Hereafter and Due Date

I'm hoping that these movies represent the sad, disappointing calm before a storm of really good movies. Even though I don't completely believe that it'll help, I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

"Hereafter" could easily be considered Clint Eastwood's "The Sixth Sense". Unfortunately it's not that entertaining, and the tough questions Eastwood is willing to ask are the same ones he runs away from at the end of the movie. If I had to sum-up the message of this movie it would be; find people who understand you, because most people are just too shallow to be sensitive to your needs. Matt Damon's character cannot get the girl because his gift/curse has unnaturally breached the emotional barriers that protect us from each other. The movie could have been an analysis of honesty, fear and vulnerability within relationships. Instead, Eastwood got overly caught-up in the storytelling process. The characters threads seemed more important than the characters themselves. Usually I wouldn't complain about an open-ended conclusion to a movie, and really this movie could have a wonderful ambiguous ending. Instead, Eastwood came up with a hybrid mushy/vague ending that was edited to make it seem better than it really was. Obviously, this is Eastwood's movie, so he can do whatever he wants, but if you can't come up with a good ending, don't try to trick me.

PS, If you want to see how to properly end a movie, see "No Country for Old Men".

Head over to www.apple.com/trailers and watch the preview for "Due Date". Most likely you've laughed about as much as you would during the feature length film. I will admit that there was enough new content in the movie that I laughed at things that weren't in the preview. Unfortunate, since I had already seen the preview, and therefore didn't really laugh at the stuff I'd already seen, the movie itself didn't add enough to the experience to make it feel worth while. If you've read my previous reviews of movies, especially comedies you probably recognize the following trend; I am gullible when it come to movie previews. If a trailer really strikes me as funny, if it asks a question I find intriguing or shows me imagery that I find amazing, I'm hooked. No matter how many times movies have failed to deliver on their promises, I'm still giving out hope, through the act of purchasing tickets. I could tell you about some other funny scenes. I could warn you of some of the inappropriate content. I could, but I'm not going to. If you want to see the movie, I don't want to spoil the few laughs you'll get, and honestly, the inappropriate stuff, relatively speaking, for an R-rated comedy, is tame. Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to decry the trend in Hollywood to produce trailers that in essence make it unnecessary to see the movie. Ya, ya, I know, I don't have to watch the trailers or the movies, but hey, it's fun to complain about something.

PS, Have you seen the trailer for "Sucker Punch" (specifically the one with 'When the Levee Breaks'), the movie is probably going to suck, but the trailer sure is sweet.