Una vita quasi perfetta

Life, or Something Like It. Dumb title if you ask me. Angelina Jolie as a blond? I don't think so. Ed Burns as the love interest? Sounds like a chick-flick or ‘something like it.' All this needed was Greg Kinnear and I think we'd have something like ‘Someone Like You', right? Well not exactly. Although this movie was obviously aimed at the female crowd and used just about every chick-flick cliché under the sun, there was more here than I expected. I found this movie very predictable for the most part but the characters are so engaging (especially Jolie's) that you find yourself getting wrapped up in them and the story that surrounds them. The thing that stood out for me where a couple of scenes that had the audience so quite you could have heard a pin drop. One was when Angelina Jolie's character asks her fiancé what it is between them that dictates they should be together. Utter silence. The theater, in anticipation of what lame answer is about to spew forth from her jock boyfriend, was silent. The other was when Angelina's character is interviewing Stockard Channing's. Again total silence from the crowd. Those two moments in the movie made it worth while for me. The rest is just as you would expect. I didn't find any above caliber performances here, just the really good ones you'd expect from this cast. You wont see this one on Oscar night but I thought it was worth the ticket price and it didn't feel like a waste of time. That's my take. What's yours?

I wouldn't watch this movie.

I gotta start off by saying that I'm still not sure if Jolie's character was a brunette or a blonde naturally. All the "young Jolie" pictures show her blonde (I thought) but she's obviously not a natural blonde.

Honestly, when I leave a movie that's supposed to make me re-evaluate my life and what it means to live (like American Beauty did) and the only thing I can think about is the hair color of the star I think the movie failed. Sure, it wasn't too hard to watch and it worked out well as a Saturday afternoon hang-out w/ the lady-friend flick, but w/ Jolie I was really hoping this movie would fulfill its promise and be the engaging, interesting, thought-provoking film that it could be. Instead we see very strong similarities to American Beauty w/ a little "To Die For" thrown in for good measure and a helpin' heapin' of a John Cusack film (doesn't really matter which)

What really bugs me about this film though is that I really thought the cast was great. They were so believable (well, except for Jolie's hair, which really is a character in its own right) and their performances were so strong that as I look back on the film I really don't understand where it went wrong...maybe it tried to hard at the end, maybe all the logic fell apart just to bring about the thrilling climax, maybe it felt too much like a parody of tv news to also be the love story/life lesson that it also sought to be. Sure parodies can have morals and realistic love stories but this one doesn't.

I wouldn't avoid this film, but I wouldn't seek it out either.

A reporter, Lanie Kerrigan, interviews a psychic homeless man (Shalhoub) for a fluff piece about a football game's score. Instead, he tells her that her life has no meaning, and is going to end in just a few days.

The moral of this story has been told ever single time from "It's a Wonderful Life", to "Last Holiday", even to "Click". Each of these movies have always won me over because I love moral stories and I certainly love this movie!

Sure, you've seen this so many times before. Sure, it's filled with clichéd, Sure, it's predictable what's going to happen before it happens. But it's a feel good movie. It puts a smile on your face when it ends. Don't go on the movie too hard.

I loved the performance by Angelina Jolie. The supporting characters give us some laughs along the way, although the film isn't too funny but more like a drama. I like the score for the film. I liked the film a lot but not as much as I thought it would be. Still, it was a pretty good film if you like moral movies. "Live everyday like it will be your last."

So the plot is thin, the characters not entirely likable, and some scenes knuckle-bitingly awkward when you know they're trying to be cute. Some of the dialogue is pretty good, and most of the acting if superb.

But what I really want to talk about is Seattle. In a world where my hometown is turned into a shallow replacement for New York, or just stereotyped to DEATH (see - Fraiser, Sleepless In Seattle, The Ring etc) it's nice to see a film that actually gives a crap about the city.

Holy doo-doo pants! Is that KOMO 4 News?! Okay, so they made one of the Os and Q, but those are the faces I watched every Saturday before the morning 'toons.

We see all kinds of places in Seattle that aren't international landmarks - Leschi Elementary School, Alki Beach, the Downtown Transit Station, the Queen Anne Easy Street Records, giving the viewer a realistic representation of the simultaneously snooty and gritty City of the Sound.

There are no slip-ups of speech. No one says anything about Lake "CHELL-un" (Chelan is pronounced "sha-LAN", Fraiser!) nor is the Sound ever accidentally referred to as a bay.

So basically what I'm saying is that if you want a movie that took its time to understand the character of the city it was taking place in, this is it. And avoid The Ring at ALL COSTS!

`Life, or Something Like It' is a romantic comedy with a better-than-average premise. It attempts to address the question `if you suddenly discovered that you might only have a week more to live, how would you spend that remaining time and what changes would you make to your life?' Perhaps because this IS a romantic comedy, the best the film can manage to do within the tight strictures of the format is to raise a few of the more provocative issues surrounding the theme – those dealing with the meaning of life and the vagaries of fate, for example – then drop them so it can address itself to the customary clichés one would expect to find in a film of this genre. One only wonders how a more serious-minded European filmmaker, for instance, might have tackled the same subject matter.

Angelina Jolie plays a beautiful, but thoroughly superficial and self-absorbed TV news reporter living a near-perfect life in Seattle. Indeed, when we first meet her, Lanie Kerigan seems to have everything going for her: stunning good looks, a glamorous profession, a handsome major league ballplayer fiancé, and now a major career advancement in the form of a regular spot on a national morning news program. One day, however, her world comes crashing in when she meets up with a homeless man on the street, a self-styled `prophet of God' who tells Lanie that she will die within a week. When all his other predictions begin to come true, Lanie realizes that this man may not be quite the lunatic or charlatan all her friends and acquaintances keep assuring her he is.

Given this setup, `Life, or Something Like It' can't help but grab our attention. We wonder how we too would react if such a horrifying scenario were to suddenly present itself in our own lives. The problem is that the movie doesn't really do much with the material it has to work with. Nothing Lanie does seems particularly thoughtful or meaningful when she is confronted with potentially imminent death: indulging in some halfhearted attempts to reconcile herself with an estranged sister and father, giving up her health-obsessive diet and exercise regimen, and dumping the fiancé with whom she discovers she has nothing in common. Considering the thematic potential of this material, the film always seems to be lagging several intellectual beats behind where it should be. This is particularly true in the predictable love/hate relationship she shares with Pete, one of her cameraman coworkers. Yet, oddly enough, it is this very pairing of Jolie with Edward Burns that gives the film its moments of greatest charm. Both performers are so likeable in their understated warmth and vulnerability that we can't help liking and rooting for their two endearing characters. Paradoxically, then, the film satisfies us most when it is at its least innovative. The movie is at its worst in an embarrassingly unconvincing scene wherein a boozed-up Lanie, sans makeup and carefully groomed coiffure, leads a contingent of striking workers in a rendition of `Satisfaction' in the middle of a live TV interview. Cloying moments like these merely serve to remind us that we are stranded in movie fantasy land when the film could, with a little more effort, have ascended to a much higher level. (The film, incidentally, endorses a rather reactionary view of women in the workplace, arguing that a woman needs to consider whether achieving success in the corporate world is worth sacrificing a chance at achieving marital and familial happiness – a quandary that never seems to be posed to male characters in movies).

Despite the fact that it has moments of quality and charm, the film, ultimately, feels like a case of lost opportunity. One finds oneself leaving the theatre in a state of frustrating ambivalence: acknowledging that the film works on a level of superficial entertainment but knowing that, with a little more depth and insight, it could have amounted to so much more.