4:44 Last Day on Earth – well thank God for that… as the ending of this film – couldn’t they have done 3:33? – can’t come fast
enough… in a story about a young artist (Shanyn Leigh) who thinks it’s an ordinary afternoon, like any other, until she learns that the world will end tomorrow. She lives with a successful actor (Willem Dafoe) and so very cliché, they make love on the floor of her canvas (she channels Jackson Pollack and an orgy of abstract expressionists.) Apparently the ozone layer
has us all doomed and the only thing to do is have sex with her lover. It’s a bit John and Yoko, too.
The Dalai Lama and Al Gore are on the news spouting from An Inconvenient Truth but oddly there aren’t any scientists being interviewed as to why this is suddenly happening. Apparently, everyone has just accepted their fate, and that’s where the movie fails. We can’t have a film without some purpose, without some love and hope.
One would suppose the movie’s message is how each of us will “Come to terms” with our demise. In the end love is all that matters, along with sex and the promise of the Asian man still delivering “Take out” Chinese at their door.
For the newscaster, he’ll go out glued to his anchor seat. And saying goodbye to our parents
on “Skype” – putting down the cover to the laptop is like lowering the lid on their casket.
The movie could have been so much more. It plays out like a palette itself, where everything surfaces, but nothing connects us to their doom. One tiara