Movie Nation

You can see, hear and feel the strain in the Brazilian comedy “Cheers to Life (Vida a Vida),” the great effort expended to achieve “cute.”

It’s sweet enough, and sweetly sentimental. But for a “finding your (living) roots” story that takes a couple of cousins to Israel to meet a granny they never knew, that’s never quite enough.

So we’ve got to trick granddad Benjamin, whom they’ve never met, lie to him and drug him for a “Weekend at Benjamins” bit. They’ve got to debate whether they’re kissing/copulating cousins, and be as dainty about that as possible. And they’ve got to see the historic sights — the Wailing Wall, Dead Sea, King Solomon’s Mines, etc. — on a Holy Land tour with cute nuns, other tourists and a comically flamboyant Portuguese speaking tour guide.

It’s a competently made film, with flashbacks from the distant past setting up a somewhat cloying story. But the laughs and delights are few and the sentimental finale is contrived and clumsy.

It’s about three heirloom “pendants”(lockets) that “only the bravest women in this family” wear. Decades after she was given one by her mother, who died young, orphaned Jessica (irrepressible Thati Lopes) stumbles across one to match the one her mother gave her.

That’s how she tracks down the “cousin,” Gabriel (Rodrigo Simas), a photographer in the process of being kicked out of his model-girlfriend’s (Aline Dias) apartment. He was selling jewelry, heirlooms included.

They didn’t know they were related, that they have a shared ancestor who fled an arranged marriage and ran off to Israel with her true love. But as both are broke — Jessica is broke enough to “borrow” and pawn jewelry from the antiques store where she works for plane fare — they’ll jet off to meet the mysterious Hava (Regina Braga) and her husband Ben, Brazilian-born tour business owner Ben (Jonas Bloch).

“They’ll think I came here for the money,” Jessica whines. As Jessica and Gabriel have haggled over “inheritance” percentages, “But you came here for the money” (in Portuguese, or dubbed into English) is the only response to that.

They will be fish out of water, trapped with tourists on a “Grandpa Ben” tour, guided by Ramirez Ramirez (Diego Martins), doing everything they can think of to draw the old man owner into the tour so that they can meet him, tell him who they are and meet grandma.

Nude bathing on a no nudity beach in Tel Aviv should do the trick. Ben has to show up to bail them out. But Jessica can’t bring herself to fessing up. Ben is sad. Hava? She’s left boring, trapped in routine Ben.

There’s nothing for it but to “help” Ben find Hava in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Eitat, the Dead Sea or wherever Ben figures she might be.

Lopes gets most of the funny lines — comforting a woman recovering in a hospital with “My dream is to get old and have as many plastic surgeries as you.” She’s a less-than-convincing saleswoman, selling articles in the antiques store by extolling “the nostalgia” of “the ’60s,” before admitting how that decade played out in Brazil.

“Set aside the dictatorship and the many being tortured and murdered” and it was a pretty stylish time, for sure.

There’s tentative chemistry between Lopes and Simas. But that requires us and them to get past the “cousins” thing, and to forget his previous lover was a model.

The movie peaks as Jessica finds herself getting the Bat Mitzvah she never had and learning that The Wailing Wall isn’t for weeping. It’s for “making requests.”

The picture blows the “fish out of water” element of this “journey of discovey,” with “a phony Jew” and a guy who only remembers the Hebrew he needed to get through his Bar Mitzvah finding Portuguese speakers every time they need one. And the travelogue part of the picture is pretty but over-familiar.

The best joke is the one “Palestinian” bit in the picture, the fear of being “sold to a sheikh” on camelback when they get lost near King Solomon’s Mines. But a few others pay off.

It’s still not much of a movie, because really, how many versions of “Hava Nagila” do we need to hear in 100 minutes?

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Thati Lopes, Rodrigo Simas, Diego Martins, Aline Dias, Regina Braga and Jonas Bloch.

Credits: Directed by Cris D’Amato, scripted by Natalia Klein. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

There’s a bracing cynicism to “Materialists,” the latest anti-rom-com from the writer-director of “Past Lives,” Celine Song.

“Dating is a risk,” her heroine, the professional matchmaker Lucy declares. And marriage?

“Marriage is a business deal. And it always has been.”

Jane Austen couldn’t have said it better, although she never quite put it this bluntly.

But this very modern, very Manhattan slap of “reality” about the nature of coupling has a few things going against it that make far less satisfying than Song’s previous wistful statement on “love.”

For starters, it’s not romantic. It toys with rom-com conventions, throwing in a “meet cute” and a production designed wedding or two. It’s got the “poor” but oh-so-pretty guy our heroine left for being “broke,” and the chic, handsome and “Tribeca penthouse” rich charmer who “checks all the boxes” as a rival.

But blasts of realistic but clumsily handled melodrama stop us short of connecting with all this. The insurance actuarial table treatment of male/female “types” that might make a good match, and the medical solutions to adding to a man’s “market value” would make Aristotle Onassis and generations of Hollywood power-broker dwarves chuckle.

And then there’s Song’s choice of romantic ideal. Whatever canny reason for having our cynical, pragmatic marriage broker deliver her smiling pronouncements in a flat, kittenish whisper behind the less than wholly expressive face of Dakota Johnson, that so lowers the stakes that it’s hard to care.

Will lonely matchmaker Lucy end up with “It” leading man of the moment Pedro Pascal, or perma-tossled, still-boyish Chris Evans?

Lucy is a failed actress pulling down $80K a year who has turned her head-turning beauty into a recruiting tool for Adore, the matchmaking agency for the rich-and-near-rich she works for. She is celebrated by her all-female-staff colleagues and her boss (Marin Ireland, just seen in “Dope Thief”) for her success rate. She makes “friends” with her female clients.

She should be celebrated for being so well turned-out every day, and being able to dress that well and live in Manhattan on $80,000 a year.

A simple walk down the street gets a little eye contact from just the right sort of client, and a proferred business card when he thinks she’s returning his flirt.

Lucy has just gotten her ninth female client to the altar, and the film’s funniest business has a parade of bridesmaids and others encircling her at that wedding, ready to take the plunge because they’re thin, educated and polished New York career women desperate to couple up and who have a specific set of criteria they figure they “deserve.” And Lucy has the magic touch.

Jokes among the lovelorn — “”You’re not ugly. It’s just that you don’t have money.” — and montages of darkly comical client interviews and not-comical-at-all phone chats with unsatisfied men and women underscore the entitlement one and all feel.

The men are downright hateful in their notion of “high quality women,” translated as much younger, beautiful, but educated and sophisticated and comfortable in a world awash in money. The women are just as shallow — about height, education and salary requirements.

“I’m trying to settle,” Lucy’s toughest client, the pushing-40 New York lawyer Sophie (Zoe Winters) complains. But nobody’s settling for her.

That opening wedding is where Pascal’s version of Matthew McConaughey rakishly overhears his way into Kate Hudson’s (Lucy’s) life. Harry’s brother is the matchmade groom at this wedding, and overhearing the flock of bridesmaids and Lucy’s “find the love of your life” pitch has Harry intrigued — not in her services, but in her.

Her task is to grab this tall, dark, rich and handsome “unicorn” as a prospect for one of her paying clients. Harry’s task is to sweep her off her feet.

But there’s a reminder of her youthful look for love past at the party. Catering waiter John (Evans) is a struggling, 40ish stage actor ex, the guy Lucy struggled with before recognizing she “can’t act” but she did know “a lot about dating,” and had a knack for setting couples up.

As they share an outdoor smoke and he admits that yes, he still has that beater Volvo and yes, he’s still sharing a flat with a couple of other slovenly actor guys at an age when that dream is past its expiration date.

Will Lucy land her “unicorn,” for herself or one of her paying customers? Will she flashback her way back into John’s arms, or simply remember she hated herself for hating him for “being broke?”

Johnson may “check off the boxes” in a role that requires beauty and allure with a whiff of box office “value.” But she isn’t the best at getting across the longing Lucy is trying to package in connecting people with “your nursing home partner and grave buddy,” “the love of your life.” Any number of 40ish romantic starlets would have done a better job at making that swooning sales pitch, or at selling the ache that must set in for having let yourself get this cynical.

Evans, clinging to “boyish” in this turn, and Pascal are so on-the-nose that it’s as if Song put as much imagination into casting as she did to character names. “Lucy,” “John” and um, Hispanic “Harry?” Really?

Ireland sets the brittle “all business” tone for a movie whose rare light moments are merely here to set up the conventions Song is mocking. And when Song takes a shot at making a statement on a grim risk all dating women face in the world of men, it’s so heavy-handed that it stops the picture cold.

“Materialists” is dry and ironic and “honest” while laying bare the hopes that we all cling to that love isn’t really as materialistic as she’s saying. But the rare air of the artificial, archetypal world she sets out to make her big statement in leaves the viewer grasping for not just a breath of fresh air, but hope.

And as perfect as Johnson might be as that elusive “ideal,” casting her is just another reminder that she’s a few shades shy of the alluring warmth her few attempts at rom-coms and romances have demanded of her. This is a sale she was never going to make.

Rating: R, sexual situations, profanity and smoking

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Marin Ireland, Zoe Winters and Pedro Pascal.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Celia Song. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:54

Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson seem delighted at the prospect of filming a B-Western together in “The Unholy Trinity,” a mediocre genre piece with the occasional entertaining sequence or moment.

Well, I’m pretty sure they share the frame together once or twice in this good-looking, handsomely mounted indie. The way these things work, often you can’t afford to have both stars on the set at the same time. As they’re sometimes joking with each other, and at other times threatening or shooting at one another, they both don’t have to have been there for those one-shots and close-up scenes to edit together.

It’s the sort of Western you get when two Aussies who perhaps enjoy the genre — one who directed the most recent underwhelming version of “Robert the Bruce,” the other a screenwriter with no credits that have crossed the Pacific to any sort of notice. The Montana locations, fights, gallops and shootouts look right. But there’s no “feel” for the story that makes sense.

Not everybody’s Tarantino and gets a pass for a Western that lets Samuel L. cut loose with assorted anachronistic”mutha” this and “my Black ass” that variations, after all.

A condemned man (Tim Daly, unrecognizable) makes his estranged son (Brandon Lessard) promise to “avenge” him for being “framed” by a dirty sheriff just as the priest (David Arquette) leads him to the gallows.

It’s 1888, the year before Montana became a state. And here’s the young man, who bears an unfortunate resemblence to longtime “Drunk History” host Derek Waters, trekking across the territory to a town called Trinity with a small pistol and a brass urn with his father’s ashes.

Montana was ahead of the curve in that choice for burials, at least in this Aussie version of Western America history.

The kid gets the drop on the sheriff in the Trinity church. But the aged Irishman behind the badge (Brosnan) is sage and cagey and the WRONG sheriff. A cleverly-staged standoff eventually straightens that out.

But the kid gets into real trouble when he gets between a “dance hall girl (Katrina Bowden) and her regular, roughneck miner-customer. Three people wind up dead, and with surviving members of the miner’s family and a Scots-born Georgian (Gianni Capaldi) baying for blood and already frustrated that Sheriff Gabriel Dove isn’t charging or pursuing a Blackfoot woman (Q’rianka Kilcher of “A New World”) for another killing, there’s lynch mob trouble on the horizon.

Another newcomer in town who refers to himself as “Saint Christopher” (Jackson) was present at the hanging across the territory at the prison, and has some connection to the dead man and by extension his son. He’s hellbent on setting the locals against one another.

Throw in more “dance hall” girls, an “actor” pretending to be a member of another ancient profession, posses and stand-offs and you’ve got yourself a reasonable facsimile of a Western.

There’s a tiny smidgen of humor, much of it provided by Jackson and a wee bit of it coming from Brosnan’s Sheriff Lucky Charms.

“The Priest?”

“I don’t think he’s a REAL priest!”

“Ah, like a Lutheran?”

Kilcher gives the picture credibility that extends beyond it’s Old West boom-town (new construction) look, and the weathered stagecoach, muddy streets and snow-dusted hills behind the action.

The shootouts are first rate, and the stuntwork does a nice job of hiding the well-past-AARP status of our Big Names.

The script may be surprisingly convoluted, with hidden Confederate gold, assorted alliances and double-crosses and a town that seems to wholly have the sheriff’s back — until they don’t.

But a bit of entertainment creeps in, much of it provided by Jackson and Brosnan, even if it turns out they weren’t one the set together for more than a day or two.

Rating: Rated R for violence, language and some sexual material.

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Samuel L. Jackson, Brandon Lessard, Veronica Ferres, Tim Daly, Stephanie Hernandez, Katrina Bowden, David Arquette and Q’orianka Kilcher.

Credits: Directed by Richard Gray, scripted by Lee Zachariah. A Roadside Attractions/Saban Films release.

Running time:1:33

“And Mrs” is a bittersweet and offbeat romantic comedy of love and loss and mourning, and a most unexpected star vehicle for unfiltered Irish comic Aisling Bea, nicely paired up with Carrie Fisher’s kid, Billie Lourd.

Bea, one of the English speaking world’s greatest talk show guests, stars as a woman whose fiancé dies just before their wedding. Lost and bereft, she decides to follow through on “what Nathan wanted” more than anything else, to be married to her.

Gemma will battle friends, family, customs and her own guilty conscience to make this happen. And as she’s living in London, naturally there’s a loophole in arcane British law that allows such “necrogamy” nuptials.

Gemma, a London-Irish graphic designer, was never the “big gesture” and big emotions one in her relationship to Nathan, played by Colin Hanks. He botches his first “I Love You” by prematurely playing The Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You” on his phone. He can’t get her to commit to an early “I love you,” just “I’m very, very fond of you.”

And he later made his very public proposal awkward enough for the record books.

But when she comes back from a morning run with her mates Ruth and Mo (Susan Wokoma and Omari Douglas) and Nathan doesn’t wake up, her shock is such than when the paramedics start zipping up the body bag, all she can think to say is “D’ye think he’ll be alright?”

Her parents (Sinéad Cusack and Peter Egan) are little comfort. Talking to Nathan, whom she still “sees” now and again, helps only so much. But when Nathan’s dizzy and somewhat less than considerate (never answers her phone or texts) sister Audrey shows up at the airport for the wedding, pink haired, gay and very pregnant from the surrogacy she took on to pay the bills, Gemma has an ally, someone “who gets me.”

Let friends and family tell her this idea of “doing what Nathan wanted” is “tasteless” and absurd, just a way of not coming to grips with grief. Short-skirted, impulsive and foul-mouthed mom-to-be Audrey is down for the dare.

“Grab hold of your labia! Let’s DO this!”

Melissa Bubnic’s script leans on the tropes of romantic comedies from “P.S. I Love You” to “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” with a particular focus on “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

A clumsy hired officiant (Paul Kaye) begins the funeral with “It doesn’t matter if we’re one or 101, we’re never ready to say goodbye,” and then goes completely off the rails with tactless jokes and self-absorbed confessions that wholly misread the room.

Gemma’s mum and her bestie Ruth are dismayed at her fool’s errand of going through the motions — catering, bookings, fitting her dress and the like.

But brassy Audrey, given a kind of dazed disconnection in between outbursts of American self-righteousness by Lourd, becomes Gemma’s wounded ride-or-die, ginning up public outrage over a judge (Harriet Walter, droll) determined not to allow a loophole to puncture 200 years of precedent and tradition.

Yes, Gemma’s online and media nickname becomes “Corpse Bride.”

Director Daniel Reisinger has a lot of story, flashbacks and “explanations” to get through, so the film is longer than it feels. Nathan and Aubrey’s childhood must be contended with (Elizabeth McGovern is the estranged mom) and Gemma’s flashbacks underscore her own “issues.”

Lourd is game, if a tad underwhelming as the “nut” who gives the picture life, but better at hinting at the heart hurt Audrey is dealing with. Bea’s grim sarcasm nicely serves the character and the picture as she gets over her fury of having to break the news to Nathan’s “only family” that he’s died in the arrivals gate at Heathrow.

Of COURSE she’ll take Audrey in.

“Hardly going to throw a pregnant woman out in the streets. It’s not BETHELEHEM, after all.”

And Reisinger and Bubnic follow nuptial-comedy specialist P.J. Harvey’s (“Muriel’s Wedding,” “My Best Friend’s Wedding”) edict that when family and friends gather for weddings, they can’t resist a sing-along, the “comfort food” of any wedding comedy ever since Shakespeare’s “Hey nonny nonnies.”

The narrative has heart and hurt and laughs and a big finish. Sure, it’s formulaic and not every scene has a proper pay off.

But in a cinelandscape where rom-coms that work are as rare as hope for a better tomorrow, “And Mrs” plays, and gives Bea another year or two’s supply of chat show anecdotes and jokes. Not that she’s needed them.

Rating: unrated, with lots and lots of profanity

Cast: Aisling Bea, Billie Lourd, Colin Hanks, Susan Wokoma, Harriet Walter, Omari Douglas, Peter Egan and Sinéad Cusack.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Reisinger, scripted by
Melissa Bubnic A Vertical release on Amazon Prime, other streamers.

Running time: 1:51