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.