RIP TRAIN: Diane Keaton (1946-2025) - HEAVEN (1987)

RIP Diane Keaton! I don't believe in such things, but you are in heaven anyway.

"I'm not afraid to die." That makes one of us....

Also: "You can spend a year communicating with a tree and never be bored." ....

If one has seen The Atomic Cafe, one can probably put two together that director Keaton had it in her head to recreate the kind of rapid-fire archive-footage-palooza that that film had, and naturally the extension from nuclear propaganda is so much that is also out there from religious televangelists and some movies about death and the afterlife. There really is a remarkable amount of moments in media that show devastation and destruction, from buildings falling to people being strangled in old horror movies to explosions anr everything in between, and if there is a major difference from that film it is that the collision of clips and sound and music creates a truly dream-like sense of the world through media (or as Annie Hall would hear on a line at a movie theater line a *hot medium* but I don't digress).

The thing that maybe complicates the flow from that inspiration (if it was, and I can't figure where else it might have been) are the interviews with regular folks and some minor celebrities (again, Don King, wtf) and they are kind of fun but also a bit of a distraction from the flow of the clips and footage that speak even greater than the interviews.

Some of the interviews are totally fine, and some of the subjects are interesting, like the one woman who claims that Jesus visited her by coming into her room and all the sensations she had there, because of the sincerity and I think Keaton means to hear them out and not simply make fun of them. Maybe some of them could have been photographed more clearly (a few of the subjects are shot with lots of blinds blocking the faces and parts of their bodies... sure).

But overall, this is mostly absorbing mostly because Diane Keaton keeps you on your toes not quite knowing what to expect next, and how there is so much that we are shown whenever we turn on the TV that shoves ideas and images of fear of death that... what other choice do we have? I have to think that Keaton also heard a lot about death and the afterlife growing up Christian and then, in the more pessimistic view of it all, through her years with Woody Allen.

 Some of it may be so weird as to defy categorization, but it is a genuine attempt to grapple with so many great (not great as in good, great as in WHOA THAT IS BIG) questions and subjects that show a lot of people are so sure about superstitious things.

This is all to say as a non-practicing Jew, I hope Keaton is just... somewhere that is not bad now.