Hereafter

Tsunami!!!!!

Clint Eastwood’s latest movie Hereafter (2010) has such a realistically stunning special effects opening sequence in which a tsunami sweeps over an Asian holiday resort that in Japan it was pulled shorty after release on the grounds that it was not appropriate following the recent devastating earthquake and tsunami in that country. The main theme of this film, number 31 from the director, is death, or to be accurate, life after death. 

The film tells parallel stories about three very different characters, each one affected by death in one way or another. George Lonegan (Mat Damon) a American factory worker and former professional psychic, French television journalist Marie Lelay (Cecile de France) who survives the tsunami and a working class English lad that has just lost his older twin brother in an accident on a London street (played by real life twins George and Frankie McLaren).

Not one of Eastwood’s best movies by a long chalk but with the great mans trademark of unhurriedly telling a straightforward story in a straightforward manner its entertaining all the same and quite moving at times. His next directorial duties involve a biopic of J. Edgar Hoover focusing on the scandalous and controversial side of the man’s life, due for release next year.