Quick Review: Life As We Know It

Here's the unusual premise of "Life As We Know It." The movie's about this couple, see, and when they first meet they just don't get along at all, but they're kind of forced to spend more time together and eventually fall in love, but not until after nearly breaking up...okay, this isn't an unusual premise at all. Plus it stars Katherine Heigl, who does this same movie every couple of months, and Josh Duhamel, who reportedly wasn't happy that this image was turned into a key marketing device for the movie. Oh, Josh, you're still more of a pretty boy than an actor, as evidenced by the fact that I want to run the picture shown at left again, so don't fight it.

The thing is, though, their initial meeting was a blind date set up by their friends, who go on to marry and have a baby daughter, and the two oft-bickering leads become the girl's godparents. Then the parents are killed in a car accident, and the godparents learn they've been named in the will as legal guardians. What a gruesome plot point for a romantic comedy! The movie's not that funny to begin with, and not very long after it gets rolling there's this tragedy that derails it for a while. Eventually, though, the formula snaps back into place and the mismatched couple get back to falling in love while trying to figure out how to raise a baby and maintain their careers. There is an amusing sidelight: after they move into the dead parents' home so that the baby can stay in the environment she's lived in for all of her twelve or so months on earth, the women (and the gay couple) of the neighborhood all swoon over Duhamel's character. See, Josh? Told you, you're still more of a pretty boy than an actor. My grade: C-minus.

Quick Reviews: Killers, Splice

It's time to catch up with the movies. I'm not sure if these are still in the theaters at this point, so they may not be helpful if you're trying to pick a movie to see this weekend. Sorry. Regular readers know I sometimes procrastinate with these. And this is a case where these two different films arrive at the same grade for different reasons.

I had low expectations for "Killers." First, the female lead is Katherine Heigl, who followed up her success on TV's "Grey's Anatomy" and the big-screen "Knocked Up" with mediocrity like "27 Dresses" and "The Ugly Truth." Here she plays Jen, a careful, cautious, not remotely spontaneous woman who is on vacation in France with her parents (the fabulous Catherine O'Hara and the not-bad Tom Selleck), when she meets Spencer (Ashton Kutcher), who asks her to dinner. Unbeknownst to her, he's a contract killer for some secret government agency (right after they meet he blows up a boat. This is the second reason for my low expectations: I can't buy Ashton Kutcher as a super-spy/killing machine type. Anyway, they fall in love rather quickly, he proposes, she accepts, and he quits his contract-killer job. Cut to three years later, they're settled into a nice house and a normal life when his old life comes back to haunt him, and it puts the couple's lives in jeopardy. I enjoyed it more than I expected, especially seeing the people that actually are out to kill Spencer. My grade: B-minus.