Reviews

I like this movie, it was a heartfelt not over the top albeit somewhat too realistic romantic comedy. Eckhart does a good job portraying a widow in denial who wrote a book on the grieving process. A bit of irony shadows this entire movie because of that. Aniston delivers another typical romantic comedy performance that she is well known for and quite frankly does well. An enjoyable 110 min that passes for a good date movie and doesn't get too heady to overwhelm anyone. The screenplay is well written and the plot flows smoothly although it somehow manages to make 72 hours seem like two weeks. A relatively good soundtrack moves the emotional scenes along well and the scenery of Seattle is left a little behind, probably because it's been done before, and better.

This was a good movie with some great acting. When an actor is given the task of portraying a subtle mental defect and makes you believe they have it, they have succeeded. The directing of this film was terrific and the suspense of the storyline drove the film right up to the end. Joseph Gordon-Levitt turns in a superior performance and Jeff Daniels shows his maturity as an actor as a blind mentor. Isla Fisher plays the love interest and makes her role interesting, not just a cut and dry part. The characters have good depth which always makes a movie more interesting. Worth the time and would be worth the money for those that have to pay for it!

If you can get over the original why the heck did she hook up with him in the first place awkwardness, it wasn't half bad. The acting is terrific (biased) and the comedy is memorable enough to keep you smiling through most of this romantic comedy. The sensitivity and believability is somewhat lacking, but the awkward moments really carry this film. The difficulty in believability comes with Jennifer Aniston's character, she just can't quite sell the awkward lover role. Sillly yes, emotional yes, sexy yes, but just not awkward. You have to suspend a lot of beliefs to come to the realization that she is choosing Steve Zahn, a quirky motel night manager over Woody Harrelson, a successful entrepreneur. I think that is the point of the movie though not perfectly executed. Fred Ward seems out of place and Margo Martindale is type cast as the mother. All in all I enjoyed the movie and would recommend it to fans of either Steve Zahn or Jennifer Aniston, they won't be disappointed but they may be a little skeptical.

This movie was slow to develop and left a huge gap in detail between the beginning and the end. The clues that we are supposed to latch onto are quick yet obvious. They also serve very little purpose to the plot. About two-thirds of the way through the movie a similarity appeared that ruined the rest of it. The similarity was to another movie where the main character is dead and doesn't realize it, The Sixth Sense. However the pinnacle work of M. Night Shamalayan is far greater than this attempt by Rodrigo Garcia. The acting in Passengers is respectable but the broken storyline fails to stand up to the intensity of the idea. A better screenplay and a little more coherent sub-plots would have gone a long way towards making this movie more memorable. As it is, this movie's most memorable part is that it ends.

As I was watching this movie, I kept wondering where it was going, but it took to the very end for me to figure out the kicker. The life she is living and with flashbacks to her teenage friendship and school relationships is merely an envisioned life. I life that hasn't and in this case won't happen. It is an ultimate play on that venerable phrase "seeing your life flash before your eyes". In this case the older Diana played by Uma Thurman is that life that flashes before the eyes of the younger Diana played by Evan Rachel Wood in the midst of a high school shooting just before being shot. I thought this revelation made the whole movie that much better and worse at the same time. It effectively desensitized some of the flashbacks to that tragedy and romanticized the rest of her "visualized" life. This was an interesting film only after the turn and rather boring and difficult to watch to get there. The acting was decent, the directing by Vadim Perelman was creative and I look forward to seeing his remake of the classic horror Poltergeist in 2011. Not a movie worth spending a lot of money on, but worth a look if your bored of action or comedy and need a decent if quirky drama.