BEFORE: Things are progressing, I guess - I've worked 3 shifts at the home of the Brooklyn Nets, all nets games, no concerts yet, and they've put me on the craft beer station, which is a self-serve station, so people swipe their credit card and then pick out their own beers from the fridges, so the only thing I really need to do is check IDs and tell them about the different beer options, which is kind of right up my alley. A little re-stocking at the end of the night, moving some beers around in the fridges to keep them looking nice, so far it's all tasks I can handle, and I'm making a little extra scratch to help pay my bills. But now I have two evening/night jobs, really so when you throw movies into the mix I've got roughly the schedule of a vampire, if a vampire woke up around 11 or noon and was able to go out and grab bagels.
I've got a busy week coming up, there's a red-carpet event Monday and then DocFest starts up, so I've got to shift my movie reviews to weekends-only for a little while - it's fine, only 16 movies left to watch this year and 53 days to do that, it's going to all work out, even when I figure in another vacation in December. I'm still going to make it, one way or another. At this point in the count last year I still had two horror movies to go in October, and then I only watched FIVE films in November. This year I'm planning to watch 10 in November and then the last 10 in December, but you know, I've got to be a little flexible.
John Magaro carries over one more time from "18 1/2".
THE PLOT: A woman's survivor's guilt from a school shooting 15 years ago causes her present-day idyllic life to fall apart.
AFTER: This film starts off as a double-timeline film, there are two actresses playing the same character, Uma Thurman plays Dianne when she's older and married and has a young daughter, and Evan Rachel Wood plays her as a high-school student. We've seen movies like this before, but then it starts to get a bit more complicated when we learn that Dianne is a survivor of a shooting event at her high-school - the anniversary of the shooting is approaching, and the town wants to have a memorial for the students who died and also a reunion of the survivors. As you might imagine, that brings up a lot of trauma and emotions and throws Dianne's life into a bit of chaos.
The problem here, for a filmmaker, is that there's no mystery to that story, the film can depict the horror of the event in question, but we know that Dianne survived the shooting, because she's a living adult. Therefore, no mystery, and from what I know about filmmakers, that's a waste of their time. By using the split-timeline format of editing, we the audience kind of know the answers before the questions even come up, and that's a really inferior form of story-telling, so of course, that filmmaker just HAS to mess with it. God forbid they start at the beginning of the story, progress to the middle and end at the ending. Oh, nay nay, we can't do THAT. Then we might actually learn something constructive about school shootings and how they work and how to stop them in the future, nope, can't do that, won't do that, we wouldn't want to risk losing half of our audience by suggesting that gun control is a positive thing.
So the film starts at this point in adult Dianne's life, where she's starting to get triggered by the upcoming anniversary of the event, and we only see flashes of the event in the past, but that past storyline is only going to inch forward, bit by bit, in a maddening fashion. Then the story jumps back a year so we can learn more about young Dianne and her best friend, Maureen, who is NOT in the adult timeline, so we can therefore assume that she does not survive the shooting. (Careful, though, just when you think you know what's happening here, remember that filmmakers can be tricky and trying to trick you by showing you only what they want you to see.)
Then it's back to the adult timeline, where Dianne has to deal with the teachers of her young daughter, Emma - the nuns at the parochial school tell her that Emma is a "handful" and often disappears. Dianne doesn't think much of this, because she often plays "hide and seek" with her daughter - but of course it could be symbolic of a larger problem that will occur later. Dianne also sees her husband out with another woman, younger of course, so perhaps there's some trouble in her adult paradise, perhaps her marrying a professor who once gave a speech at her school about visualizing the future for yourself that you want to have was not the greatest idea. While standing in traffic after spotting her husband with a younger woman, Dianne gets hit by a truck, and while she's being taken to the hospital, she has a vision of bleeding very badly, however the truck didn't hit her that hard, so this is summarily dismissed as a flashback to an abortion she once had but this isn't explained until much later on. Again, the split-timeline and jumping around in the plot is very wonky here.
Then we're back in the past again, where Dianne has a number of different boyfriends, which of course explains the pregnancy thing and while we're cheapening school shootings for the sake of our story we might as well cheapen the abortion issue while we're at it. Once again we inch closer and closer to that school shooting, to the point where the shooter confronts both Dianne and Maureen in the girls bathroom and decides to kill just one of them, but not the other. Sure, because a psycho kid who just killed 50 students and teachers without stopping suddenly decides that he's going to kill one more kid but not two, because that would be too much. Yeah, right, THAT'S how it all works. Give me a break.
When a person with a gun asks two people which one he should kill, really the only acceptable answer is "Shoot yourself, you a-hole, because you know you're going to have to do that anyway." Yes, of course in doing that you might piss him off, causing him to shoot you, but perhaps you can reach that part of him that is suicidal, or will be shortly after the realization of what he's just done sinks in, or if he thinks about how he's going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
The title hear comes from the phrase about watching your whole life flash before your eyes when you know that you're about to die - which could be a complete myth, for all we know. Eventually the entire adult life of the main character here is (spoiler alert) revealed to be one giant flash-forward, as she essentially imagines the next 30 or so years of her life if she manages to survive the school shooting. There are little inconsistencies, things about her adult life that don't make much sense, and they build up, eventually forcing us to come to terms with the fact that it's not real, it's all her fantasy about what her adult life is going to be like.
First off, it's bullshit to tell me that half the movie I just watched was a dream and didn't really happen, because it was edited in as if it were the future, and therefore real. I don't like wasting even an hour of my time watching something that just turned out to be imaginary. Second problem is that when a person imagines their life 20 or 30 years into the future, they tend to only imagine the good things, like being married, having a child, being successful in their career - people tend not to imagine the bad stuff like having their spouse cheat on them, having their kid get abducted, or getting older and less active or getting sick.
This is what I call mortar, not a brick - the film makes absolutely zero sense, and the only purpose this serves is to get me to the next film in the chain, which might be better and actually have something constructive to say.
Directed by Vadim Perelman (director of "House of Sand and Fog")
Also starring Uma Thurman (last seen in "The War with Grandpa"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "Kajillionaire"), Eva Amurri (last seen in "That's My Boy"), Gabrielle Brennan, Brett Cullen (last seen in "The Turkey Bowl"), Oscar Isaac (last seen in "10 Years"), Jack Gilpin (last seen in "Heartburn"), Maggie Lacey, Lynn Cohen (last seen in "Walking and Talking"), Nathalie Paulding, Molly Price (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Oliver Solomon (last seen in "The Night Before"), Anna Moore, Isabel Keating, Adam Chanler-Berat (last seen in "Delivery Man"), Tanner Cohen, Aldous Davidson (last seen in "Happy Tears"), Ann McDonough (last seen in "For Love or Money"), Sharon Washington (last seen in "Joker: Folie a Deux"), Kia Jam (last seen in "The Misfits"), J.T. Arbogast (last seen in "When in Rome"), Jewel Donohue (last seen in "The Irishman"), Shayna Levine (last seen in "The Happening"), Anslem Richardson (last seen in "Freedomland"), Evan Neumann (last seen in "Serendipity"), Reathel Bean (last seen in "The Good Shepherd"), Tuck Milligan (last seen in "Of Mice and Men"), Jessica Carlson (last seen in "Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant"), Molly Shreger, T.J. Linnard, Marie Brandt (last seen in "The Box"), Brian M. Wixson, Dianne Zaremba
RATING: 3 out of 10 useless facts learned in biology class (but they're all going to be on the test, for some reason)
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