Wolf

Wolves are the largest members of the dog family. Adult wolves have 42 teeth. They prefer to eat large mammals like deer and moose. They can weigh up to 175 pounds.

All of these trivial facts are more interesting than most of what we get in the 1994 romantic horror flick Wolf, the Mike Nichols-directed take on werewolf films from a screenplay by Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick. Wolf is a film in which I had mostly low expectations that were by the end met. The first half of the film is wherein the potential for something greater lies. This is a werewolf movie, but our wolfman here is a sophisticated yet banal editor-in-chief, making this story ripe to do whatever it wants to do, and yet it doesn't take the bait. Early test reactions to the ending were negative, so a new, action-packed one was shot. By that point, though, I couldn't wait for it to be over.

Jack Nicholson (in his second-last of seven horror movies in his career) plays Will Randall, a successful editor-in-chief at a large publishing house in New York. Trouble is brewing for Randall, however, as the tycoon Raymond Alden (Christopher Plummer) has recently purchased the publishing house and plans on replacing Randall with his protégé, Stewart Swinton (James Spader). To make matters much worse for Randall, while driving home in snowy weather after negotiating a deal in Vermont, he accidentally hits a black wolf. While attempting to move the seemingly dead animal off the road, the wolf suddenly reanimates and bites him in the hand before darting back into the woods, where it's protected by its pack. (Another fun fact from wolvesmatter.org that's more interesting than Wolf: "Wolf packs work together to hunt for food. The loss of one wolf from a pack can damage cohesion of the group and can cause packs to break up.") Randall escapes and hurries home.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) for Randall, things start to drastically change for him. His senses are heightened, so much so that he can tell what kind of liquor someone has recently drunk and can edit manuscripts without his reading glasses. His hair starts to grow back and become youthful-looking again. He can hear virtually anything, including every conversation in the building. His sex drive rapidly increases. These newfound heightened senses give him a new purpose, mainly for revenge against the back-stabbing sycophant Stewart. "Ruthless" is the word that's used to describe him, and the scenes of him being so are the most captivating to watch.

But Wolf is a werewolf movie, and it's the "man-wolf" scenes that are the most ridiculous, expectedly. Going into a movie like this understandably requires a certain level of tolerance toward the silliness and definitely loads of suspension of disbelief, but Wolf takes that agreement for granted. The film made a profit, though, earning $131 million worldwide from a large $70 million budget, so despite the subpar appearance of the horror effects and sets, audiences at least somewhat embraced the...I don't know what to call it—camp, I guess, as Randall increasingly metamorphoses into a wolf and howls at the moon. You've heard of An American Werewolf in London; this is "A Callous Werewolf in New York Not Afraid to Take On Armed Men About to Mug Him."    

Nichols certainly pulled out the big guns for this film, his only horror movie. In addition to uncredited screenwriting work from his longtime collaborator Elaine May, the score is by Ennio Morricone, the makeup effects are by Rick Baker, and the production design is by Bo Welch. All of them, however, put in much better work before and since, especially Baker, whose makeup effects make Spader basically look like a thin version of Fat Bastard and Nicholson look like an older Wolverine. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about Morricone, Welch, or Baker's contributions to the film; the same could largely be said about the acting, and certainly the characters. Other than Nicholson's Will Randall, every other character is about as two-dimensional as possible. The other huge star here is Michelle Pfeiffer, who worked with Nicholson on The Witches of Eastwick. Pfeiffer plays Alden's daughter, often in trouble with the law and not a big fan of her father. Pfeiffer does a fine job, no doubt, but her character only serves as a sex object for Randall and to a lesser extent another element of animosity between the protagonist and his jerk boss, Alden. 

Both Nicholson and Spader overdo it from time to time, but it's less bearable watching the latter do it. Nichols at least got Nicholson to tone down the obnoxiousness that was present in Carnal Knowledge, the first film the two worked on together. (They also collaborated together on Heartburn.) That being said, it's impossible to take your eyes off Nicholson. For one, he's in basically every scene, usually at the center. Even watching him eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and drink a glass of milk can be fascinating. It may not be his most challenging work ever, but he and some of the others make it look like a piece of cake. There are also a variety of pre-stardom cast member appearances here in almost blink-and-you'll-miss-them moments, such as Allison Janney, David Schwimmer, and Peter Gerety.  

Wolf is usually rather predictable; the only thing anticipated about it that follows through is its absurdity. The simplest way of describing Wolf is that at times, it's more or less watchable. But it certainly becomes less so during its second half. One of the fundamental problems with Wolf is that it's not sure what it wants to do. Is it a conventional horror feature? Does it want to satirize the dog-eat-dog world of editing? Is it trying to do something different? All of the above? Who knows, and who cares? 

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The Many Saints of Newark

This review contains minor spoilers.

"Your mama always said you'd be the chosen one."

Fourteen years after the iconic HBO show The Sopranos ended its seven-year run as a critical and audience hit, fans' patience has been rewarded with a prequel titled The Many Saints of Newark. It may not exactly be what fans would wish for in a perfect world, but it is likely to suffice anyway. Directed by Alan Taylor and written by Lawrence Konner and show creator Dominic Chase, familiar characters quickly show up. They are obviously played by younger actors, but fans of the show will recognize them immediately. Younger versions of Junior Soprano (Corey Stoll), Livia Soprano (Vera Farmiga), Paulie Walnuts (Billy Magnussen), and a pre-toupée Silvo Dante (John Magaro) all show up. The gang's all here. 

Much of the hype around the film when it was in production centered on the fact that it was an origin story of Tony Soprano, the central, groundbreaking anti-hero of the famous show who was played by the late, great James Gandolfini, and that the character would be played as a teenager by Gandolfini's son, Michael. But Tony is surprisingly not the main character here. That part goes to Alessandro Nivola in a rare starring role as Dickie Moltisanti, Tony's uncle, who basically is the only authority figure Tony will listen to. Nivola does a fine job here, although, because Uncle Dickie (a character whose presence looms largely over The Sopranos) is not as eccentric as some of the other characters mentioned, it's difficult to imagine his mileage lasting as long as other figures have. As a character, Dickie may seem initially to possess at least some decency, or at least he might not be as monstrous as the others; we get sporadic reminders that this is not true.

Ray Liotta makes a triumphant return to the cinematic gangster world more than three decades after Goodfellas helped turn him into a star. Here, he plays two characters: Dickie's father ("Hollywood Dick") and his uncle he never really knew (Sally), locked away in prison for murder. The two older Moltisanti twins are very much a yin-and-yang duo: Hollywood Dick is bombastic and charismatic, with a frightening and violent temper (and it's often his new, young wife from Italy played by Michela De Rossi who is at the receiving end of it), while Sally is sullen and remorseful, rotting away but enjoying the small things, like jazz music. Sally is like a priest or counselor to Dickie (it's the closest we get to a recreation of the therapy scenes in the original show); it's clear Dickie is going to see him because of his guilt, but he won't reveal much to his uncle, only lies. Uncle Sally can see right through him, though. It's a better acting challenge than Liotta has had in the past few years. 

The Sopranos was one of the whitest shows around, but it's at least a little more diverse this time around, largely because of a major part of its setting: the 1967 Newark riots. Chase originally had an idea for this project—that of four white guys being sent to Vietnam during the riots—in the beginning part of his career, but the idea didn't go anywhere. This central element to the story (the way Black people have been treated in this country, especially by the police and the military industrial complex) adds an element of politics the show only occasionally dabbled in (often through Tony inching his way into modernity, often because of the lectures from his social-justice-warrior daughter). This angle makes its way to the Moltisanti/Soprano family by way of a rising criminal named Harold McBrayer, who's played by Leslie Odom Jr. Harold and Dickie are associates, but between little insults and a host of other tensions, their relationship sours, and they soon become enemies.

Despite the commendable acting from Odom, Nivola, and Liotta, there is an enormous emotional weight to the project due to Gandolfini's presence. Tony is still the most interesting character here. The most compelling tragedy to witness in The Many Saints of Newark isn't the rise and fall of Dickie Moltisanti or the rivalry between gangsters, but instead the inability of Tony's mother to be a good parent. It's not as if Livia is the sole reason Tony turned out to be a ruthless, murderous mob boss, but her ineffectiveness as a mother is a large part of what made the show so iconic because that's one of the major reasons Tony ends up in therapy.   

For the record, I liked The Sopranos (a lot, I think). Maybe not as much as The Wire, but I still liked it. I do, however, still hold reservations about the show, namely its depictions of violence against women. In The Sopranos, that violence is often inexcusably gratuitous, like in the controversial episode "University," in which a twenty-year-old woman played by Ariel Kiley is beaten to death in a parking lot by the gangster Ralphie Ciffaretto (Joe Pantoliano). The people behind the scenes would try to explain the necessity of depicting these gangsters as monsters. (This wasn't necessary, though. We understood they're terrible people going into the show way back in 1999; we've all seen Goodfellas.) Yet depicting such a scene and then trying to mansplain it away reveals issues with the series: Like basically all of the gangster flicks Martin Scorsese has directed, The Sopranos is a show (as Anne Cohen reminded us a few years ago) by, of, and for men. The show was a rarity in pop culture: it had numerous great, interesting, terrifically written and acted roles played by women, and yet it also possessed a male-only perspective on their depiction. The issue again roars its ugly head in The Many Saints of Newark.  

As a film itself, it's essentially fine, partly due to it having impossibly high expectations. But what works, works. It features a great soundtrack, and its actors, as mentioned, do a commendable job. It might not be as awesome as some kind of Sopranos Part II might have been, but it's recommendable nevertheless. 

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