Six Second Reviews: 'Hereafter'

I saw the movie here last night in Chicago and was pleasantly surprised at how much this movie moved me.

In my mind's eye, this wasn't a movie so much about what happens after we die, as much as it was about life itself. The movie caused me to ponder the fact that no one is perfect, and that there events which happen in life for a reason: a reason which we can't yet explain.

I like the fact that Eastwood did not take a religous stance on death, but rather a general experience of what life might be like, based on the accounting of so many other people.

The most important factor I took away from this movie was to cherish every moment we have on this planet, and to treat loved ones and friends like we would want to be treated. That our time on this planet is short, and that we never truly say goodbye.

If you saw the trailer - then you saw the best part - the only part - of the movie worth watching!

This is the most boring movie - it never starts, and you just wish it would end soon!

People were groaning in the theater it is so bad!

Don't waste your money on this movie.

Sorry Clint

Eastwood's Hereafter is going to be a love it or hate it affair. It is remarkably different from anything he's directed before and remarkably superior to previous, similar efforts from Inarritu, etc, to relate globally dispersed, yet ultimately intertwined character driven stories.

I am someone who does not believe that there is such a thing as life after death. As skeptical as I am about it, I also know that I cannot possibly prove that there is no such thing. Hereafter didn't change my mind about this one bit, but that didn't stop me from deeply enjoying and appreciating the story that Eastwood and Morgan had to tell.

I am also annoyed by critics, who possessing not one iota of creative ability, always emphatically know better than screenwriters, directors and everyone else on the creative side of films what's a good story and what's worth watching.

So much has been said about the leisurely and meandering pace of the film, which I find to be pointless observations. Many of these same reviewers completely failed to grasp that the astonishing, mostly first-person tsunami sequence was supposed to have happened in Thailand (not Maui, where the practicals were shot), based on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It's equally clueless of these same commentators to characterize the terror elements of Hereafter as being "post-9/11," when terrorist attacks against civilians have been going on, around the world, before and since 9/11. The terror incident portrayed in Hereafter is clearly based on the 2005 London Tube bombings, known over there as 7/7. (No one, not even a ghost in Hereafter, predicted it.) Finally, some of these same reviewers fault Matt Damon's George Lonegan for not being a future seeing clairvoyant, when his one and only supernatural ability is limited to channeling the dead under very specific circumstances. For these impatient chroniclers, all of these details must have rushed by too slowly for them to have noticed at all.

Can't say where Mr Moviefone is on all of this, because I refuse to run Flash and there's no transcript. I just can't believe that 6 seconds can do justice in this case, whether pro or con.

The fundamental story revolves around three kinds of loss.

Cecile De France's silver-spooned French TV journalist Marie LeLay dies (skeptics would say she has a near-death, out-of-body experience) and then miraculously comes back to life when active efforts to revive her have failed. (Her would-be CPR givers failed to clear her blocked airways of water prior to all of their huffing and puffing.) Her experience of crossing over and back gradually comes to overthrow nearly everything in her previously self-assured and self-determined Parisian life.

Damon's Lonegan rightfully considers his ability to channel the dead as being a curse. There is nothing congenital about it. Modern medicine has boiled his condition down to a form of childhood surgical brain-injury induced schizophrenia, to be controlled through the use of powerful medications that render him feeling lifeless. Refusing to medicate, his unmuted "talent" results in his ongoing alienation from the rest of everyday humanity -- that humanity having a high propensity for shooting messengers. In the meanwhile, he lives an economically precarious blue collar life in San Francisco (which is very possible via rent control) and listens to Charles Dickens audio books as a substitute for sleep. All of this is portrayed with deft understatement by Damon.

Real-life identical twins George and Frankie McLaren portray twelve-minutes separated twins Jason and Marcus, who are engaged in a spirited battle to prevent London's Child Services from taking them away from their beloved opiate addicted mother (Lyndsey Marshall), who self medicates with alcohol between fixes. The younger Marcus, who has always deferred to his "older" brother, becomes a lost half-soul when Jason unexpectedly dies while returning from an hope filled errand that Marcus was initially asked to undertake for their mother. (The scrappy twins learn that Jason was filling a prescription that will help their mother begin her fight against addiction.) The same tragedy results in Marcus being placed in a foster home. So, he loses his mom, too. No matter how high functioning Marcus seems to be, he is deep in the grip of shock and grief.

All of the other elements of Hereafter serve to underscore and develop each character's profound sense of loss as well as their respective quests to fill their voids with meaningful answers. This unfolds rich with Dickensian detail.

Bryce Dallas Howard delivers an inspired turn as Melanie, George's night school cooking partner and potential romantic interest. Some reviewers have criticized Howard for overly hammy "bad acting," when, in fact, she perfectly nails the part of a hypomani