Saw the previews when it came out and I had absolutely zero interest in seeing it because I thought it was a typical Hallmark lovestruck type movie (yuk)... WRONG! Don't listen to the cold-hearted critics because they're WRONG! I loved the performances, the writing, the locations. I love movies that keep you guessing and go back and forth to cause a little confusion, and then, BAM, it all comes together! I didn't see many of the twists coming and the last moments of Rodrigo with his mother took my breath away. Her words mean so much to me because we are going through that same thing in my own family. See this movie. Take it for what it is and be prepared to feel. We all need to do that once in a while, don't we?

Will Dempsey (Oscar Isaac) is a bitter struggling writer in NYC. In flashbacks, he is happily in love with Abby (Olivia Wilde). Dr. Cait Morris (Annette Bening) is his appointed therapist. Abby left him six months earlier and he's been institutionalized for three of those months. That's part one.

The Samuel L. Jackson sarcastic narration is off-putting and throws me right off this movie from the very start. A pathetic Will does not help. It also doesn't help that a therapist's office is such a static setting for sitting people to talk about the story rather than showing the story. His neediness is tiring. There is a meandering aimlessness to the movie that is equally tiring. It took me a dozen stops and starts to get through the first thirty minutes. That's right. I could take this only two minutes at a time. Even the surrealism is tiring. Abby even states that the unreliable narrator is a gimmick, a trick. Tricks can be tiring but talking about the tricks being shown on screen is the most tiring of all. The distancing of story telling is tiring. I don't always mind narrative tricks but I don't want to pontificate on narrative tricks like a college thesis. There is nothing to care about. It is a well-made film aiming to frustrate me to no ends.That's the end of part one. Just when it gets slightly better if only for getting rid of the narrative conceit, the story starts all over with a new family and its own narrative choice, and I don't care. The heavy-handed writing is most of the problem. I wonder if the movie does the same stories without the tricks.

. . . was too weepy for male viewers, and before the closing credits finished rolling I replied that this would depend upon whether or not their guys were in total denial of LIFE ITSELF, like "Old Scratch's" large "base" of "core supporters." LIFE ITSELF is set in a world where being "eviscerated" by a city transit bus is considered to be about the worst thing that can happen to a lady. That is why LIFE ITSELF merits a top rating of "10." LIFE ITSELF harkens back to more innocent times, when a diagnosis of cancer did NOT automatically disqualify people from having a roof over their heads due to this "pre-existing condition" nullifying the security they had relied upon from their health insurance policy. The men of LIFE ITSELF have not yet declared "Open Season on All Women," and the one young 15-year-old girl being molested feels free to shoot her assailant, without worrying that he will be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court some day. Though the story line of LIFE ITSELF extends well beyond Present Day America, the ravages of the Pachyderm Party trampling down all Basic Women's Rights are nowhere to be seen. "Shari" feels no qualms about presenting the A-word as option #2 for her "surprise" pregnancy, because LIFE ITSELF is set in a galaxy far, far away from the HANDMAID'S TALE land in which we currently suffer.