This is the kind of movie where the villain plants his feet and bellows at the heavens; things explode willy-nilly (watch out for the coffee cup in your hand); and the only comic relief is of the unintended kind.
Perhaps in heaven, all things come together as one, and they do play Rossini on 17th-century instruments (and I would love to hear it).
Get to Heaven dials things back up again, presumably in order to evoke the information overload of 24-hour rolling news and the vast attendant echo chamber of social media.
Oliver, by now sporting a beard fit for an Assyrian king, said that he saw himself like a comet, hurtling through the neurological heavens, observing things as he went speeding by, constantly in motion and not bound to a home.
In Proximate Agent Cause, meanwhile, al-Kindi gives a more detailed account of the means by which the heavens cause things in the lower world (here he invokes friction, not rays).
And I, behold, I do bring the flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; every thing that is in the earth shall perish.
We may curse the heavens when things don't go as planned, but in the end, this source of turmoil can often be creatively fertile ground, and fortune favors those who know how to turn those lemons into lemonade.
Building a business organically or, heaven forfend, making things, was viewed as old hat.
That Karl and Jimmy, once friends, now adversaries, swerved from honor to horror is just one of the thousands of things "Heaven" at Yale Repertory in New Haven is about.
The worlds in question could be a number of things — heaven and hell, peace and war, past and present; but in a film this vivid and this oblique, the cumulative thrust of the images is what pulls us through.
