Werewolves Within (dir. by Josh Ruben)

Posted on October 30, 2021 by Leonard Wilson

Mention the name Ubisoft to most people, and most responses are about their videogames. Assassin’s Creed, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six, and my personal favorite, Tom Clancy’s The Division. Ubisoft also has a movie production arm to it, along with an effects division called Hybride. With all that, I’m surprised Ubisoft hasn’t tried to develop their own films before. “Werewolves Within” may be one of the better Videogame adaptations around.

Earlier this year, the film premiered on the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Tribeca at Home” digital offering. I was able to watch the film there (a total of 3 times – two because I enjoyed it, and a third to showcase the film to my cousin, who also liked it), along with a few other films.

Werewolves Within is the tale of Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson, Veep, We’re the Millers) a Ranger taking on new duties in a snowy Vermont town. He’s a pretty nice fellow – he rides under the speed limit and is considerate of others. While he’s getting to know his new neighbors, they are all forced to hunker down during a major storm. Of course, things become a little weird in the form of power outages and quite possibly a werewolf running around town, but who better to have around you than your neighbors in such stressful times? Can Wheeler survive in the town and discover the mystery? The film moves like The Thing or The Beast Must Die in that the members of the town begin to suspect each other is the killer (or killers, like Scream) in question.

The film is peppered with familiar faces, such as Milana Vayntrub (NBC’s This is Us), Harvey Guillen (FX’s What We Do In the Shadows), Glenn Fleshler (HBO’s Barry), Wayne Duvall (The Hunt), & Catherine Curtin (Netflix’s Stranger Things). The banter between them all is fun to watch and each one brings a bit of comedy to the table. Richardson & Vayntrub in particular are the stand outs, though.

Where Werewolves Within really shines is the pacing. Most of the films at the Tribeca Film Festival have an average running time of about 100 minutes. How those minutes are used are important. Don’t believe me? Pair Tenet and WW84, which both have a running time of about 2:30 minutes (about as long as Avengers: Endgame) Werewolves Within moves from scene to scene at a pretty brisk pace. Fans of Ubisoft’s The Division may recognize the New York Shortbows in the movie, which officially makes them canon in the tale.

If the movie has any drawbacks, while there’s horror, the focus is more on the comedy. This isn’t terrible, but if you’re walking in expecting something like Dog Soldiers, Werewolves Within isn’t exactly that. It does handle it well. One other nitpick is that there’s an overused camera technique where the someone on screen does a really slow pivot, bringing their subject into our view. The first time is nice, but after about 3 times, you almost expect it. Again, not horrid, but a little odd. The movie also has it’s share of gore, but it’s a bit light compared to some other films.

Overall, Werewolves Within is a great late night treat that’ll have you laughing, with some nice jump scares.

The Films of 2020: The Trial of the Chicago 7 (dir by Aaron Sorkin)

Posted on January 19, 2021 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Trial of the Chicago 7, the latest film from Aaron Sorkin, is a fairly mediocre and rather forgettable film. Because of that mediocrity, it stands a pretty good chance of doing very well at the Oscars later this year.

Aaron Sorkin specializes in political fan fiction. He writes plays, movies and television shows that address big and controversial issues in the most safely liberal way possible. Whenever Sorkin writes about politics, there’s not a single debate that can’t be won by one long, overdramatic speech, preferably delivered in an office or a conference room while everyone who disagrees nervously stares at the ground, aware that they’ll never be able to match the rhetorical brilliance of their opponents. It’s a rather dishonest way to portray the ideological divide but it’s one that’s beloved by people who want to be political without actually having to do much thinking. Sorkin is the poet laureate of the keyboard activists, the people who brag about how their cleverly-worded tweets “totally owned the MyPillow guy.” (One sure sign of a keyboard activist is the excessive pride over rhetorically owning people who are ludicrously easy to own. These are the people who think that Tom Arnold arguing about the electoral college with Kirstie Alley is the modern-day equivalent of the Lincoln/Douglas debates.)

The Trial of the Chicago 7, which Sorkin not only wrote but also directed, deals with a real-life event, the 1969 trial of eight political activists who were charged with conspiracy and crossing state lines with the intention of inciting riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (Black Panther Bobby Seale was ultimately tried separately from the other defendants, leading to the Chicago 8 becoming the Chicago 7.) Sacha Baron Cohen plays Abbie Hoffman, the fun-loving activist who delights in upsetting the establishment. Eddie Redmayne played Tom Hayden, who takes himself and his activism very seriously and who worries that Hoffman’s antics in the courtroom are going to discredit progressives for generations to come. Hoffman ridicules Hayden for being a rich boy who is rebelling against his father. Hayden attacks Hoffman for not thinking about how his actions are going to be perceived by the rest of America. Sorkin the screenwriter is clearly on Hayden’s side while Sorkin the director keeps finding himself drawn to Hoffman, if just because Hoffman is the more entertaining character. Hoffman gets to make jokes while Hayden has to spend the entire film with a somewhat constipated expression on his face.

As is typical of Sorkin’s political work, the film raises issues without really exploring them. We learn that the defendants were all arrested during anti-war protests but the film never really explores why they’re against the war. It’s mentioned that David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch) is a pacifist who even refused to fight in World War II but at no point do we learn what led to him becoming a pacifist. When Hoffman and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) talk about how they feel that the government holds people like them in contempt and that they shouldn’t have to fight in a war that they don’t believe in, Sorkin’s script has them speak in the type of simplistic platitudes that could just as easily have been uttered by a MAGA supporter talking about the war in Afghanistan. If all you knew about these men was what you learned in this film, you would never know that Hayden, Hoffman, and the rest of the Chicago 7 were activists both before and after the Vietnam War. You’d never know that there was more to their ideology than just opposition to the Vietnam War. The film never really digs into anyone’s beliefs and motivations. Instead, everyone might as well just have “Good” or “Evil” stamped on their forehead.

Sorkin’s simplistic approach is most obvious when it comes to Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). With Seale, the film is more interested in how other react to him than in the man himself or his activism. The film’s most shocking moment — when Judge Hoffman (Frank Langella) orders Seale to be literally bound and gagged in the courtroom — actually did happen but the film mostly seems to use it as an opportunity to show that even the lead prosecutor (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is disgusted by the government’s heavy-handedness. Seale and the Black Panthers are used more as symbols than as actual characters.

Since this is an Aaron Sorkin film, the action is male-dominated. It’s justified as the Chicago 7 and their lawyers were all men. Still, it’s hard not to notice that the only prominent female characters are an undercover cop who betrays the protestors and a receptionist who is frequently reprimanded by the men in the film. One black woman in a maid’s uniform does get a chance to reprimand Hayden for not speaking out when Bobby Seale was gagged but she’s never even given a name. As often happens with women of color in films like this, she’s only there to remind the white heroes to do the right thing.

Watching The Trial of the Chicago 7, I found myself thinking about how lucky Aaron Sorkin was to get David Fincher as the director of The Social Network. A smart director with a strong and unique style, Fincher was able to temper Sorkin’s tendency toward pompousness. Unfortunately, as a director, Aaron Sorkin is no David Fincher. While Sorkin has definitely established his own style as a writer, he directs like someone who learned how to stage a crowd-pleasing moment from watching Spielberg but who, at the same time, never noticed the sense of playfulness that Spielberg, especially early in his career, infused within the best of those scenes. It’s all soaring rhetoric and dramatic reaction shots and cues to let us know when we’re supposed to applaud. As a director, Sorkin never challenges the audience or lets the film truly come to any sort of spontaneous life. Instead, he adopts a somewhat cumbersome flashback-laden approach. The story never quite comes alive in the way that the similar courtroom drama Mangrove did. It’s all very safe, which is one reason why I imagine The Trial of the Chicago 7 is as popular as it is. It’s a film that allows the viewers to celebrate the fantasy of activism without having to deal with the messy reality of all the complications that come along with taking an actual stand. It’s a film that encourages you to pat yourself on the back for simply having watched and agreeing that people have the right to protest.

I will say that Sorkin made some good casting choices. Langella is memorably nasty of the judge and Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a good job as the prosecutor. Eddie Redmaye is a bit of a drag as Tom Hayden but Alex Sharp is likable as Hayden’s friend, Rennie Davis. Michael Keaton has an effective cameo as Ramsey Clark. The film presents Clark as being a bit of a wise liberal and the film’s epilogue doesn’t mention that Clark went on to a lucrative career of providing legal aide to murderous dictators and anti-Semites. (Lyndon LaRouche was one prominent Ramsey Clark client.)

The Trial of the Chicago 7 will probably do well come Oscar-time. In many ways, it almost feels like a generic Oscar movie. It’s about a historical event, it’s political without being radical, and it presents itself as being far more thoughtful than it actually is. That’s been a winning combo for many films over the years.

Film Review: The Kitchen (dir by Andrea Berloff)

Posted on November 24, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Eh. Who cares?

I mean, seriously, do you understand what I mean? Sometimes, you just see a film that leaves you feeling so indifferent that it’s a struggle to even think of anything to say about it. That’s the way I feel about The Kitchen, which is neither bad enough to hatewatch nor good enough to recommend. It’s a mediocre film, one that would be totally forgettable if not for a few remarkably inept choices made by the director and the cast.

Melissa McCarthy is Kathy Brennan. Tiffany Haddish is Ruby O’Connell. Elisabeth Moss is Claire Walsh. The year is 1978 and all three of them live in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York. All three of them are also married to men who are involved with the Irish Mob. When their husbands all get busted by the FBI and the new mob boss refuses to help the three women pay the bills, they team up and take over the neighborhood themselves. With the help of their number one enforcer, Gabriel O’Malley (Domhnall Gleeson), the women prove that they can be even more ruthless than their husbands and their competitors.

And really, this should have been fun. I’m all about girl power and I’m half-Irish. If I was going to join the mob, I would definitely join the Irish Mob. But, seriously, The Kitchen is not just a mess but it’s a dreadfully heavy-handed mess as well. I knew that this film was going to suck as soon as James Brown started singing, “This is a man’s world,” over the opening credits because it was just such an obvious choice to go with. To me, picking the song showed that the filmmakers weren’t really interested in giving too much thought to what the film was about. Instead, they just said, “Hey, that’s a really on-the-nose choice! Let’s go with it!” About an hour later, Clare and Gabriel were making love while Carry On My Wayward Son blasted on the soundtrack and I found myself wondering if this film’s soundtrack was put together by listening to a random classic rock station and just jotting down the names of the first ten songs that were played.

Adding to the disappointing atmosphere of the film is a talented cast, everyone of whom appears to be acting in a different movie from everyone else. Melissa McCarthy, for instance, gets all of the dramatic scenes but gives a comedic performance, one that feels like it’s been assembled from outtakes of the “awkward humor” bits of Ghostbusters. Tiffany Haddish is ruthless but it’s a very one-note type of ruthlessness. It gets boring after a while. Elisabeth Moss gives the best performance out of the three but her character often seems to be pushed to the side. Once Claire starts threatening to shoot people, you can tell that the film doesn’t know what to do with her.

You also have to feel bad for the supporting cast, all of whom deserve better than this film. Annabella Sciorra plays a Mafia wife who walks up to the women in the middle of the street and tells them that they’re just like Gloria Steinem and, when she shows up, you can’t help but think that Sciorra would have been a better pick for the role of Kathy than Melissa McCarthy. Then Common shows up as an FBI agent because, for some reason, Common always plays a member of law enforcement in films like this. Margo Matindale gets a few good scenes as an Irish mafia matriarch but her character disappears from the film far too quickly.

It’s a mess of a film. Kathy, Ruby, and Claire’s rise to power happens too abruptly to be credible and none of the subsequent betrayals make much sense. Appropriately, for a gangster film, it’s violent but the violence is so repetitive that it gets a little bit dull after a while. None of the characters are really memorable enough for their subsequent deaths to generate much of a reaction. An hour into the film, you just find yourself thinking, “Oh, hey, that dude’s dead now. Yay, I guess.” Much like Captain Marvel, The Kitchen often seems to only be interested in girl power as a way to disguise the fact that the script kind of sucks. I kept waiting for one of the male gangsters to shout, “The ancient prophecy said that I will be defeated by no man!,” just so Melissa McCarthy could respond, “Yes …. by no man!” It didn’t happen but maybe they’ll get around to it in the sequel.

Film Review: Lincoln (dir. by Steven Spielberg)

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I am a history nerd.

If you’ve read my previous reviews here on the Shattered Lens, that’s not necessarily a major revelation. Still, before I talk about Steven Spielberg’s latest film, the sure-to-be Oscar nominated Lincoln, you should know where I’m coming from as a reviewer. Cinema may be my number one love but history, and especially political history, runs a close second. To me, there is nothing more fascinating than learning how those in the past both viewed and dealt with the issues that we still face in the present. Whereas some people take pride in being able to name every player that’s ever played for the Dallas Cowboys, I take pride in the fact that I can not only name every President and Vice President in order but I can also tell you exactly who they had to defeat in order to serve in those offices.

I love history and therefore, it was hard for me not to feel as if Lincoln was a film that was made specifically for me. Covering the final four months of the life of the 16th president, this film tells the story of Lincoln’s struggle to pass the 13th Amendment and to bring an end to the U.S. Civil War. The film also documents Lincoln’s troubled marriage to the unstable Mary and his son’s decision to enlist in the Union Army. Even though Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner don’t include any vampires*, there’s still a lot going on in Lincoln and it is to their credit that the film remains compelling despite the fact that everyone already knows how the story is going to end.

Daniel Day-Lewis is getting a lot of critical acclaim for his performance in the title role and, for once, I actually have to agree with the critics. Abraham Lincoln is one of the most iconic figures in American history. He is such an icon that, at times, it’s hard to believe that this larger-than-life figure, with his stove-pipe hat and his homely face, was an actual human being who lived and breathed and died like any other human being. It’s easier to think of him in the same way that Jesus Christ used to be represented in films like Ben-Hur, as an inspiring character who is always standing just a little bit off-camera. The brilliance of Day-Lewis’s performance is that he makes us believe that this legendary figure could actually exist with all the rest of history’s mortals. For lack of a better term, Day-Lewis humanizes Lincoln. His performance contains all the bits of the Lincoln legend: the fatalistic melancholy, the steely resolve, the quick humor, and occasional flashes of self-doubt. The genius of the performance is the way that it takes all the legendary pieces and arranges them to create a portrait of a very believable man.

Though the film is dominated by Day-Lewis’s lead performance, the film’s supporting cast does a good job at bringing to life the people around Lincoln. Whenever one film can manage to find roles for Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Jared Harris, James Spader, John Hawkes, and Jackie Earle Haley, you’ve got good reason to be optimistic about what you’re about to see. Probably the film’s showiest supporting role goes to Tommy Lee Jones, who plays the firebrand abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Admittedly, Tommy Lee Jones gives a standard Tommy Lee Jones performance here but, especially when paired with Day-Lewis’s more internal acting style, the end result is still fun to watch. Also giving a good performance is Sally Field, who plays Lincoln’s mentally unstable wife. Historians have rarely been kind (or fair) to Mary Lincoln but Field makes her into a difficult but sympathetic figure. Finally, even though the role of Lincoln’s son is not a challenging one, I’m always happy whenever Joseph Gordon-Levitt shows up onscreen.

Ultimately, however, Lincoln is a Steven Spielberg film. Spielberg is a very good director but he’s also a very safe one. The same can be said of Lincoln as a film. The film’s cinematography, art design, and costume design are all brilliantly done and award-worthy but it’s still hard not to occasionally wish that Spielberg would have enough faith in his audience that he wouldn’t feel the need to have John Williams provide constant musical cues to let us know what we are supposed to be feeling about what we’re experiencing. If you’re looking for hints of moral ambiguity, an unflinching examination of the rivers of blood that flowed on the Civil War battlefield, or for an in-depth portrait of Lincoln’s personal demons (and most historians agree that he had a few), you might want to look elsewhere. This is not Martin Scorsese’s Lincoln. This is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. This is a film that is meant to be inspiring (as opposed to thought-provoking) and, for the most part, it succeeds.

I have to admit that I went into Lincoln expecting to be disappointed. Ever since the film first went into production in 2011, websites like Awards Daily have been hyping this film to death. Before many of them had even seen the completed film, online critics were announcing that both the film and Daniel Day-Lewis were the clear front-runners for the Oscars in 2013. As anyone who has read my previous reviews on this site knows, nothing turns me off more than the bandwagon mentality of the critical establishment. Often times, when a film is embraced as vehemently and as early as Lincoln has been, I feel almost honor-bound to be a hundred times more critical of it than I would be of a film like Step Up Revolution.

However, Lincoln is a rarity. It’s a film that, for the most part, actually lives up to all the hype.

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*I imagine that little joke will cause a lot of confusion to anyone who, ten years in the future, happens to stumble across this review. To you, future reader who has forgotten all about Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I can only apologize.