BEFORE: Matt Damon carries over from "The Adjustment Bureau", and again dealing with issues of life and death and fate. I've got three weeks to go before the big virtual around-the-world movie trip, and I remember how TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" schedule (from which I'm blatantly copying the idea) ended its long location-based chain with movies set in heaven, hell and outer space. Thematically, that felt a bit like a copout. Well, I already watched films about Mars last week, now I'm working on the afterlife, so I don't have to include those films in the tour, which will be limited to places on the globe that one can actually visit.
THE PLOT: A drama centered on three people -- a blue-collar American, a French journalist and a London school boy -- who are touched by death in different ways.
AFTER: The film is all about connections, between people and between the life and the afterlife, but I want to take a minute to talk about some basic filmmaking rules. The first one is the rule of parallel editing, which dictates that any concurrent storylines HAVE to meet. Perhaps the name is misleading, since in geometry parallel lines never meet, but in film editing, they do. If this film were to show three storylines that ran at the same time but never came together, the audience would end up feeling unfulfilled. So it's no great feat to expect the storylines here to (eventually) intertwine, the mystery is just abour when they are going to coincide, and in what way.
The second rule, and this is really first-year film school stuff, is about crossing the axis. Any relation between two people in a scene creates an invisible line between them, the axis. The rule states that the camera(s) can be placed anywhere on only ONE side of this axis, but never both. If you have a scene where a man is talking to a woman, and you cut from an angle where the man is on the right and the woman on the left to a shot on the other side of the axis, they will appear to have suddenly switched places. The only acceptable way to cut to that shot is to insert a shot in between where the camera is directly ON the axis, so that the audience doesn't experience the jump. (You can also do that thing where the camera spins around them, but that's really contrived.)
Once you know to look for it, you'll see it again and again, in poorly blocked scenes, or in places where there wasn't enough camera coverage - but I really expect a director as accomplished as Clint Eastwood to know about this rule, and not cross the axis. Yet it occured several times, most notably in the dinner-date scene.
Getting beyond the mechanics, there were even more signs that the "seams" were showing - I supposed that's bound to happen when you stitch together three storylines like this. Random chance is one thing, fate is another, but a writer shouldn't rely on one to create the other. That's just lazy.
An even worse offense is creating a main character who is a psychic, and having him be a REAL channeler of messages from the deceased, while at the same time, in another storyline, pointing out how many of the supposed psychics are frauds. (Hint: it's all of them.) Those who claim to speak for the dead might even be worse than people who claim to speak for God, because they specifically prey on people who've lost loved ones, and they say the things that they think people want to hear. For anyone who might think they're real, psychics use a variety of tricks including, but not limited to, carefully researching their subjects, and making educated guesses about the deceased (a lot of names begin the letter "J", as one example) because their marks are likely to remember the correct guesses and forget the occasional misstep. In addition, the mark, even when told to answer only "yes" or "no", often forgets about that and surrenders additional information about the deceased anyway.
Psychics and mentalists are slick, I'll give them that. Two were recently featured on "America's Got Talent", but one blew his shot at the semis when he incorrectly heard the name of a city, and opened up the "sealed" envelope to reveal the predicted answer "Bilan" instead of "Milan". Another was more successful, and played out a "Deal or No Deal" scenario, and it sure appeared that he was able to predict the choice of one briefcase out of a possible 16, with the prediction appearing both within the selected case and a sealed envelope. I'm pretty good at sussing out how such tricks are done, I won't reveal the mechanics of the trick here but you can find it on YouTube. I'll just say that the real trick was creating the illusion of free choice, when really there was none.
So, for those people who don't believe in an afterlife - how do they explain the tunnel of white light, the feeling of being outside one's body, the reunion with loved ones that those who have nearly "crossed over" say they have experienced? Only those who have had near-death experiences can say for sure, but can't there be some kind of scientific explanation? The inner workings of the brain are still something of a mystery, but what if those sights and feelings are a result of the human brain shutting down? Some kind of dream or delusion that takes place due to a lack of oxygen?
You've also got to consider a lifetime, however long, of being told what to expect at the end. When you were a kid, you believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, right? But when you got to a certain age, you figured out those beings were impossible. So why continue to cling to the same fantasies where God and the afterlife are concerned? God's just the adult version of Santa, with his ultimate afterlife Christmas list of who's been naughty and nice.
John Lennon sang "Imagine there's no heaven", and pointed out that the worst that could happen without it is that people would live for today, and therefore appreciate life more, and maybe spend less time asking God for help and more time helping themselves. And who knows, maybe people would be a little more careful when crossing the street.
Also starring Cecile de France, Bryce Dallas Howard (last seen in "Terminator: Salvation"), Jay Mohr, with cameos from Richard Kind (last heard in "Cars 2"), Derek Jacobi (last seen in "Anonymous").
RATING: 4 out of 10 books on tape
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