Love After Love (2018)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

There is really nothing there that's worth watching or listening to! Even the music sucks and doesn't make a ny sense. Story is amazingly blah - unfortunately as soon as I see that somehow 'Sundance' is part of the production I'm not expecting anything, or let's say exactly something like that. And what about this insane standup comedy scene? Who writes stuff like that?

For whatever reason, I started this film thinking it was about a woman finding love and companionship later in life. I usually like those kinds of films because they are something different from the usual fare of 20-somethings romance movies. It wasn't too long ago I saw Debra Winger's comeback film entitled "The Lovers," so that's probably why I had this assumption. However, the movie is actually a very bleak family drama about death. It shows how an upper middle-class social circle handles life in the aftermath and ambiance of death and dying. It made me cringe a little bit to see how the adult sons react to everything, but I suppose that really is how young people respond when they confront the realities of life for the first time. In summary, they react very poorly and with indignation, as if life owes them something and they expected better. I am actually younger than these characters, but I have encountered disease and death so much in my life already that all of this is far too familiar to me. I would say this film is not an unrealistic portrayal of this subject matter. The central message is that, despite death, people go on living as normal. The human drama never stops. Life is for the living and there's not much time to waste out of our finite lives to grieve. People chase endlessly after love and romance despite the futility of it all. Honestly, this is why I refuse to have children. I dislike life and by not reproducing it's like my way of having revenge against it. I would not want my children to face these horrible things like aging, death, disease, loss, and heartbreak. Other people think breeding is a great idea, though. It does make good fodder for screenplays and art films.The movie is a little pretentious, but I appreciate the non-linear editing and the fact that it makes you think a bit and face a truth that most people like to hide from. It also helps that Andie MacDowell is very beautiful and it was nice to see her again. She was easily the best part of this movie. There is another film that deals with the same subject matter in a less depressing and more comedic way named "The Savages" (2007) if you're interested.

Love After Love should continue the prepositional phrase forever because the major players in this finely wrought drama are forever looking for love or grieving about it. Matriarch Suzanne (Andie MacDowell) loses her husband and wanders around her two sons almost in a fog of grief but maybe more in puzzlement about how they are working out their fates without her influence.They are flawed adults, like womanizing son, Nicholas (Chris O'Dowd), who has a conflicted intimacy with his mother but more with himself as he wanders among showing the greatest puppy eyes in cinema. He is an emblem of the players who never seem at peace with their current or future partners.This episodic, fragmented story, whose jumping back and forth in time is occasionally disorienting, in its unsympathetic way, reveals the puzzle-like lives of sentient beings who witness death, go through its mourning rituals, and search for love, carnal and otherwise, in, it would seem, a hedge against oblivion.Co-writer/director Russell Harbaugh, in a promising debut, navigates smoothly in rough affective waters, saving the best scenes by interspersing them among some fairly quotidian events that play naturally to the death motif. When alcoholic son, Chris (James Adomian), does a standup about the difficulty of Jesus competing with his Father, the metaphor is not lost but not heavy-handed either. Both sons are struggling to compete with dad and themselves.Love After Love is a satisfying drama about all of us in families we know have dysfunctional working parts but who are on the greatest quest of all for love after love, after love, after love, forever.

I hardly ever rate a movie 1 star, but here is one. I hated every character, the non story, everything, really. andie MacDowell still looks beautiful, I must say. unfortunately, movie goers need more.