Still Playing Review – Hereafter

Following the disappointment of the film adaptation of The Lovely Bones last year I was looking for a new film about life after death to invest my hopes in.  Following first seeing the trailer for Hereafter it quickly became that film for me, and I expected that it would do what Bones was unable to as long as it didn’t go all Ghost Whisperer on us.  Unfortunately I once again found myself with a lackluster film unable to fill the void in my checklist.

Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon team up once more in this film that tries to connect three different stories together through each separate characters connection to tragedy and the afterlife, including a French reporter who has a near death experience when she is swept away in a tsunami, two English twins whose lives are forever changed following an accident, and a psychic who has trouble coping with his understanding of the hereafter and its effect on his hopes for living a normal life in the real world. [Read more...]

Review: Hereafter

Clint Eastwood’s latest bests his last couple efforts but for every thing I like about Hereafter there is almost always something that really grates me the wrong way.

The film follows three thread lines of different people that have had a recent connection with death and/or the “hereafter.”  One is a French reporter who has a near death experience in a tsunami, a pair of twins in England that run into family tragedy, and an ex-psychic in San Francisco who is trying to reconnect with the real world.  The reporter is trying to understand what she experienced, the twins are trying to connect, and the psychic is attempting to leave the world of the “hereafter” behind. All these threads serve as fairly interesting character studies but they never blend together all that well.  The characters are obviously disjointed and unconnected to one another and you are left to watch them move parallel through life.

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