Send Help

In Sam Raimi's pitch-black thriller-comedy Send Help, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien play highly efficient budget analyst Linda and her nepo baby boss Bradley, respectively, who find themselves stranded on an island in the Gulf of Thailand after a plane crash kills everyone else on board.

When we meet Linda, she's a bundle of slatternly social awkwardness, who, nonetheless, had been promised a promotion by the company president before his death and the ascendance of his feckless, frat-daddy son, who gives the job to a golfing buddy.

Linda and Bradley are so brilliant rendered that we feel repelled by both of them for different reasons, reasons that are undoubtedly intensified as the story unfolds. Linda has aspired to "Survivor" notoriety, so she takes on the challenge of keeping the nagging / whining Bradley and herself alive. Linda's amazing fortitude and resourcefulness do not temper Bradley's domineering selfishness -- at first. A campfire heart-to-heart midway through sheds some light, so to speak, on Bradley's narcissism and Linda's neediness.

As the hours and days pass, the animosity ebbs and flows, and to the viewer's delightful surprise, the tables turn and turn again, until the last minutes of the picture when all bets are off on who will be the real "survivor" -- the analyst or the asshole

The Odyssey beef

Christopher Nolan cast Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy for his upcoming epic, The Odyssey.

Some folks are having a ball trashing the choice as inaccurate and not true to the original material etc. Helen was white!

Me thinks this is rage baiting from folks who have too much free time.

Counter-arguments against finding offense in the casting of a mythical character are sensible to me but don't seem to get much traction -- evidence this is all social media chirping.

Nolan's work is routinely visionary, and, IMO, he can do as he pleases because the film will most assuredly be a quality production.

Folks SHOULD be asking why he wasn't able to get the executive to play the part of the Cyclops Polyphemus, who, after entrapping and eating some of Ulysses' men, was outwitted and blinded by a smaller and smarter being and left crying that "Nobody" had hurt him.

 

Is This Thing On?

 

In actor/director Bradley Cooper's dramedy Is This Thing On?, Will Arnett (Arrested Development) and Laura Dern (Little Women) play Alex and Tess, a middle-aged couple and parents of 10-year-old boys (Blake Kane and Calvin Knegten).

When we meet the family, they are entering that murky territory of trial separation that will surely be followed by a divorce.

Why they're so unhappy with each other is never crystal clear, but whatever damage has been done seems irreparable, at least at first.

The couple's boys are handling the disruption better than Alex's parents (Ciarán Hinds and Christine Eberole) or longtime frenemies Christine and Balls, played by Andra Day (The United States vs. Billie Holiday) and Cooper. They offer consolation and condemnation at various turns.

Alex purportedly works in finance, but we see him mostly palling around with his boys and dodging Tess's darts, which are sharp.

One evening, Will wanders into the New York stand-up circuit despite never having done a comedy routine. As expected, he begins to channel his pain and confusion through the mic, which offers him cathartic release, even though, as one of the regulars tells him, he's a nice guy who is awful at stand-up.

When Tess discovers Alex's moonlighting, the anticipated explosion never comes, and the story takes an unexpected turn, which reveals a bit more of the dynamic between these two ambivalent people.

Cooper and Arnett wrote the often insightful screenplay with Mark Chappell (Spotlight), but offer no easy answers to the questions posed ... the main one being, what if the "for better" and "for worse" parts of marriage are actually indistinguishable from each other?

Unlike Cooper's other directorial forays in feature film (Maestro and A Star is Born), Is This Thing On? misses some narrative notes. For example, Sean Hayes (Will and Grace) and real-world husband composer Scott Icenogle are never fully integrated into Alex and Tess's trusted inner circle. They are present at gatherings but contribute little to the story or provide any real counterpoint to the other marrieds on the screen.

Luckily, Arnett and Dern are so wonderful at playing befuddlement and frustration that it seems petty to carp about a few loose threads.

 

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and The Testament of Ann Lee

 

Nia DaCosta's 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and Mona Fastvold's The Testament of Ann Lee are visually intoxicating treatises on religion, the former being a musing on faith's corrupting power and the latter on the twin paths of sanctity and delusion.

DaCosta's entry in the "28" zombie apocalypse franchise picks up the story from last year's 28 Years Later, which introduced Ralph Fiennes's survivalist/scientist Dr. Kelson, Jack O'Connell's shamanistic sadist Jimmy Crystal, and the young boy named Spike (Alfied Williams), who stumbles into Jimmy Crystal's camp and reluctantly becomes a member of his tribe of muderous renegades.

Jimmy Crystal wears a gold inverted cross and preaches about Old Nick (another name for Satan), whom he claims to serve. As part of their worship, he and his followers dispatch the naked, raging undead with great skill and torture survivors who wander into their paths. (This is what lawlessness and hopelessness produce, I suppose.)

Kelson has become "friends" with the brutish alpha male he's named Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), and has been calming him with a concoction that contains morphine. DaCosta stages an interesting interlude during Samson's drugged lucidity that provides a valuable, humanizing backstory for the giant and transforms him from horror to hero.

When Jimmy Crystal finally encounters Kelson, he mistakes the doctor's coating of red iodine for a devilish hue and asks for his commands. Thus begins the film's stunning last act, where Fiennes turns his character up to 11.

*****

Norwegian director Mona Fastvold's Ann Lee adapts the apocryphal account of the life of the title character, one of the founders of the Shaker religion and the person who established the sect in America in the late 18th century.

As played by Amanda Seyfried, Lee is a prophet and martyr to the faith that she claimed was revealed to her in visions. One of the central tenets of the faith was celibacy, a condition Lee's husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott), eventually rejected, leaving Lee and marrying another woman. It is left to the viewer to connect Lee's disdain for sex and procreation with the loss of four children in their infancy.

Lee's most devoted companions during the growth of the movement and the creation of the sect's compound in upstate New York are her brother, William (Lewis Pullman), her emissary and protector; and her friend Mary, played by Thomasin McKenzie, who narrates the tale.

Seyfried delivers a performance of remarkable conviction, despite the astounding nature of Lee's revelations and her claims to being Jesus Christ returned to earth. The unsustainable nature of the faith's doctrine of celibacy for all members would suggest it was not divinely inspired.

The film is superbly crafted and artful and partly told through lovely, minimalist songs written by alternative composer Daniel Blumberg and based on Shaker hymns. And the movie's intricate dances were choreographed by Celia Rowlson-Hall.

John Wick Revisited

At the beginning of John Wick (2014), the arrogantly entitled son of a Russian mobster (Alfie Allen and Michael Nyqvist, respectively) approaches Wick (Keanu Reeves) -- a recently widowed, retired master assassin -- and asks how much he will take for his vintage Mustang while petting Wick's beagle pup, not knowing who Wick is.

"She's not for sale," Wick says, turning the key.
The kid says in Russian, "Everything has a price, bitch!"
Wick, whose native language is Russian, responds, "Not this bitch." And drives off.

But, rather than leave it alone, the kid and his henchmen come to Wick's home in the middle of the night, beat him, kill the dog his wife left for him, and take the car -- not knowing the "bitch" and "little nobody" they'd just rolled is a sleeping giant.

Thus begins the globetrotting film franchise about a good man born into circumstances he could not control, who must nonetheless return to a life he despises to be free of it.

Never afraid to stretch a metaphor, I see parallels between this scene and its aftermath and the current episode of the executive and Greenland. The executive comes from and thrives in a purely transactional world, where everything has a price, and where that which can't be bought will be taken.

Nothing has intrinsic value, like Wick's beloved Mustang; the only value to the regime is material. Everything is boiled down to attributes that can packaged, monetized and sold. (While some might find a disconnect between this viewpoint and the executive's supposed Christianity, to me, it matches the christianist approach to religion, which turns Jesus into a brand and church buildings into malls, which, ironically, more than a few of them once were.)

In the case of Greenland, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization might reveal itself to be the sleeping giant that has stated without equivocation the Danish island is not for sale and will be defended if that declaration is not sufficient. Undoubtedly, NATO would like to avoid major military confrontation, but senseless provocation demands a response.

The executive's recent hedging on moving forward with his threat to take the island might suggest he is not like the arrogant thug in John Wick and will not press the matter ... for now. But, unfortunately, the giant is awake and won't be slumbering again.

The Secret Agent

Brazilian writer/director Kleber Mendonça Filho's The Secret Agent is essential viewing for cinephiles, globalists, social justice warriors, and, well, anybody who loves human beings.

The film is a slow-burn, with a deliberate and strategic pace that reflects Filho's background as a journalist. His camera is steady and patient, and true to the thriller genre, dread lurks just outside of each frame.

In the first minutes of the film, Filho shows us Brazil in the '70s, a violent and corrupt place, where corpses lie in the sun for days, drawing vermin but no police.

Golden Globe-winner Wagner Moura (Narco) plays Marcelo, a Brazilian man who takes shelter in a refugee lodge in his hometown of Recife, Pernambuco, for reasons that become clearer as the story unfolds.

Before we even know why, we learn Marcelo's young son (Enzo Nunes) is being reared by the boy's grandparents, cinema operator Alexandre and his wife, Lenira (Carlos Francisco and Aline Marta Maia). Marcelo sees his son and promises they will be living together soon. (One of the more endearing scenes in the entire picture, which is at points violent, grisly and forbidding.)

Marcelo, whose real name is Armand, gets help from a member of the resistance underground (Buda Lira) in landing a position in the office that issues state IDs. It is there Marcelo looks for papers about his birth mother and meets with other members of the resistance to get passports for him and his son.

In the meantime, assassins have been contracted by a murderous and vengeful industrialist (Luciano Chirolli) to find Armand and silence him. Once that is revealed, the picture becomes a race, the story driven by uncertainty of who will succeed.

Along the way, we see the faces and hear the voices of castoffs trying to find safety in the open, a condition that until then has eluded them. I trust some American audiences will find haunting parallels between these displaced people, the political corruption and law enforcement abuses in 1977 Brazil and the state of affairs in the U.S. today.

The Five Chinese Brothers

 

I start volunteering with a reading program at a neighborhood grammar school this week, and I've been reflecting on my experience with reading, something I've always loved.

Folks of a certain age might remember The Five Chinese Brothers storybook from their school library. It was one of the first books I read on my own.

The book was written by Swiss-American author and librarian Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese, and published in 1938. It was based on the ancient Chinese folktale The Ten Brothers.

The story is about the eponymous siblings who have special gifts or abilities. In the Chinese folktale , which has been traced back to the 14th-17th centuries, the abilities were of the super-power variety. Interestingly, in some versions the great talents included diplomacy and strategizing.

Over time, the number of brothers in the tales flexed from five to six to seven, and in at least one adaptation the brothers are sisters.

One retailer on Amazon is selling a hardback of the first edition for $134, which is excessive considering modernized versions and adaptations are readily available, and they don't feature Wiese's dated "pie-face" drawings.

Then again, maybe some buyers think this curious anachronism, which at one time might have been used to shape children's thinking about Asians, is worth owning.

 

The Plague

 

The horror of Charlie Polinger's unnerving debut film The Plague is in how close the picture's story cuts to the bone of the viewer's own experiences with childhood isolation, cruelty, and general confusion. 

 

Joel Edgerton, one of the film's producers, stars as a boy's water polo coach at a summer camp where young Ben, an impressive Everett Blunck, is the new player, paddling fiercely to be accepted as one of the lads while also wanting to befriend another boy, Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a strange lad who has a serious skin condition. The team has dubbed Eli's pimples and scars "the plague," and spun a story about its contagiousness, turning the boy into a pariah.

 

Check that. One teammate, the stunningly sadistic and machiavellian Jake (Kayo Martin), concocted the story and has imposed his will on the other campers, especially the half dozen in his select circle. Many viewers will be chilled by Jake's cold detachment from the harm he does to those around him, his control over others, how he gets them to do his bidding through sheer will and a needling smile.

 

The nightmare for Ben -- an insecure, gangling 13-year-old whose homelife has been disrupted by divorce -- is finding a safe space in such a toxic place where his attempts to win Jake's favor are disastrous. Edgerton's Coach Wags is well-intentioned but poorly equipped to handle a team of pre-adolescents poised on the edge of true ferality.

 

Polinger's script and direction are razor sharp; his keen insight into human behavior -- not just that of young people, mind you -- makes The Plague an intriguing motion picture, with three terrific central performances by young actors. The film is a bitter but brilliant first feature film for Polinger.

 

X2: X-Men United (redux)

 

 

In 2003's X2:X-Men United -- Bryan Singer's folo-up to his Marvel extravaganza from 2000, X-Men -- a crazed mutant-hunter named Stryker (Brian Cox) secretly stages a mutant attack on the U.S. president (Cotter Smith) so that Stryker's special forces will be authorized to round up and imprison mutants all over the country, starting at a school run by mutant champion Professor X (Patrick Stewart).

 

Stryker, the self-loathing and war-mongering father of a mutant, wants to cleanse the population, make the world safe for normal people. He has created a mind-control drug that turns mutants into compliant servants and then turns them on one another. 

 

Stryker wants a war and is ready to use fear and disinformation to ignite one. 

 

But he underestimates the resolve and resources of those willing to fight forces blinded by hate.

 

Great Lesson.

 

Pluribus

What makes Apple TV's Pluribus so compelling?

I think it's the essential question at its core:

What do we do when peace, love and understanding are obtainable but at the risk of individual free will?

The story's central character -- a bestselling author of sci-fi / fantasy fiction -- finds herself one of about a dozen people on the planet who have not been assimilated into a collective that was spawned by an alien transmission.

The audience's assumption is a race of beings light years away thought the Earth could use a communitarian boost and sent the formula. Once absorbed, the assimilated person becomes one with all life on the planet, which means nothing is killed or harvested, which, as one might expect, leads to complications other than the agency matter mentioned earlier.

The dyspeptic novelist Carol Sturka is played by a tireless and committed Rhea Seehorn, the recent Globe winner for her performance. The calculus in creator Vince Gilligan's series has viewers being both drawn to and repulsed by Carol's crankiness and the easy peace the rest of the world seems to have found through "Joining."

Most interesting is recently widowed Sturka's relationship with her "chaperone," Zosia (Karolina Wydra), and the evolution of their platonic and romantic dance. Through this element and a host of others, Pluribus probes perhaps in ways never done before, the human conundrum of uniting heart and mind -- not from person to person -- but in each of us, individually.

Pluribus invites us to search for certainty in existence, make our own choices, avoid the temptation to exploit those who would allow such abuse, and accept that sometimes "love" and "kindness" are NOT the same thing.