so i was visiting my mom at her house, cooking dinner for her, and begged her to put on something else. anything else. but netflix had started autoplaying this, and with her adult adhd, it takes a supremely offensive film to make her turn something off. and while this turned out to be just as fluffy and forgettable as i thought, it was not supremely offensive. reese witherspoon is in prime eyelash-batting rom-com mode right out of the gate in this, anchoring what should be a lifetime movie by just being so damn watchable. then mark ruffalo comes in with an energy that is at first decidedly out-of-place in a rom-com, making you think for a minute that this is going to be a real film... but no, the ridiculous, contrived dialogue and completely lightweight emotional stakes come on soon enough, like a blanket of cotton candy that i'm sure fans of the genre will be too happy to wrap themselves in. director mark waters has a resume of successful fluff that probably includes at least one or two guilty pleasures for the significant other in your life. not me, i'd rather drift off to the next world in a warm bath with a razor than watch another of his films, but hey, we all have our kinks. i literally stepped out of the room 20 minutes into this to record a voice memo for my mom so that i could play it back for her at the end of the film and blow her mind by predicting exactly how the how thing would play out. okay, i overestimated how much they'd play up the odd couple ghost roommate angle (could easily have gotten some more gags from these leads!) but otherwise i nailed every major plot beat. which is not to say this is horrible, i mean, it's one of the better films i've seen based entirely around a just-barely top 40 charting alternative rock/pop song. the bottom line is that there are enough good performers in this movie to make it not terrible. donal logue is great. jon heder is great. they stick ivana miličević in this one year before she's a bond girl with the apparent instruction "slut it up...like, hard!" and she dutifully nails it. yeah, the ending is so cheesy and contrived and awkward that you want to drive to florida and hit as many oxy clinics as possible so that you can make the pain blissfully drift away, but you know, other than that, this is completely fine. it's fine. :d at least they picked a good song to play every twenty minutes so that you'd remember the name of the film. i'm preferential to "inbetween days", which feels like a good title for this, but marketing probably ixnayed that. or maybe "pictures of you"? "friday i'm in love"? "lovesong"??