Harry here, I've never liked a single Angelina Jolie movie... I realized that as I read the following Capone review. Sure I've thought she was hot and even talented in a few of her films... But I've never liked one of her movies as a whole. Not one. I just pulled up her filmography, nope, not one. Has she been in a movie that was good? What's her best film? Is that like comparing the smell of kitten kaka with puppy poo? I'm not sure, is it even worth trying?
Hey, Harry. Capone in Chicago here, with a burning question in my heart: Has Angelina Jolie ever made a movie that people feel they have to see? I’m not asking whether she’s ever been in any good film; she has. But even her one potentially smach hit, TOMB RAIDER, was such an unwatchable blip of a film that it makes me wonder how she became as popular as she is. She did earn her Supporting Actress Oscar, but that doesn’t answer my initial question. Despite some genuinely fine moments in her latest film, LIFE OR SOMETHING LIKE IT, I just can’t imagine why anyone would care about this movie.
The lessons that are supposed to be learned from LIFE... have to do with living your life to the fullest because you never know when fate may take an ugly turn against you. But really the movie is just an excuse to watch Jolie do something I’ve never seen her do before: light, new-agey comedy. This is more the kind of film that Meg Ryan has made so popular. Instead of Meg, we get a Marilyn Monroe-style, platinum-blonde Jolie playing Lanie Kerrigan, a popular Seattle news reporter who has made a career of producing fluff pieces. She has convinced herself that her career, body, and boyfriend are perfect, thus, her life is flawless and in no need of inprovement. She gets a shot at a network morning chat show, and just before she discovers she’s in the running for the new job she is assigned a story about a psychic homesless man named Prophet Jack (Tony Shalhoub--this guy could make 50 movies a year and it still wouldn’t be enough for me). He tells Lanie the score for that night’s Seahawks game, the following day’s weather, and that she’s going to die within a week. His first two predictions come true, and Lanie is a bit worried.
With the help of her old flame and current cameraman Pete (Edward Burns), Lanie tries to find some flaw in Jack’s sooth saying. Pete tells her that the only way she can escape death is to change the set-in-stone path that she has set for her life. Lanie does such crazy things as go live on the air drunk, blow off work to spend time with Pete and his son, and figure out what’s so great about her major league baseball boyfriend. Director Stephen Herek (ROCK STAR) does what he can to stir up the pretty stagnant material, but Jolie rises above it. She and Burns have a fun, adversarial chemistry. Jolie also maintains a funny, clipped speech pattern that made me crack up, and she does a credible job as a television news reporter. There’s a major section of the film that just kind of sits there and does nothing. Included in this time frame is an audition-interview Lanie conducts with Stockard Channing, playing a Barbara Walters-like news woman. The sequence isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and it adds nothing to the rest of the film.
Does Jolie die at the end of the film? Well, considering the film opens with a shot of her flatlining on an emergency room table, you can probably guess how Prophet Jack’s prediction might come true without totally bumming us out. LIFE OR SOMETHING LIKE IT is classic feel-good fluff. Will it make you think twice about your own life path? Probably not. But it did make me wonder, “How the hell did Angelina Jolie become so popular?”
Capone
