By Jason Adams, MyNewPlaidPants

This weekend’s pack of new releases is a small one, just a pair, but they’re thematically similar, sorta. It’s all about the Afterlife this weekend, and most especially Hollywood’s whiplash attitudes towards it.

If you want solemn and thoughtful – some also say it’s simultaneously maudlin and insensitive – then you go with Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, which tells three parallel tales of three parallel people experiencing glimmers of life after death and the strands that slowly intertwine to bring them together. They probably whisper a lot. I’m not much of an Eastwood enthusiast to be sure, but I have to admit this one’s tugging at curiosity a lil’ bit. (This is where I don’t admit it’s mostly because the special effects crafting the horrible tsunami look really terrific and I do love me a good disaster on film. Oh wait I just admitted that. Ahem.)

If solemn and thoughtful ain’t you bag when it comes to the Afterlife though then perhaps the night-vision sight of lady being yanked around like a string-less marionette in an under-furnished apartment is? Paranormal Activity 2 is here, one year after last year’s phenomenon came and went and left some souls satisfied and some terrifically annoyed. I thought the first one was a fun movie with a lot of good jump scares and an real palpably mounting tension – those loooong static shots of Katie standing beside the bed are classic - but it’s not a movie that deserves to make it on anybody’s Best Horror Movies Ever lists. Ugh that ending! That stupid stupid ending. Anyway this here sequel is brought to us by Tod Williams, the man that made the seriously underappreciated 2004 film Door in the Floor, and it’s gotten some really great reviews the past couple of days. So I have some hopes that this sequel might satisfy.

How about that box office last weekend? Fifty million dollars for Jackass 3D! I can’t think of a bunch of jackasses that deserve it more. Their balls suffered so that we could laugh again. Thank you, Johnny Knoxville and friends. Thank you, and thank your balls. And apparently they shot so much ball-smashing footage that didn’t make it into this movie they could possibly have a quickie sequel out in not a lot of time. This is fine with me. Make your money while you still have balls! And then spend your retirement having a ball cream made of liquefied diamonds massaged in. You’ve earned it.

There’ve been a couple of big movie stories of note this week – Sam Raimi’s signed on for his next film, an adaptation of The Day of the Triffids, the 1951 sci-fi novel about a meteorite that hits Earth and releases carnivorous plants onto the population, who apparently also went mostly blind at the same time. It’s been adapted a couple of times before but nothing that really caught on. I like the image I have in my head of Sam Raimi standing in a studio head’s office saying, “It’s like The Ruins meets Blindness!” even though Sam Raimi probably doesn’t have to pitch things like that anymore. It entertains me.

And then there’s The Hobbit. Oh Hobbit, might there come a day where you don’t dominate the conversation? This week was all about wrangling over the unions in New Zealand – it appears Peter Jackson’s gotten his way now and they will let him film there after all. Which is great, I can’t imagine Middle Earth anywhere else. And today they’ve officially announced that Martin Freeman, best known as Tim in the original UK version of The Office, has indeed landed the lead role of Bilbo, and he’s a perfect choice. On top of that they’ve thrown out a pile of names for other characters, mostly dwarves, but they’re all only vaguely, if at all, familiar names so I’m not listing them here. Hey it’s that guy from 24! Someone from Eastenders? Really? So on. Just think back to a time before The Lord of the Rings and tell me if you had any idea who Orlando Bloom or Dominic Monaghan were, and then give the casting folks some trust here. They know what they’re doing. These new actors will be terrific here, and then in ten years they’ll be getting crappy work if any and being completely annoying otherwise, just like the old ones are now! Hooray!

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