cute couple. As well, Mackie, Stamp, and especially Slattery were well-cast as members of the Adjustment Bureau. Director George Nolfi comes up with a few striking images and, if nothing else, he knows how to film people being chased. Then again, it may have just been the fact that I saw this film with a special someone and therefore, I didn’t feel like I had to be cynical. I could just embrace all the emotional silliness in all of its simple-minded glory and as a result, I had a good time.

That said, I don’t think I’ll be seeing The Adjustment Bureau a second time or buying it on DVD. Unlike 0ther guilty pleasures, I don’t imagine this is a film that’s going to hold up well on repeat viewings.