|
It
isn't often a week goes by in which you don't hear some crazy
tale about Angelina Jolie and her hillbilly husband, Billy Bob
Thornton (the general level of wackiness always seems to
increase whenever either of them has a film on deck).
It's almost enough to make you forget what good actors
they both are. Each
earned an Oscar the first time they were nominated, but instead
of that fact, people tend to remember stories about them wearing
miniature vials of each other's blood and wanting to rid the
Earth of komodo dragons.
Jolie's
latest film, Life Or Something Like It, might help you
overlook the tomfoolery in her personal life (at least
temporarily...until she and BBT announce their intention to
populate Indiana with nothing but potato bugs).
It's a cute movie that uses a somewhat original idea to
tell a story that isn't terribly original at all.
Hey – that's a lot more than we've been getting from
Hollywood lately.
Jolie
(Original Sin) plays Lanie Kerigan, a drop-dead-gorgeous
platinum-blonde reporter at Seattle's KQMO who happens to be up
for a gig on the network's national morning show.
As if that wasn't enough, she's also engaged to one of
the stars of the Seattle Mariners (Christian Kane, Summer
Catch) and lives in a swanky high-rise.
Things begin to slightly unravel when Lanie is forced to
work with the station's best cameraman, Pete (Edward Burns, Sidewalks
of New York), with whom she had a brief fling some time
ago. The unraveling
continues during a "human interest" story on a
homeless prophet (Tony Shalhoub, The
Man Who Wasn't There), who says the Seahawks are going
to win 19-13, that it will hail in the morning, and that Lanie
will die the following Thursday.
Lanie brushes off the
man's predictions, until both the score and the hail come
through. After a
quick medical checkup (they can't find anything wrong) and a
call to her traveling fiancé (he's too shallow to be bothered
with it), she begins to realize her perfect life isn't really
all that perfect after all.
With a sudden awareness of her egotistical
superficiality, Lanie begins to wallow in unwashed misery,
which, together with the aid of Pete, helps her realize how
fucked up her priorities have been for the last few years.
It's silly, really – I mean, every girl knows the key
to happiness is to ditch the makeup and shampoo, put on some
sweatpants and crank up the Social Distortion, right?
If
you've seen the trailer for Life, you only need to show
up for the last 15 minutes, because you've already seen
everything else (unfortunately, those last 15 minutes are the
worst part of the film and feature a very disturbing product
placement, where the star is continually compared to said
product). We already know something bad is going to happen to
Lanie because the opening shot of the movie is an overhead look
at her lying in the hospital with tubes coming out of her,
before showing a brief glimpse of her childhood, in which she
was something like the female version of Ralphie Parker from A
Christmas Story.
Life
wouldn't have worked nearly as well as it did without Jolie, and
I'm not sure too many other actresses could have carried this
film (Reese Witherspoon comes to mind, but that's about it).
She's usually playing some dark, dangerous psychopath
hell-bent on either kicking the shit out of you or screwing you
stupid (and either one would be fine by me), so it's almost
shocking to see her in a light romantic comedy with a role so
different from anything she's ever done.
And Jolie's chemistry with Burns is pretty decent, too.
That's
the good news. Here's
the rest: Life
was directed by Stephen Herek (Rock Star, Holy Man,
101 Dalmatians...it gets worse the further back you go)
and written by John Scott Shepherd (Joe Somebody) and
Dana Stevens (For Love of the Game).
| 1:37
- |
 |
for
sexual content, brief violence and language |
|
