He said, "A life that's all about death is no life at all."
- Billy

Well I'm certainly surprised to have found that Hereafter treats its material with complete sincerity. Yes, there are moments that are terribly contrived and the child actors seem unable to deliver any of their lines convincingly but Eastwood achieves such a calm profundity for the majority of the film that I feel I could almost forget about some of the lesser points. He only breaks that placid tone in the three catastrophic events which act as intervals in the story - becoming all the more powerful as antagonistic moments. In terms of its structure it's actually pretty odd, giving each of the three stories their…

The crux of the plot is completely ludicrous, yet in a strange roundabout way it allows Eastwood to explore so many of his core interests, including death and grief as implied by the plot. I have very little to say about this one actually - what sticks with me the most is how much this film really consists of "little" moments - nothing really happens in this movie, but there are real moments of beauty throughout - like Damon (whose ability to underplay his parts makes him an ideal collaborator for Eastwood) and Bryce Dallas Howard meeting each other at cooking school, flirting and slowly getting to know each other. Moments like these are some of the hardest to get…

a tsunami hits thailand, but paris is fine.

there are two films, hereafter and the tree of life, that have interesting parallels: both structure themselves around a traumatic event and the reconciliation there-of. one is steeped in mysticism, the other is in history. hereafter's mysticism therefore compels it to avoid history -- an ontological point declared, the beginning with an act of destruction. but we know why these places get destroyed, we know that acts of god are not really acts of god. we know too that within a certain time frame these beaches will be consumed by the oceans so that the wealthy will no longer have their luxury hotels built off of the labor of the people who…

Clint Eastwood Study: Entry #56

Although frequently clunky, I think the fault lies primarily with Peter Morgan's script, which is quite a frustrating piece of work that is also very silly and bad.

Eastwood executes the playbook as best he can, though, and - to his credit - he finds more than a few moments of aching melancholy and genuine sorrow along the way. He also proves himself once again to be surprisingly adept at staging largely CGI sequences of complete chaos, with the film's tsunami opening capturing the absolute mania of such a moment in vivid detail.

I'd argue that it's only by virtue of the muted performances of his actors that Eastwood's able to avoid the treacly nonsense…