Just Like Heaven is More Like Purgatory

I am lucky to have seen this film with a girl. Had I not, I would have probably questioned my manhood or suffered from post-movie trauma. It is pure chick-flick all the way and is so sweet you may find yourself with diabetes afterwards. But if you can find someone special in your life and watch it with them, you may make it out alive.

Big forehead Reese Witherspoon plays (implausibly) a workaholic doctor who seems to retain her Barbie-like prettiness despite working without sleep. She can’t get a date (again, yeah right) and is on her way to visit someone when she gets smacked by a car. Fast forward to sometime later and we meet Mark Ruffalo, who happens to be the new tenant in Witherspoon’s apartment. He starts seeing the unknowing ghost of Witherspoon and thus the saccharine-sweet, testicles-shrinking fun begins.

The movie does have its moments of objective comedy, such as a few jabs at classic “ghost” movies such as The Exorcist and Ghostbusters. And then there’s Jon Heder in the only memorable role of Darryl, the stoned psychic who acts like a tripped out Shaggy from Scooby Doo. The plot is tediously clichéd until a certain point where it becomes contemporarily ironic, pointing out a rhetorical pro-life situation that becomes the crux of the film. I really enjoyed that part, but liberals will probably react to it with protests and chaining themselves to trees or whatever.

But overall, it is what it is. It’s a girl’s movie and a date movie. So if you’re not a girl and you don’t have a date, you may not want to admit to people that you’ve seen this. If you qualify for watching this film, you’ll probably have warm fuzzies and all that good crap.

Grade: C+