Movie / Hereafter

A very pleasant and cleanly made film starring Matt Damon and Cecile de France, directed by Clint Eastwood, with Steven Spielberg up in the credits. It helps if you have some sympathy to the idea of an afterlife, which is the main theme of the film. Die hard atheists should probably steer clear.

Its most memorable moments (for me) included a clear eyed reenactment of the previous big Indonesian tsunami (surprise, incredible violence, tons of CGI and stunts), in which Cecile's character nearly dies, but comes back after having a near-death experience, which changes her life in major ways. Also it's the first film I've seen where all 3 main characters, when confronted with difficult life decisions, turned to Google for answers!

The plot has 3 major threads, which cut back and forth but remain unrelated for a long time. In one Cecile, a French newscaster, nearly dies and ends up writing a book about the Hereafter. In another a young British lad (whose Mum's a heroin addict) experiences grief after the death of his twin brother and goes on a desperate search to communicate with him. In the third Matt Damon plays an SF-based psychic (and Charles Dickens fan) who can communicate with the dead, but is trying desperately to leave all that behind so he can live a normal life.

Eventually the 3 threads come together in a satisfying ways. I left the theater wondering, okay, so if there's a Hereafter, hmmm, what should I try to clean up about my life to make it more defensible?

Movie / Up

Ho-Hum. Time for John Lasseter to Retire? [This comment may contain spoilers]

A rare stumble. When every movie you've made (before) was a breakout hit, a fatal malaise can set in where you think every idea you have is good.

"Up" is a case in point. Is this a kids movie or an Ibsen drama? The film starts with an unrelated short about storks bringing new babies. Already we are thinking, "huh?" Then the hero (a sidewalk balloon vendor) ages from 7 to 78. Touching but cartoonish. Scene change. Then he transports his house to South America with a mockery of an ethnic Cub Scout in tow, where they meet a giant bird. Then his childhood hero, an accused fraudster, who should be at least 120 by now, appears and turns out to be a creep.

All this time they never meet another human or animal, besides the villain and his dogs, despite that those forests would be teeming with tribesmen, lizards, other birds, and so on. Like a stage play in which a few characters do everything. Dora the Explorer does a better job of portraying wilderness.

The cardinal sin: the characters never change. The old man and the demented pseudo Cub Scout emerge exactly as they were before. Pixar markets itself as being about great storytelling, not just animation, but here they goofed. You'll walk out wondering, "what was that?"

Movie / W

Oliver Stone's biopic of President George W. Bush was lightly attended, drawing 20 people in a theater that would have held several hundred. At many points it is comedic, drawing chuckles rather than real laughter, in view of the deep gravity of the situations depicted.

It barely mentions 9/11 drawing instead on the rich material of young W's early life as the black sheep of the patrician Bush family, the heavy drinking, arrests, bad attitude, lack of focus on school, inability to hold any job, inopportune entanglements with women. The contrast with his more studious brother Jeb is duly noted.

Then around age 40 or so, he has a religious experience, stops drinking, starts attending Bible classes and praying. He also serves his father's presidential campaign, finally displaying skill and ability (with negative campaigning), and meets Karl Rove, who thereafter gets him elected governor of Texas.

The film intercuts his early life and rise to power with scenes of Iraq War planning. The characters of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Colin Powell, Condolezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and Doug Feith are all readily recognizable, some of them dead ringers.

The deliberation scenes may be fictional, based on memoirs, or merely reconstructed from news accounts. However they are chillingly realistic, depicting a president with a limited attention span, little patience for details, persistently ungrammatical speech, who prays at every meeting, reduces all ideas to slogans, believes in clear "right and wrong," and is easily misled by his agenda-driven advisors, especially Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld into attacking Iraq without any real justification besides an unstated desire to control Mideast Oil. When WMDs fail to materialize the story is changed to democratizing the Arab world.

Josh Brolin who portrays W remarked (on Saturday Night Live) that making the film convinced him that neither he nor W should ever be president. One would think for all his political craft, he would be capable of uttering a coherent sentence or engaging in extended reflective thought, but Stone's W remains a dullard all the way.

One take away from this film is that it strains credulity that the same team who planned the Iraq War fiasco could have been involved with any alleged 9/11 conspiracy. Others must have handled that, who were not making plans in a fog of total incompetence.