Life or Something Like it

***

Rating

PG-13 for sexual content, brief violence and language

Director

Stephen Herek

Life happens

Starring

A Seattle TV reporter, thinks she has a perfect career and love life until a homeless street seer leads her to question her choices when he predicts that she only has one week to live. She begins an analysis of her life that results in a transformation.

Lanie Kerrigan (Angelina Jolie) has a strained relationship with her father (James Gammon) and sister Gwen (Lisa Thornhill), which she sees more as part of her past than the present or future. Her mother died when Lanie was a young girl. She believes that her father and sister really don't like her, so each year on her father's birthday, she brings the same present, season tickets for the Seattle Mariners. Gwen makes the effort to do something different each year. She also stays to cut the cake, while Lanie quickly leaves so she can run back to her perfect life.

Lanie is a feature reporter on "That's Seattle Life," a morning TV show and she's being considered for a big time network job (a la Katie Couric from NBC's "Today" show). She's also engaged to Seattle Mariners superstar batting champion Cal Cooper (Christian Kane); life is truly perfect and on the fast track to be even better.

To prepare for the new job, Lanie's boss tells her she needs some experience working behind the camera with Pete (Edward Burns). They had worked together before, did not get along, but had a one-night fling that resulted in a second love making session the following morning before they parted and went their separate ways.

While working on the streets of Seattle with Pete, Lanie interviews a seer who calls himself Prophet Jack (Tony Shalhoub). Jack predicts the exact, unlikely results of a football game that night, hail the next day when sunshine is forecast and oh, by the way, that Lanie will die next Thursday. She thinks nothing of it until the game results are as Jack predicted and she wakes up the next morning to hail beating on her patio furniture in the back yard.

Lanie begins to examine her life with just a little bit of concern. She goes to the doctor for an exam; starts to wonder if she should marry Cal or pick up where she left off with Pete; and reexamines her career goals as well as the relationship with her sister and father.

Of course there is a happy ending and we were surprised to find that Angelina Jolie can be charming, funny and sexy while portraying an intelligent character, full of life and willing to look into her soul. The film is a fine romantic comedy that shows Jolie and Ed Burns ("Sidewalks of New York") at their best. Tony Shalhoub, who gave us an Oscar caliber performance in "The Man Who Wasn't There," makes his seer role a credible one.

There are plenty of laughs, especially as Jolie leads transit strikers in the Rolling Stones classic "I Can't Get No Satisfaction." She's so good you could almost sense the audience ready to begin singing out loud too. Overall, the film has a great soundtrack.

More than anything, the observation that one should "live life everyday as if it's your last, because one day it will be," may take on new meaning as you watch the credits roll. There is a tendency to want to always be somewhere you aren't, but sometimes the best place to be is where you are right now.