‘When no one laughs, your soul leaves your body’: have you heard the one about the Bradley Cooper film inspired by John Bishop … ?

Is This Thing On? is Cooper’s third film as writer/director – and his third to wonder whether performing saves or destroys your love life. He and stars Will Arnett, Laura Dern and Andra Day talk gags, growth and relationship goals Last Christmas, the audience at an open-mic night in New York welcomed to the stage a new standup. Alex Novak, he said his name was. Mildly funny, bit depressed. Mostly told jokes about getting divorced. Weirdest thing though: he looked exactly like that guy from Arrested Development . “I was so naively unaware of what to expect,” says Will Arnett, almost a year later. “I’ve been comedy-adjacent for a lot of my life, but not a comedian. I had no idea what I was in for.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/hBIcyrg via IFTTT

Home Sweet Home: Where Evil Lives review – fresh take on pregnant-woman-in-peril horror

Unfolding in what looks like a single take, Thomas Sieben sends his protagonist into a house that’s haunted by historical trauma

When Maria (Nilam Farooq) shows up 37 weeks pregnant at the attractive but remote country home of her husband Viktor (David Kross), you sense immediately that no good can come of this. If a character is pregnant in a film, it’s about even odds that said pregnancy will function as a way to increase their vulnerability – though not all films take this as far as this nifty little low-budget horror movie from talented German director Thomas Sieben, which combines the haunted house subgenre with pregnant-woman-in-peril to nicely nerve-jangling effect.

Occult horror always needs a starting point, a first evil from which the later ghosties and bumps in the night derive. Some films take as their inciting incident a broader historical crime or atrocity and it’s into this category Home Sweet Home falls. The Herero and Nama genocide, conducted by imperial German forces against indigenous people in what is now Namibia, was the first genocide of the 20th century, and is the basis for subsequent terrors visited upon our heavily pregnant heroine. Paying a price for the actions of previous generations is a big theme in German horror, but by looking to an earlier period than the horrors of the Nazi regime, Sieben reminds us that genocidal white supremacism was not invented in the 1930s.

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