Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The best way that I feel I can describe this movie is this: I liked it, but I'm not exactly sure how much. There are several reasons why I liked the movie but not a lot of reasons to make me think it's one of the best ever made. First off, any fan of Angelina Jolie shouldn't think twice about seeing this movie. She continues to prove time and again what a versatile actress she is. And if anyone else had played her role, this movie would have come across extremely boring. The rest of the cast was well chosen but they definitely weren't enough to carry the movie by themselves. The addition of Stockard Channing was a very fitting one as she did an excellent job of playing the network news equivalent of Jenny Jones meets Barbara Walters. And Edward Burns does an adequate job of playing Jolie's cameraman and part time love interest.
The story itself had a lot of interesting elements to it. Angelina Jolie plays Lannie Kerrigan, a Seattle Reporter who is living the perfect life, or at least what she thinks is the perfect life. She has the perfect body, the perfect hair, a major league baseball player as her fiance, and is one step away from her perfect network news anchor job in New York City. Everything is running according to plan, when one day, while on assignment she is given some life altering news. A street prophet tells her that in one week she will die. At first she dismisses his prophecy as nothing to be taken seriously, but as his other predictions come true, her perfect world starts to unravel. She is forced to look at every aspect of her life and realizes that everything she thought was so important doesn't really matter. What follows is a mixture of sometimes funny and at times depressing series of events that teach her the true meaning of what a perfect life really is.
All in all a solid movie to go and see. The performances were all done very well, with Angelina Jolie being the bright spot in the whole movie. There were several memorable scenes, including the impromptu singing of "Satisfaction" during a bus driver strike. This movie was definitely a feel good comedy from start to finish, with a few sad parts that were necessary to bring the viewer back up. And my personal favorite scene was Jolie and her fiance taking batting practice. It just really cracked me up. This isn't a movie you have to see in theatre's by any means, but would be well worth the rental price sometime for a date night at home.
The Breakdown:
1. Plot-8 (neat structure for a romantic comedy)
2. Characters-8 (very detailed and well developed)
3. Flow-9 (moved along quite nicely)
4. Atmosphere-9 (you can tell a lot of thought went into the setup)
5. Cinematography-8 (not a lot of creativity but didn't look low budget either)
6. Entertainment value-9 (surprisingly attention grabbing for such a simple plot)
7. Replay Value-7 (not a movie I could watch all the time but not necessarily one I would turn off either)
8. Casting/character depth-9 (Great casting for the most part and excellent detail to characters)
9. Relevance to genre-8 (hard to categorize but a good all around movie)
10. X-factors-8 (Angelina Jolie alone makes this movie worth seeing)
83/100
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Life or Something Like It (2002)A reporter, Lanie Kerrigan (Jolie), 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, which sparks her to action, trying to change the pattern of her life...
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