| LIFE OR SOMETHING LIKE IT |
 2002 -
USADirector: Stephen Herek - Reviewed by Linda
Angelina Jolie plays Lanie Kerigan, a Barbie-doll-esque news reporter for a regional Seattle TV station. OK, let me just start by mentioning that most of the audience was already in a titter of giggles seeing our local newscasters from KOMO-TV4 now suddenly working for the very well disguised fictional station KQMO-TV4 (clever!). To see our popular local weather man pop a champagne cork for movie star Angelina got the biggest (unintentional) laughs of the movie at this Seattle screening. But Lanie's smarmy "hard" news reporting trivializing and glamming-up stories is right-on. She is one of those reporters that would end a story about child abuse by giving a pseudo-concerned furrowed brow, then announcing her name with the inevitable flash of pearly whites. Lanie's perfect world of a living in a swank apartment, riding a fast-rising career, and shacking up with a professional baseball player boyfriend, is suddenly thrown for a whirl when a homeless street prophet (Tony Shalhoub) tells her in an interview that she is going to die by Thursday. Um, what? When some of his other trivial predictions start coming true, Lanie suddenly flips out with the realization that she may have less than a week to live. Of course we have to have a love interest in this week of self-evaluation. Maybe the shallow baseball player isn't the ideal boyfriend, but instead her true love is Pete (Ed Burns), a womanizing news cameraman whom she once has a drunken fling with. Of course he is a manly man: constantly scruffy, lives in a rustic humble home with a interior like a log cabin, and hides a sensitive side under all his smart-ass exterior. Try to guess: Pete helps Lanie realize what is really important in life, when for her it may be too late. Angelina plays the Barbie-doll reporter to the hilt. So much so, that it is a bit disturbing and unpleasant to watch. The film itself doesn't actually pick up and become somewhat enjoyable until Lanie finally becomes unhinged. When Angelina is surrounded in her apartment by empty pizza boxes, record album covers, and old yearbooks, with her hair unwashed (aka un-"coiffed"), and donning clunky reading glasses and a Social Distortion T-shirt, you realize that she looks ten times cuter in that scene than in the rest of the film. And unfortunately for the normally rising-above-the-material Angelina Jolie, she is paired with the bland and uncharismatic Ed Burns. In his case, a handsome face is about all he has to offer. He has hardly any presence on screen, as though the casting director just grabbed a random guy from a sports bar to be a stand-in for a better actor. With no spark of chemistry between the leads, the film just plods along to the inevitable and predictable conclusion. Though not offensive and not awful, Life or Something Like It is a pleasant enough but forgettable movie diversion. Save this one for background video entertainment when you're vacuuming the house on a rainy Sunday afternoon. |
|
Home
| Currently Playing | For
Rent | Video Obsession ©2002 Moviepie e-mail us |
I
have a friend who once told me that those ubiquitous splashy billboards of
airbrushed local TV newscasters "scare the sh*t" out of her. I kinda
know what she means. Just when you think your own local TV anchors look
freakishly airbrushed with extremely white teeth and perfect hair, all you have
to do is drive down the freeway to the next city to see slightly altered, but
disturbingly similar versions of what appears to be the same people under the
guise of a different TV station. It is enough to question the time/space
continuum.
