OVP: The Village (2004)

Film: The Village (2004)
Actors: Bryce Dallas Howard, Joaquin Phoenix, Adrien Brody, William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Brendan Gleeson, Cherry Jones, Celia Weston, Judy Greer, Michael Pitt, Jesse Eisenberg (seriously-this cast list is nuts)
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're back to our reviews!  I took a week off to recuperate from some personal life things as well as to try and get my professional life in order, but we're back to our weekday reviews, and our (frequently Oscar-inspired) themes.  This week, the focus is going to be on music, specifically Oscar-nominated music.  All of this week's movies will have one thing (and pretty much that only thing in common)-they were nominated in one of the three Oscar music categories (either Song, Score, or Song Score...and in some cases a couple of those).  We're going to start off this category with a pretty recent nominee by our standards, The Village, which was during the period where M. Night Shyamalan was not only a bankable director, many were thinking he was about to rival Spielberg & Cameron in terms of becoming the rare director who could open a movie simply based on their own name.  While this film struggles in terms of quality years later, it didn't disprove that theory-The Village was a big hit, the final one before Shyamalan's epic fall-from-grace in the back half of the Aughts.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie takes place in a remote village in Pennsylvania, a 19th Century town where villagers live in fear of bizarre creatures in the woods who walk around in red cloaks.  The town is run by a group of elders, headed by Edward Walker (Hurt), whose blind daughter Ivy (Howard) is in love with a local boy named Lucius Hunt (Phoenix...btw, it is so weird to see Phoenix when he would still take romantic lead roles, and a bummer to remember he was so good in them).  After Lucius is stabbed by another young man in the village, Noah (Brody, playing a character with a developmental disability in a performance that would raise eyebrows today), Edward decides to let his daughter go out and find medicine from beyond the forest that surrounds their village, in hopes of saving Lucius' life.

This is where the film's twist happens, but, well, it doesn't feel like a twist.  Perhaps because The Village (as I mentioned, a huge hit at the time) has become so influential, I kind of assumed that we weren't in 19th Century Pennsylvania but instead a modern day time period but a group of people who were living as if time hadn't passed.  As a result, I wasn't really thrown by the twist, which isn't a bad thing (this was the era when the "twist" became the most important aspect of story-telling in a movie, frequently to the chagrin of the actual plot), but it feels pretty anticlimactic, and the movie never really recovers.  Some of the emotional tears this might have aren't fully explored.  The village elders founded the town because of traumas in their own lives, that they could no longer handle, but the film's final moments aren't grand enough or precise enough to get across a sense of the sacrifice they made by escaping the world, and what it means that they are willing to let all of the other children in the village continue living as if the world around them hasn't changed (and that the monsters aren't real).  As a result, I feel like The Village is less a bad movie and more a failure, something that could have been terrific but gets lost in the execution.

The score to the film is actually quite good on its own.  James Newton Howard creates a rich, elegant sound and frequently uses violinist Hilary Hahn to great effect, having her create a signature almost wave-like chill over the movie itself.  The problem for Howard is that the music, while gorgeous, doesn't fit the movie and frequently feels like it's telling a story that the film doesn't know.  The music is always building to something, some great reveal, and since I didn't feel like the movie's "surprises" (it's so essential to the script that these read as surprises to you in order for the movie to work) really added to the narrative, his music feels off-balance in the movie.  It's not really Howard's fault (I'm certain he composed the way that Shyamalan pitched the movie & hoped the film would turn out), but it doesn't land properly on the ear while actually watching the picture.

OVP: Rocketman (2019)

Film: Rocketman (2019)
Stars: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden, Bryce Dallas Howard, Gemma Jones
Director: Dexter Fletcher
Oscar History: 1 nomination/1 win (Best Original Song-"(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again"*)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

I cannot stress how much I hated Bohemian Rhapsody last year.  Months after seeing it, and watching it win a bushel of undeserved Oscars, it still haunts me as one of the truly worst movies ever to win an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture (had it won, which I think it was dangerously close to doing considering that Roma seems to have never been properly in the conversation last year), it would have been the worst film to take the trophy, and it might be the nadir of a rush of musical biopics in recent years that will surely become a tidal wave after seeing the box office off of this treatment of Freddie Mercury's life.

(Spoilers Ahead) It is impossible not to bring up Bohemian Rhapsody in relation to Rocketman.  After all, coming just a year after the Queen flick, this is also a movie about a 70's rock god's struggle with money, drugs, and his sexuality; hell, both films have John Reid being played by a different actor from Game of Thrones (in Bohemian Rhapsody it's Aiden Gillen, here it's Richard Madden).  The films are similar in motif, and occasionally in terms of actual content.  Both struggle with how to break out from the mold of what we've come to expect from a musical biopic: a rags-to-riches tale of a genius talent who hits it big, skids, and then either recovers (in the case of John) or eventually succumbs to some of his demons (in the case of Mercury).  The biggest difference is that Rocketman occasionally works in its attempts to step out, having it rise from the complete failure of Bohemian Rhapsody (even though I'd argue that neither movie is all that good).

Rocketman's saving grace is surely that it is trying to be a proper musical, not just having John himself sing, but other side characters tackle his biggest hits in musical montages.  In this way, it kind of transfers from being a cliched musical biopic, but does still veer into a stage cliche-the jukebox musical.  This works when it's fun-Egerton as John is the best part of the movie (it's embarrassing how much better he is compared to Malek's Mercury), giving a glibness to John that was lacking in the two-dimensional Freddie.  The side characters are more hit-and-miss, with something like Bryce Dallas Howard's to-the-rafters take on John's mother being hopelessly indulgent, while Jamie Bell (so good so often these days) does much more with Bernie Taupin.

And lest we forget, the film does in fact have a sex life.  For the first time in a mainstream, Hollywood film of this magnitude, we see two men doing it (Madden & Egerton), and there's nothing cruel or condescending about the act.  Honestly, in what is a nice moment in a world that is too filled with hate, I sat there looking at the entire straight audience I was with, and not anyone batted an eye or looked away as the two hotties got it on.  There was even a lot of knowing chuckles when the impossibly handsome Madden came into the studio in a tailored suit, and Egerton's John got flabbergasted & visibly horny.  These moments of whimsy, with an actor as charming as Egerton, were by-far the bets parts of the movie.  They just aren't enough to ultimately make it a winner.

The film in its back half becomes hackneyed and cliched.  It's better than Bohemian Rhapsody in every conceivable way, but that shouldn't confuse this with being a meaningful or strong film-it's just that the bar bore a whole in the floor it was so easy to cross.  Still, Rocketman has some fun & wit about it, even if it can't rise above a genre that just doesn't have room for originality, despite profiling some of the most creative people of the 20th Century.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)

Film: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Stars: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Jeff Goldblum
Director: JA Bayona
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I hated the first Jurassic World with a blinding rage (seriously, see the review-it's brutal), so it was never a guarantee that I would catch the film.  However, I went on a date and wasn't going to quibble too hard about catching it, and the reviews (both RT and from friends) indicated that it was considerably better than the first installment, so I thought I'd take a shot.  After all, Jurassic Park is one of my all-time favorite movies, the picture managed to find one of the original stars (Jeff Goldblum) to add to its roster, and it couldn't possibly be worse than that travesty, right?  The latter half of that question proved correct-it is, in fact, better than the first film.  But that shouldn't be confused for the film being good or remotely close to it.  At this point, we're all just wondering if the Jurassic World movies are instead a copy of the Transformers pictures-mindless drones of summer blockbusters churning out increasingly unnecessary sequels that the public will lap up because that's what's expected.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place shortly after the events of the previous film, though with a shocking change in a lot of the characters' personalities, the island that contains all of the dinosaurs is now under attack not from man or a meteor, but instead by a volcano that is set to erupt. The film follows Eli Mills (Spall), a handsome assistant to a previously undisclosed partner of Richard Attenborough's John Hammond, Benjamin Lockwood (Cromwell, filling in for one of many suspensions-of-belief the film takes that suddenly we have an important character that was never mentioned or seen previously).  Mills recruits Claire (Howard) and Owen (Pratt) to return to the island to help save the dinosaurs once again from extinction, particularly the raptor Blue, whom Owen trained.  Once there, they realize that Mills tricked them to try and turn a profit on the dinosaurs to use them as weapons of war, and work with a small band of nerds to eventually get back to the mainland, track down the dinosaurs before they're auctioned off, and then after a side story where we find out that Lockwood is also trying to clone human beings, his cloned granddaughter frees the dinosaur with a push-of-a-button in a ridiculously hammy scene where she protests "they're just like me" and we see a world that is now filled with dinosaurs, staking a claim through the deserts and into cities.

The film itself is an improvement mostly because the plot, at least if you don't look too closely at it, makes sense.  Howard's Claire has been rewritten to be more compassionate, more of an environmentalist, and as a result her relationship to the dinosaurs is similar to Owen's, making their romantic relationship a bit more believable.  The idea of the dinosaurs eventually getting to the mainland is intriguing, and actually we get the best scene of the movie during the opening, when the Mosasaurus escapes into the ocean, free to roam and feast.  But the film cannot handle its characters, and would honestly function better as a silent picture.

For starters, there's the idiocy of introducing human cloning.  Yes, in a world where dinosaurs can be cloned it would make sense that we'd turn to bringing people back from the dead, but the storyline feels a bit too huge for the picture and tacked on to have yet another child in the film, and really to give us some more characters to anchor us on the mainland (the film is pretty bereft of "good guys" in the face of a lot of bad guys, so giving us a child feels like a Spielberg-esque requirement that will also allow for some balance to the back-half of the movie).  This entire storyline feels unnecessary, and poorly edited.  Geraldine Chaplin is either doing way more character work than anyone else in this film as the nanny, or had scenes that were cut out as she feels far more important than her character arch would suggest, and really I could have done without all of this side business about human cloning.

The bigger issue, though, is that there is no suspense in the film whatsoever.  Think back to the original Jurassic Park.  The film not only sees the demise of Wayne Knight's Dennis and the "blood-sucking lawyer," but of some of the "good guys" like Samuel L. Jackson's Ray Arnold and Bob Peck's Robert Muldoon also perished.  As a result, there's some suspense in the film over who might live or die, making the dinosaurs seem scary and risky.  Here, though, there's only bad guys (and, it's worth noting, all of the bad guys) that are killed by the dinosaurs.  In many ways we've gotten to the point where the dinosaurs are now the heroes of the film, with you rooting for the raptors and T-Rex's rather than seeing them as the enemy.  This is fine-and-good, but it makes the action sequences kind of pointless-you can't have your cake and eat it too, and we know that since there's a guaranteed sequel that most of these characters will live to fight another dinosaur.  Without that risk, there's no point to the movie-you know what's going to happen, and since the effects are only middling, there's nothing particularly compelling occurring onscreen.  Add in the fact that no one is giving a noteworthy performance here (Chaplin's arguably the best, Toby Jones is the worst, but no one's clearing even the most basic of hurdles here), and you have a movie that's yet another cash grab from Universal.  Fallen Kingdom is better than Jurassic World because it's not desecrating a film classic, but it perhaps commits a greater sin: it's super boring.

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Film: Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Stars: Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard
Director: Sam Raimi
Oscar History: It is one of only two films that led the Box Office in the past twenty years that received no Oscar nominations.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

As we are investigating the films of 2007, I figured it was important for me to see the year's highest-grossing picture (domestically, at least).  Somehow when it originally came out I missed the movie, despite having seen both of the originals and having a bit of a thing at the time for both Topher Grace and James Franco (also, what the hell happened to Topher Grace's career-he was the highlight of That 70s Show and yet Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis became superstars and Grace became Shelley Long).  The thing that kept me from the film at the time were the awful, awful reviews that accompanied it, but despite this fact the film made gazillions of dollars (for comparison's sake it made more money than mammoth hits like Captain America: Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy).  So I was curious what it would be like filling in this missing piece of Marvel iconography.  Unfortunately the initial reviews were right.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film's biggest problem, oft-discussed when it originally was reviewed, is that it is WAY too busy.  When I originally started I groaned a little bit because the film was going to cross the two hour marker, but then I recalled that they would be covering three of the biggest villains in the Spider-Man universe: Venom, Sandman, and the Green Goblin.  How in the world were they going to give each of those three a real plotline without short-shifting one?  The answer was, of course, that they weren't.  In the Batman series the films became greedily worse whenever they expanded the number of villains, but while one villain is controlled, two villains is potentially solid but shaky, and three villains always ends in disaster.  Comic book villains are generally more interesting, at least aesthetically, than heroes, and so we want to see what they do, see what it's like for them to occasionally win before they eventually fall to their doom or learn the error of their ways.  Here, with three villains in such a short amount of time, we see no growth from any of them.

We see, for example, the ridiculous plotline of Venom (Eddie Brock, played by Grace).  Eddie goes from being a happy-go-lucky guy on top of the world, trying to get ahead, but then he quickly falls and becomes homicidal after just a few quick mishaps (his girlfriend Gwen Stacy dumps him-also, Gwen Stacy is coming chronologically after Mary Jane, totally throwing that entire lore from the comic books to the wind-and Peter Parker exposes his lies).  If we're meant to feel a little bit of sympathy for Venom, it fails (he kind of deserved both of these falls), and the movie is predicated on us thinking Peter has done something bad when, quite frankly outside of trying to kill the Sandman instead of arresting him, he doesn't.

The film also sacrifices a critical part of the initial movie by making the guy who killed Uncle Ben be someone different than the man he initially thought.  The original movie and comic book sees Spider-Man take up a hero's lifestyle when he realizes that letting evil grow has dire consequences (his uncle is killed by a man whom Peter doesn't stop from sticking up a convenience store).  As a result, the film in order to establish a quick rivalry between one of the three villains, gives up one of the most important moments in the first film and in Spider-Man's history.  I know I don't usually care about a film matching the source material, but the Uncle Ben story is arguably one of the most beautiful in comic book history, and I just don't see why they gave it up.  The Sandman villain, it should be noted, just randomly knows how to control his powers despite not even planning to become a villain, and we get a lazy story arch involving a dying daughter who doesn't even get a name (if she does, it's mentioned like once).  Overall, the Sandman and Venom stories are so ridiculously rushed and stupid that you wonder if they didn't actually plan on a fourth film and were just throwing paint on the wall.

The main stories, the ones that don't feel as rushed surrounding the Peter/Mary Jane/Harry love triangle have already been done to death in the first two pictures.  We make no use of Gwen Stacy (poor Bryce Dallas Howard gets underutilized yet again...also, she is in a LOT of movies), and Harry in love with Mary Jane is yet another repeat of a previous film.  We also get no indication of how Harry survives a blast about halfway through the film (or whether the Sandman is even beatable), and then dies later on in the film.  The movie tries for the epic, and everything is there, but it's trying to be too many things to too many people, and Tobey Maguire, nearing his mid-thirties, is too old to still be playing a guy who can't figure his life out like he's still a teenager.

Overall, then, this is possibly the worst comic book movie I've ever seen.  It's a mess, and when the only cool things about your film are seeing powers onscreen come to life, you have an issue (that's in literally every comic book film ever).  It's worth noting that I've never seen Daredevil, and I'm just now remembering Green Lantern exists (that was worse than this), but where does this rank in your personal estimation?  Do you think this film ruined the Spidey franchise?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Jurassic World (2015)

Film: Jurassic World (2015)
Stars: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Nick Robinson, Ty Simpkins, Vincent D'Onofrio, Irrfan Khan, Omar Sy, BD Wong, Jake Johnson, Judy Greer
Director: Colin Trevorrow
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I loved the first Jurassic Park movie.  It was a magnificent film, my personal favorite not only of Steven Spielberg's movies, but also of popcorn flicks in general.  Yes, there was some silliness and it might seem inappropriate to say that it's better than, say, Jaws or Schindler's List, but the heart wants what it wants, and this is a superb film with effects that have stood the test of time in ways few other films have ever dreamt of doing.  That, plus game and iconic performances from pretty much everyone involved (it says something that despite the fact that BD Wong hasn't appeared in one of the films in 22 years and is only onscreen in the 1993 film for a handful of moments that we still recognize he's our link to the previous flick) make it classic.  The film knew how to put care and wonder into the film, and create rounded individuals with hopes, dreams, and wonderfully quotable lines ("Clever girl", "Hold onto your butts").

And I have also seen and been okay with the follow-up films.  It's been so many years since I saw The Lost World and Jurassic Park III that I can't really weigh in on either with great authority, but I remember thinking "good, not great" for both of them.  The Lost World felt like a disappointment but still held up effects-wise (I wanted Sam Neill back, not Jeff Goldblum), while the third film I only really remember how snug Alessandro Nivola's pants were (I was a 17-year-old closeted gay teen, this was where my focus typically was).  Neither blasphemed on the original, but didn't really compliment it enough that I felt I had to watch them over and over again like I did the first movie.

(Spoilers Ahead) Which brings us to Jurassic World, a film that does pretty much everything in its power to try and destroy my memories of the original movie.  Set years after the original, the film follows a similar plot to the first  movie, occasionally straying (there's not really a great John Hammond-style character in this movie), but by-and-large we get "bigger, stronger, faster" but at no point, in any capacity, to we get better.  This movie is mindless garbage, the kind that critics feel that they need to rescue by saying "good popcorn flick" and "action-packed" when in reality what they should be saying is "the studios spent way too much money on this for it to fail, so we're going to pretend like it's not as mind-numbingly awful as a Transformers movie."

I don't even know where to begin in terms of the awful, but let's start with where it should have actually improved-the effects.  I don't know how twenty years worth of special effects, with movies like Titanic, Avatar, and Gravity all in its wake, couldn't cause some improvement on the original, but the movie looks plastic, cheap.  The special effects don't interact with the actors well and the CGI that is utilized looks inauthentic compared to the original dinosaurs.  Too much of the film is shot in close-up, so we don't get the feel of the size of the dinosaurs and every scene pretty much falters whenever it's trying to get a wow.  The mososaur, or whatever you call the sea creature, is on-paper way more interesting than the genetically created one, but it also looks fake and waits around way too long to show up in key battles.

The film's screenplay is appallingly bad.  The movie falls into literally every cliche known to man, from the rough-and-tumble Abecrombie model who has a day job as a raptor trainer to the beautiful uptight woman who needs a bunch of near-death experiences and an obnoxious sister to harp on her about her life choices (all due respect, Judy Greer, but your sister arranged for a $30,000 trip for your sons while you get a divorce-let's save the judgment) to two of the most obnoxious children you've ever seen.  Seriously, the only reason that Nick Robinson was hired was because he's hot and can sell Tiger Beat issues, and Ty Simpkins is so annoying and cloying that you kind of wish the raptor would just help us all out here.  Honestly, the entire cast feels like a list of actors who are trying to be worse than the next-we get Vincent D'Onofrio as the world's stupidest villain, Jake Johnson as some random Jeff Goldblum wannabe, and BD Wong as someone far too naive to also be a genius.  No one is giving a good performance in this film, and that's something I never thought I'd say about Chris Pratt and Judy Greer.

The plot is certainly the worst thing about it, principally because of the ridiculous holes permeating it.  Why, for example, does Bryce Dallas Howard head across the island to track the Indominus Rex instead of picking up a phone?  What precisely was it that Bryce Dallas Howard didn't see in Chris Pratt (noble, handsome, built like a Brooklyn firefighter) that she suddenly saw later in the movie since his character never changes?  And why is it that every female character in the film is portrayed as a harpy?  Throw in the two kids conveniently running away from their babysitter (I doubt very much that a corporate-ladder climber like the woman who is babysitting them would abandon her boss's nephews), the fact that the children's parents' divorce plays absolutely no role in the story, and countless other ridiculous notions (the entire "allegiance of the raptors" thing was a frightful mess, not to mention the new "dinosaur language" found between the T-Rex and the raptor), and you get the worst thing to happen to a classic movie since Indiana Jones 4.

Those were my thoughts on this pointless piece of garbage that will inevitably gross a billion dollars, providing us with a near-certain sequel.  What were yours?  Anyone want to defend, well, any of it (if so, do not use the words "mindless but fun" without expecting a massive eye roll)?  And if you need a place to vent, the comments section is there for that as well.

Everybody's Linking for the Weekend

All right, it is bright and early this morning (or at least it is at the moment-it always takes me forever to get the link posts written, so who knows what time it will be when this finishes).  Either way, let's get to it!

On Entertainment...

-Mark Harris has a wonderful piece dissecting the Tony Awards, and their weird sort of decay in recent decades.  Much of it could also be said for the Oscars, who are constantly trying to accommodate younger audiences when, like the Olympics, they should really just try to steep us in history and make us feel like we're watching something iconic, rather than something transient (Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber are not going to make you fall harder for an awards show).  The show should return to its awards-giving roots, and celebrate moments like Kelli O'Hara's worm and maybe some of the plays on Broadway (like those starring major movie star Bradley Cooper) rather than Finding Neverland for the second year in a row (despite it getting no nominations in the meantime-I don't care how many tickets to the ceremony Harvey Weinstein bought!).

-Nathaniel over at the Film Experience had a new entry in my favorite series on the internet, the Supporting Actress Smackdown, which covered 1979.  So head on over if you want a solid discussion surrounding Mariel Hemingway, Jane Alexander, Candice Bergen, Barbara Barrie, and how they all fell to a young up-and-comer named Meryl Streep.

-The second season teaser for the genius (if you haven't watched yet, I don't know what I can do with you) HBO series The Leftovers is finally out, and like the original season is creepy with a lot of questions hanging over it.  I'm so excited that they officially said fall at the tail end of that clip, since that means The Leftovers will soon be on my DVR.  Again-see it!

On Politics...

-The big news this week was coming out of the halls of Congress, with the Democrats shockingly defying the president over the TPP trade compact that he has been trumpeting for weeks.  The Democrats went so far as to stop the TAA, a program they have historically supported for decades, potentially risking it's extinction in hopes of slowing down the fast-track bill.  This has been a bit hard for me to understand, both because these acronyms are WAY too similar for my brain, but also because I'm conflicted on how I would have voted (I always think with bills of this complicated nature it's worth looking at how you would decide, at least to improve your opinion of Congress when you realize you aren't sure).  In many ways, I think that we need to pass some sort of trade bill to not give up economic advantage in Asia, but some of the environmental aspects of the bill inserted by Paul Ryan (which seems to be a principle reason why Nancy Pelosi didn't end up supporting the agreement) are very troubling, with a lot more credence placed on business than on environmental law. So I probably would have supported TAA (it's too important, and almost assuredly dead after the Democrats' actions on Friday) but not TPP (which I would have supported if Ryan hadn't made it more palatable to conservative Republicans).  Either way, this was a terrible week politically for the Democrats, particularly Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.  Pelosi couldn't get a bill that even she could back, showing her weakened hand with such a small caucus (it's hard to imagine she couldn't have had both TAA and a palatable TPP if she had ten more seats), and the President showed that only appearing every two years at Democratic caucus meetings (seriously-that's just appalling and embarrassing for POTUS-these are members of his team) means you can't call in for loyalty when it counts.

-The New Yorker chronicles why Joe Biden should consider a run for the White House.  Listen, I love Joe Biden more than almost any other politician in America, and have supported him for decades, but I usually greet these sorts of articles with a solid eye roll.  Biden doesn't have wide enough respect across the country after a series of gaffes and he's considered too old at 74 next year to be running for POTUS.  Still, it's worth at least looking into for a man who has wanted to be president for decades and is one heartbeat away at the moment.  After all, some of the other handicaps (like his link to the Obama administration) are also held by Hillary Clinton, and it's worth noting that Clinton has had a pretty lousy rollout of her campaign (the way she has completely zoned out the press has gone from interesting to quirky to downright dangerous, and if this is the sort of campaign that she's going to run, it might be worth looking at other candidates because it's a 90's-style campaign that completely ignores the social media age we live in, and shows too much of a tin ear).  Biden could eviscerate her on this front (get him a little more finesse and he could run the entire news and talk show circuit through the ringer), and based on polls that show Bernie Sanders is doing better than expected, one would imagine that Joe Biden could actually pick up that mantle as both a left-leaning champion AND a viable contender.

-John Sutter has been doing a fascinating study about the 2-degree number and what an enormous impact it will have on the environment.  This isn't what I'd call a feel-good number, but it's one that will make you want to rethink your carbon footprint, and it's full of some information even I hadn't heard of before, so take a look.

Shameless Self-Promotion of the Week...

-I may have hated the movie, but it's worth noting that this is the best scene of the movie.

YouTube Video of the Week...

-The funniest should-be-viral-but-isn't-quite-yet video of the week was surely the Jessica Chastain musical, which makes fun of the visual similarities between Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard which was acknowledged by Chastain on Twitter and has now become a "thing."  Also, can we all just acknowledge that Howard is totally killing on the press tour for Jurassic World?  I think she's aware her career has gone off the skids a bit and she needs this to reverberate, so she's not only commenting on this video, but also crying on cue on Conan in a GREAT clip (it was the runner-up this week).

Just One More...

-An absolute must-read this week is Fareed Zakaria's fascinating look at the Millennial generation, both the good and the bad.  It's a thoughtful, interesting, and not knee-jerk article about the so-called "Me, Me, Me" generation, which is hard to find so I encourage you to check it out.  I love the renewed focus on volunteerism amongst Millennials (PS-that's on my goal list to have a consistent volunteering organization that I support by end of year, so if you know any good ones, let me know), but also a discussion of their political apathy that doesn't break into condescension. 

OVP: Hereafter (2010)

Film: Hereafter (2010)
Stars: Matt Damon, Cecile de France, Frankie McLaren, George McLaren, Lynne Marshal, Jay Mohr, Bryce Dallas Howard
Director: Clint Eastwood
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Death.  It's the source of our greatest fears, our profoundest beliefs, our myriad curiosities.  Some believe it holds the answers to the meaning of life (an irony lost on some), others believe it is simply a biological reaction to disease, injury, or time.  Whatever your thoughts, it's a fascinating source of artistic inspiration (one could argue that all great art revolves around birth, life, love, or death, and perhaps all four at once), and so when I started to realize Clint Eastwood's premise in Hereafter, I felt thrilled and excited that this stoic, grandmaster of film who created one of the finest movies of the 1990's (Unforgiven, for the record) may have stumbled across something breathtaking after toiling for a number of years in increasingly fruitless territory.  Alas, I was stuck with something promising but unfulfilling, a great idea that got sidetracked by a series of silly cliches.

(Spoilers ahead) Hereafter is three stories for the price of one, and each revolves around death or near death experiences.  In the opening scenes, we see something that would be largely borrowed from several years later in The Impossible, the Indonesian tsunami and its effects on, in this case, a French political journalist (de France), who sees the white light and finds herself continually thrown off-balance when she is revived, not by the injury but by the challenge to her beliefs.

De France's story has the most potential, and part of me wishes that they had stuck with it a little while longer, as Eastwood finds some solid truths about spirituality.  People will regularly claim their belief in God, in Heaven, but when they try to get specific about it, try to prove they're right, and yet don't get to a crazy, televangelist sort of attitude with it but a rational, beautiful journey of faith, the general populace turns away.  They get uncomfortable.  We're so ingrained to associate outspoken religious people with gay-bashing or obnoxious faith-pushing or righteous indignation that we've forgotten that spirituality can be liberating and discussion, even if it leads to arguments, can be productive.  In the best parts of de France's stories, she touches on this-in particular, the scene where she pitches the book about her change of life and she is not only shot down, but also is told her credibility is hurt for such nonsense, is a real examination of where a few zealots have taken the public consciousness toward religion and an open discussion of it.

Alas, her story becomes awash in convenient plot points (her book is instantly picked up by a publisher) and lesser stories surround it.  In particular, the story of a young boy who loses his twin brother.  I'm aware this sounds callous, and obviously this is an unspeakable tragedy were it to happen in real life, but Eastwood coasts too far on our emotions with this plot-everyone feels bad for the living brother, but Eastwood's choosing first-time actors (to make them seem less "child actor-y") doesn't work.  Non-actors, particularly child non-actors are rarely any good without some sort of strong film background (Hunter McCracken in The Tree of Life being a rare and brilliant exception), and while they have memorable faces, the McLaren's occasionally enter Jake Lloyd territory with their stilted, uniform line readings (I'm thinking of the badly timed takes in the final scene with Damon in particular, but the evidence is there throughout).

The third story is the tale of George (Damon), a true psychic, a man who can communicate with the dead, but has found that this comes at a terrible price-everyone wants to use him for his gifts, and he doesn't want to live his life for death, but no one seems to care about this decision.  Again, this is a great premise, and occasionally crackles (the Jenifer Lewis scene is excellent, and perhaps the minute turn by Lewis is the film's best acting) but we don't get to know the character and the constantly switching to the other stories costs us a firmer connection with Damon's character.  Damon, of course, can act, and does so rather well, but he's saddled with too small, too traditional of an arc for his character and what should have been a series of interactions between he and different clients turns into a story about a man trying to make a change.  It also doesn't help that he's saddled with Jay Mohr, who must be so tired of playing assholes that he can barely bother to bring any energy to his user brother.  Bryce Dallas Howard fares a bit better, but like I've found with most of her work (trust me, I'm trying to like her, as she looks like a movie star, and not just because she's beautiful, but because she's got a smoky, quirky beauty that I find very appealing) she's too broad and doesn't know when to dial it back.  Was I the only person who kept thinking that Christina Hendricks could have nailed this part?

The film is at its worst in the final thirty minutes, when Eastwood, realizing that he isn't Terrence Malick and probably can't find the meaning of life in a two hour movie, decides to give us a Nora Ephron flick instead, with Damon and de France enjoying a meet cute and then suddenly, oddly falling in love.  It's one of the weirder and more bizarre endings I've seen in a while, I'll give Clint that, but it's completely out-of-synch with the rest of the film, and I was not a fan at all.  There is a time and a place for romance, and it is when two characters showed some sense of compatibility during the rest of the film.

The film's Oscar nomination is also an odd one.  Hereafter received a nomination for Best Visual Effects, which makes sense on some level if you know something about the Visual Effects nominating process (if I'm correct, and dear reader, correct me if I'm wrong below), but as part of the nominations process, the film's VE team will put together a short reel of the Visual Effects highlights.  This is how films like Snow White and the Huntsman, which isn't supremely Visual Effects dominated, can occasionally score a nomination, and how Hereafter, which throws out anything resembling meaningful visual effects after the first fifteen minutes, can succeed over the likes of Tron: Legacy, which would normally be more up the Academy's alley.  Since we'll be perusing this category on Sunday more thoroughly, I won't go too in-depth on this, but I will say it's an odd citation.

How about you though?  Do you think that Hereafter deserved its Oscar nomination (and do you think the producers of The Impossible wish they had beaten it to the punch?)?  What do you think of Clint's films as of late?  And which of these three plots struck you as the best, the worst?