Hereafter reviewed by Two Buck Chuck

Two Buck Chuck Review
Properly aged films at a discount

Hereafter

review by Anton "Chuck" Aguiar

Love Clint Eastwood. Good actor. Great filmmaker... Usually. In the past five years, the prolific director has given us the WWII double blast epics Sands of Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, Gran Torino, Invictus, and the under appreciated The Changeling.

Hereafter seems to be a reversal of fortune for Clint with more in common with clunky earlier efforts True Crime and the true crime that was Blood Work.

Matt Damon is George Lonnegan, a retired psychic counselor trying to leave the pain of that life behind and begin anew, free of visits from your dead Aunt Betty. George enrolls in a cooking class that's peopled with lonely souls who aren't quite desperate enough yet to try okcupid or craigslist. Maybe oenophilia and the perfect two minute egg can cure what ails him. He meets cute with fellow lonely heart Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard) and a paper thin montage romance is begun. Howard is so wooden and unreal that all I could think about was her frighteningly shiny red locks with the severe bangs. Do you blame lead hair stylist Frederique Arguello or assistant hair stylist Holli Doherty? 

"Don't touch my hair, it might hurt you"

There's a scene where they feed each other while blindfolded that is nauseating and hilarious in equal doses. But this is just part of the story.

The film's a triptych with three story lines across continents that deal with love and loss and the hereafter. The stories are uneven, some moving, some cloying. There's something attempting to surface here  about the way we deal with death as a society but the end result is trite and cloying. There's a fun CGI Tsunami to get the ball rolling (is that even legal to say?), but little else in the way of action, humor or pace.

Clint's next effort is the biopic J. Edgar with Leo DiCaprio as the cross-dressing head of the G-Men. Here's hoping that Eastwood gets back to his A game and that Leonardo DiCaprio twirling in an a pencil skirt has more energy and life to it than the underwhelming Hereafter.


Now Playing at The Pasadena Regency 6