Just Like Heaven, directed by Mark Waters from a script by Peter Tolan and Leslie Dixon, is a metaphysical second-chance comedy, the kind of movie in which the laws of time and space are bent to give characters access to self-knowledge unavailable in ordinary circumstances. The genre has a long and varied history, going back at least to It's a Wonderful Life and including Ghost, Big and the many versions of Heaven Can Wait. These movies always risk a certain sentimentality, but at their best -- Groundhog Day, All of Me, Waters' splendid remake of Freaky Friday -- they leaven teary lesson-learning with a whimsical delight in the ridiculous.
Just Like Heaven, which stars Reese Witherspoon as an ambitious San Francisco doctor and Mark Ruffalo as a mopey fellow who sublets her apartment, is a bit too thin and gooey to be counted among such classics. Given its somewhat morbid premise, though, it is also impressively nimble and cheery. At the beginning, Elizabeth Masterson (Witherspoon) completes a marathon emergency room shift (compressed by Waters and his brilliant editor, Bruce Green, into a tour de force of breakneck comic exposition) and is promptly involved in a car accident. A bit later, Elizabeth -- or rather her immaterial but nonetheless talkative spirit -- barges in on David Abbott (Ruffalo), who has been shuffling around her old home, drinking beer and glancing at her spectacular views of the city and its bay. What, she wants to know, is he doing in her apartment? He asks her the same question.
Their initial encounters suggest The Goodbye Girl redone as a ghost story. Elizabeth, being the ghost in question, does not hang her underwear on the shower curtain to dry, but she does have a habit of walking into the bathroom when David is showering. If the two of them were a single person, you might describe that person as passive-aggressive, but as it is, Witherspoon, scolding and blustering, sees to the aggression, while Ruffalo, once again, turns passivity into an unlikely form of charm. After a while, predictably but winningly, their oil-and-water coexistence emulsifies into love, and they join forces to figure out just what happened to Elizabeth, whose memory of her physical life is conveniently cloudy.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
The two of them are not hard to like. Witherspoon sheds the mock ditziness she experimented with in the Legally Blonde movies, and in the early scenes (which might have been called Medically Blonde), she rediscovers the chipper steeliness of Tracey Filck in Election, her first great comic role. In some ways, Elizabeth, who must be both mockable and lovable, is a greater challenge, but Witherspoon is up to it. And Ruffalo, with his stoner drawl and his sad-sack gallantry, is an ideal foil.
Adapted from a novel by the French spiritual writer Marc Levy, Just Like Heaven spins its fluffy conceits in the crossfire of the US culture wars. Without giving too much away, I will note that the movie performs the astonishing feat of taking the contentious issues surrounding the life and death of Terri Schiavo and turns them into the stuff of farce. Waters must have the lightest touch in Hollywood, an enviable and perhaps unnerving ability to wring belly laughs out of grief, ethical difficulty and medical horror.
The supporting cast certainly helps, in particular Donal Logue, who plays David's friend and therapist; Jon Heder (the goofy hero of Napoleon Dynamite) as his unlikely spiritual adviser; and Dina Waters as Elizabeth's older sister. They all perform with a liveliness that keeps the more mawkish elements of the story at bay, though these inevitably assert themselves at the end, when the camera lens seems to be submerged in corn syrup, and lumps rise, on cue, in throats. It's not heaven, exactly, but after the purgatory of the late summer movie season, it may be close enough.
PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX MOVIES
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS