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Full Review
A beautiful, rising-star telejournalist is suddenly shaken when told she will die within a week in the contrived romance "Life or Something Like It" (20th Century Fox).With her perfectly coiffed platinum 'do, polished French manicure and subtly sexy attire, ambitious Seattle TV reporter Lanie (Angelina Jolie) wants it all. She's thrilled at the prospect of nailing a network job in New York, but irritated she must work with cameraman Pete (Edward Burns) in the meantime, with whom she had a drunken one-night stand. She's now engaged to hunky Mariner's batter Cal (Christian Kane) who's always on the road. Still, they are Seattle's power couple -- and she's more than ready for her close up.
While interviewing a homeless street prophet (Tony Shalhoub) with an uncanny ability to predict unlikely events accurately, he tells Lanie she will die next Thursday.
She dismisses his dire words until his other three predictions all occur exactly as he said. Convinced she is going to die, Lanie hits the bottle -- and shows up tipsy and disheveled to interview striking transportation workers live and winds up leading them in a raucous rendition of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction."
The upshot is she's not fired as would happen in the real world. Instead, Lanie's whisked off to New York to interview a revered Barbara-Walters type (Stockard Channing) on-air, but by this time Lanie has had to re-evaluate her life thanks in large part to the persistent promptings of Pete who has also re-entered her life romantically.
Naturally there has to be something to the death-on-Thursday threat, but why reveal a finale that makes the typical Hollywood happy ending seem gloomy?
What to do when faced with imminent mortality is a promising premise but in director Stephen Herek's hands, it all boils down to romantic fluff. There is nothing wrong with the message that a loving family and friends should come before naked ambition and self-love. But the contrived situations that drive this film make the positive direction the plot takes seem banal and unavoidable.
It's hard to watch such a self-obsessed character as Lanie, who's on screen in virtually every scene, but Jolie does nail her narcissistic character yet manage to keep her slightly sympathetic once she begins to clean up her act. There's a good scene in which she visits her estranged sister (Lisa Thornhill) to attempt to mend fences but it's cut short just when it started to have a little substance.
It is also not credible that that Lanie's unprofessional interview where she loses all objectivity as a reporter would get her rewarded with a huge promotion. And Pete and Lanie's habit of constantly asking each other to define the words they throw at one another becomes quite annoying.
Product placement in movies has become commonplace over the last ten years, but scenes involving characters gushing over Bose audio equipment and Altoid's mints amount to blatant commercials.
Nor is divorced Pete's crack that as a Catholic if you get a woman pregnant you have no choice but to marry her an accurate description of what the Church advises.
All in all it's a well-intentioned movie that only delivers on a superficial level.
Because of implied affairs, fleeting violence, brief alcohol abuse and an instance of rough language, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops classification is A-III -- adults. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is PG-13 -- parents are strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
These movies have been evaluated for artistic merit and moral suitability by the media reviewing division of Catholic News Service. The reviews include the CNS rating, the Motion Picture Association of America rating, and a brief synopsis of the movie.
The classifications are as follows:
A-I -- general patronage;
A-II -- adults and adolescents;
A-III -- adults;
L -- limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. L replaces the previous classification, A-IV.
O -- morally offensive.
Note: Some movies previously were designated A-IV. Older films with this classification should be regarded as classified L.