The Worst Film Ever

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Nathan Del Amico (Romain Duris) is a hard-driving successful New York corporate lawyer. He is approached by mysterious doctor Joseph Kay (John Malkovich) who claims to see people about to die with a bright white light. He warns Nathan to put his life in order. He dates waitress Anna (Pascale Bussières). There are constant flashbacks of Nathan with his wife Claire (Evangeline Lilly) and their two kids.These are New York characters but half of them have french accents. I don't care about Nathan. He's cold, angry, and unappealing. He's a horrible lead. As for the story, it has no dramatic movements at all and it's not compelling. Dr. Kay is not much better. Malkovich decides to play the character reserved. There is no tension. There is a supernatural aspect but it doesn't do enough with it. This thing moves slowly.

This film is dealing with death in the most surprising way possible.After Ray Kurzweil and all his consorts who pretend that in a few years we will be full of nano-robots that will make us eternal because death is a tragedy we have to get rid of, we have the spreading of Tibetan Buddhism that is founded on its famous Book of the Dead and the rebirth theory and there the tragedy becomes a drama, a melodrama even, a Broadway melodrama.Either you have enough merit in your "karma" and then you get into "nirvana" and your energy will merge into the cosmic energy of the universe, in otherwise BINGO! Or you will be reborn in one of six possible realms. The realm of the gods who will survive in bliss one full life to be reborn again when death comes again. The realm of the asura, divine again but jealous of the real gods but that will only be for one life. Then in the human realm and that's the only realm where you can hope to improve your karma and envisage the possibility of getting into nirvana. Then the realm of animals and no chance there to improve your karma. Then the realm of hungry ghosts, monsters who are thirsty and hungry for blood and fresh human flesh, cannibalism and vampirism, and the two together werewolves and wolfmen. Finally Hell itself where you will be tortured for a life time in your mental body but be sure that will be just as painful as if it were your physical body, except that your mental body never dies and recuperates at once. You just have the pain, over and over again.Since our western world has been weaned of any real religious belief and practice, since our religious rites are nothing but habitual actions that are part of the backdrop of our life, we are totally unarmed in front of that death and we are afraid, and we are panicky, and we are traumatized. What's more there are two eras in this world of ours.Before, when people lived less than fifty years, death was an everyday event and most of the time a child saw his or her grandparents die when he or she was less than five and the grandparents he or she knew then were those of other younger children. So we cried a little, we celebrated a little bit more than just a little and adults got drunk to forget, and then the show had to go on. Religions were there to make us believe that these dead people had only departed to go on the big journey to the other world, because there was another world.But after, when people live more than eighty years, it is not rare to have three or four generations in a family; for the parents to retire when their children are still in the process of training for a job one day. Then death has become a lot more unnatural and there is no solace in traditional religions. That's where Tibetan Buddhism comes into the picture and reinvents the Judeo-Christian myth of life seen as a valley of tears, the world as a sea of lachrymal fluids, and our lot as nothing but a sequence of dramatic tragedies. Then life is turned into some kind of permanent mourning not for death but for the death or deaths to come and every single event is seen in its end, in its termination, in the fact it will not last long. And we will suffer hell and blazes when they come to their end.That is efficacious to prevent depression and to get used or accustomed to the fact that any moment of bliss is a blitzkrieg against doom and suffering and death. It all started when a certain Rhys-Davids, the founder of the Pali Society at Oxford University, Great Britain, at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, at the time of the British Empire, published his first Pali-English dictionary giving the false but perfectly Christian translation of '"suffering" for the central Buddhist concept of "dukkha." That Oxford scholar, probably a Don too, was wrong and his translation that Buddhism has been dragging behind itself ever since and all the time was just a misinterpretation of the word in canonical Buddhism, maybe because Rhys-Davids was there and then under the strong influence of the only Tibetan tradition. The Chinese Zen tradition would laugh at that naiveté. So Nathan, who has become a messenger of death because at the age of eight he died and was resuscitated by some doctor, knowing that his wife is going to die soon, drops his whole life in New York and comes back to his wife from whom he was at least separated, just to accompany her into death. That's just the most absurd story I have heard. Any decent human being, knowing he or she was going to die would certainly not require anyone close to him or her to drop out of society to become the slave servant of him or her, a plain dying relative. In other words we do not see the coming death from the one person who should be concerned, Claire herself, but only from the point of view of Nathan, the messenger who does not deliver the message, the coward who does not know anything but submission and acceptance. That is supposed to be equanimity but in fact it is plain absurdity. It is true if he did hand out the message to Claire, she would consider he is out of his mind, and maybe even harassing her. A court order would be at once called for to keep that dangerous maniac at certain distance of her, Claire, and their daughter.And yet some scenes are very powerful, lost in an ocean of wordy sentimentalism.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

As the story begins, we are taken to an ideal bucolic setting that ends in what might be a lake. A boy and a girl are playing in a dock. The little girl steps on a loose board and gets trapped. She begins screaming while the boy goes running to get help. As the boy goes to cross the highway, he is struck by an oncoming car. This scene holds the key to perhaps understanding the mystery posed by the creators of this complex film.Without explanation we are taken to a Manhattan plush conference room where Nathan, a successful lawyer is hearing a colleague present a case which the firm might be interested in taking. It involves a suit against an airline where several family members have died in the Caribbean due to negligence. Nathan does not quite agree with the presentation and decides it is not for the firm.At this time, an enigmatic man, who claims to be a Dr. Kay, arrives to speak with Nathan. The doctor watches Nathan while he puts sugar in his coffee; he is shocked by the amount of sugar the lawyer uses, so he warns him about possible health risks, something that is dismissed. The nature of Dr. Kay's visit is not immediately known, but the effect of his visit will linger in Nathan's mind and it will disturb him deeply. It is obvious Dr. Kay has come as some sort of messenger to warn about an impending doom, which is hard to understand.Nathan's life will be greatly transformed as he learns more about Dr. Kay's message. He is shocked when the doctor asks him to accompany to watch a horrible scene in a subway station. Kay also tells him about a lady who Nathan used to know and her impending demise. Dr. Kay also points to other matters that must be seen to in Nathan's own life, like the strange relationship between Nathan and Claire, his former wife. We get to know about the personal tragedy in their life and finally Nathan is told about why he has been chosen by Dr. Kay in what will be his own mission in life."Afterwards" is not an easy film to grasp, yet there are rewards for the viewer that pays close attention to what really is underneath of what surfaces on the screen. Directed by Gilles Bourdos, and based on a novel "Et apres", which we never read, with Mr. Bourdos and Michel Spinosa's adaptation of the original material. The film is gorgeously photographed by Pin Bing Lee with an original musical score by Alexandre Desplat, a man with an excellent taste in whatever project he decides to undertake. The film was shot in different locales going from Quebec, to Manhattan to New Mexico.Romain Duris, a versatile French actor, is at the center of the film playing Nathan. In his first assignment for an English language movie, this amazing actor shows why he is one of the most interesting personalities working today. John Malkovich appears as Dr. Kay, the enigmatic man with a mission. Canadian beauty Evangeline Lilly is fine as Claire.

The man and the voice of John Malkovich have carried forward from 'Burn after Reading' to this movie but this, unlike that movie, is a pure drama thriller and not a comedy. The beginning and the end take a bit of thinking about and thank goodness for DVD and the chance to play it a couple of times to try and understand it.There was a period three quarters through the film when I felt the film definitely dragged, Nathan visiting his divorced wife Claire in wherever it was and his reluctance to fly home back to New York,but part from that, the film entertained and provided lots of interest.Malkovich plays a Doctor who is a messenger with the vision to foresee the death of someone with a glowing white light. Dr Kay (Malkovich) first encounters Nathan the lawyer as a child and it is later in life when he sets out on a mission to deliver the message to him literally.Of course, things don't pan out quite what you might expect but this is a fine drama, plenty of suspense, nice scenes and you get what you pay for. You shouldn't be disappointed.Just love that eerie voice of Malkovich, so unique! Just imagine if Anthony Hopkins possessed it for Hannibal!