Priest Josh Brolin, Gardener Thomas Haden Church, and Doctor Jeremy Renner conspire with Glenn Close to perform a miracle, but she kills them all, confounding disheveled priest Josh O’Connor until our guy Blanc figures it all out.
The bar with a hell theme has a Ricky Jay poster:
Great opening titles, introducing all the characters as a music montage cut with the body of their dead friend being dressed, closing on shot of his stitched-up wrists. It’s a hangout film after that, former classmate/friends who now all have good jobs and drug habits. Some light resentments and conflicts, some secrets and such, one delightful ending.
JoBeth Williams had just starred in Poltergeist, her outsider husband is an object of fun. Meg “sister of Jennifer” Tilly (Body Snatchers), also an outsider, had been Dead Alex’s girlfriend so they all feel responsible towards her. Mary Kay Place (between New York, New York and Pecker) is a lawyer with bad hair who wants to get pregnant but has no man, so is sizing up her friends (and gets the movie’s best insult-comic line). Kevin Kline is the nice-guy husband of Glenn Close (between Garp and The Natural) who’d had an affair with Dead Alex. William Hurt, messed up on pills, had already starred in Altered States and Body Heat. Mustachioed Tom Berenger is a TV celebrity (actually on his way to Major League immortality after an oscar-nominated stop in Platoon). And reporter Jeff Goldblum would reunite with Kline and their dead friend Kevin Costner in Silverado. Lost the same writing oscar as Fanny & Alexander, Kasdan went on to make the terrifically bad Dreamcatcher. Wiki says the last ten minutes were meant to be a 1960s flashback with Costner-as-Alex, and it was cut… and I see the blu-ray has ten minutes of deleted scenes… but they’re completely different scenes, no fair. At least Criterion had the good sense to commission an essay by Lena Dunham.
It’s like all the humorous bickering of The Avengers mixed with the action of… The Avengers. So it’s like The Avengers, or maybe Firefly. But funnier, and with more rock songs. Katy and I don’t like the shot-too-close, over-edited action scenes, but otherwise had no complaints.
Heroes: Andy Dwyer, hulky Dave Bautista (Brass Body in Man With The Iron Fists), green Zoe Saldana (Avatar), talking raccoon Bradley Cooper (Midnight Meat Train) and kinda-talking tree Vin Diesel (The Iron Giant). Not heroes: Andy’s mercenary ex-partner Michael Rooker, Zoe’s evil-blue-robot sister Nebula, “the collector” Benicio Del Toro, super baddie Ronan (partnered with Thanos, a main Thor/Avengers baddie) and Ronan’s enforcer Djimon “Digital Monsters” Hounsou.
Supplementary good guys: president Glenn Close and cops John C Reilly and Peter Serafinowicz.
Introduced: something called “infinity stones” which I think power some of the other magic stuff in Avengers-world, and rumored superhuman backstory for Andy.