"My Life or Something Like it in Ruins"

A good job is like a good romance, as is a good career like a good marriage.   Both jobs and romance involve a courtship phase, a feeling of unbridled anticipation and a series of let-downs and/or challenges that must be reconciled in order to go on with them.

Unfortunately, when it comes to jobs, we can't simply stay single until the "right one" comes along. Yet, considering how frustrating and/or inconvenient our jobs can be sometimes, many of us would certainly do that and just remain "on the market,"at least intermittently, if given the chance.

For this "Love Films, No Kisses" blog post, I will be doing something different: reviewing two related romance films side by side. The first film is Life or Something Like it (2002) and the second is My Life in Ruins (2009).   Each film stars a female protagonists who (SPOILER ALERT) does get her guy in the end.   But each also features  a larger romance that overshadows the typical guy-girl affair: the romance of a woman and her career.

In Life or Something Like it, Angelina Jolie stars as Lannie Kerrigan, a a bleached-blond perfect-permed local reporter and television personality in metro Seattle.  She is very successful at her job and her challenge in the film is that she's trying to break into the national media scene.  Her character flaw is that she is too shallow, caring about little other than maintaining her image, and local soothsayer, played by Tony Shalhoub (that's right, Detective MONK), puts her vanity to the test by prophesying her upcoming death and making her feel as if she only has a week left to live.

Armed with a microphone, and no one can change the channel.

In My Life in Ruins, on the other side of the world is a Georgia, played by Nia Varddalos, a dissatisfied tour guide in Greece . Unlike Lannie Kerrigan, Georgia is failing at her job and just wants out.  Also unlike the Angelina Jolie character, she is someone who is TOO sophisticated and actually struggles to be shallow enough to connect with her tour group, which consists of what seems to be an obnoxious bunch of blowhards that are definitely not the nice Canadians that everyone tour guide wants to serve.

In both films, the love interest is, as expected, the "unexpected" one.  For Life or Something Like it  it's her boss's son, the cameraman, whom Lannie detests but has to work with him in order to advance her career, and for My Life in Ruins, it's the bus driver.  Both male characters, in addition to serving as the love interest, have a role to teach the female characters about the simple pleasures in life.  These pleasures are held up a superior to all those pipe dreams of national celebrityhood and actually teaching a tour group audience something about history.

While the message of "appreciating the simple things in life" is an important one, the way the films convey the message is at times very mawkish and corny (more so for Life or Something Like it but certainly true of My Life is Runs too).

There are also some extremely awkward parts that hardly help.......

In Life or Something Like it, a drunk and personality-makeovered Angelina Jolie (reminiscent of the Naomi Watts character in I Heart Huckabees),  instead of reporting on a worker rally, joins it.  To do so, she chooses, of all the possible songs in the world, to lead a chorus of "I can't get no satisfaction," which (correct me if I'm wrong) is not even a protest song.  And the whole incident actually helps her career rather than hurts it (so much for objectivity in journalism)

In My Life in Ruins, the driver gets distracted by Georgia making sexual poses while giving her tour and crashes the bus.  The calm and nonchalant way the people on the tour react towards almost losing their lives in an accident makes it seem as if the once "bitch about anything crowd" had suddenly become complacent angels overnight.

Overall though, it's refreshing to see two romance films where the female lead is not simply bound by her love for a man but rather propelled by it.  At the same time, their big dreams are not met but compromised, which although is quite reflective of reality, is not typically the same story you see when the protagonist is male.  This is probably unfortunate more for men than for women.   Hollywood rarely shows male characters lowering their expectations, which is something that almost every male person has to do.  As a result, males all across the country miss out on an important message that sometimes it can be a good thing to want less rather than more.

Final Verdict:
  Life or Something Like it: WILD CARD  (could have been GOOD with more Tony Shalhoub scenes)

 My Life in Ruins: GOOD but probably only because I also have a career of talking to a crowd of people who barely listen to a thing I say.

Most awkward part of having no kissing scenes.
   Life or Something Like it: They weren't taken out of the movie!! (at least two of them were actually included).  Perhaps it would have been too awkward to take them out because they don't last very long occur at the most critical turning points in the film.
   
My Life in Ruins: We miss out on some of the picturesque scenery of the Grecian landscape.