Burke is a motivational speaker whose book about dealing with grief is a best seller. His wife died in a car accident three years ago. He's in Seattle to lead a week-long workshop on healing and to negotiate a major multi-media deal. But, something's amiss because he's a closet drinker, he won't ride elevators, he has moods swings, he's estranged from his wife's father and he's very much alone. In a hotel hallway, he bumps into a woman arranging flowers, he tries to chat with her and gets the brush-off. She's Eloise, a local florist who's just broken up with her boyfriend. Burke is persistent and they eventually go to dinner. It goes badly? What's blocking Burke? Can the physician heal himself?
This film is a downbeat story about romance but also about dealing with grief. Eloise gets Burke to confront his real feelings. There is some satire about the multimedia self-help/feel good industry included. One major problem with this film is that Jennifer Aniston is not acting in this role and other roles because she is always acting as herself? She is fidgeting, she gets stuck pronouncing words, trouble expressing her feelings and she always has the same head movements. She makes everything around her seem light and frivolous but it doesn’t fit or work in this drama. Despite these drawbacks, I did like this movie. 3 1/2*
109 min, Romance directed and written by Brandon Camp and also written by Mike Thompson, with Jennifer Aniston, Aaron Eckhart, Dan Fogler, Martin Sheen, Frances Conroy, Sasha Alexander, Anne Marie DeLuise, Panou, Michelle Harrison, Tom Pickett, John Carroll Lynch, Judy Greer, Joe Anderson.
Note: Imdb 5.7* out of 10* with 32K reviews, popularity 3784, Rotten Tomatoes 16% with 110 critic reviews 37% with 100,000+ audience scores, Metacritic 33 out of 100 with 26 critic reviews 5.6 out of 10 with 31 user scores, reelviews.net 1 1/2* out of 4*, Letterboxd 2.4 out of 5*.
Special Note: "Unicom" appears to be a combination of the names "Universal" and “Viacom? Jennifer Aniston was never in Seattle during the shooting of this film except when exiting Water St. Cafe and she is front facing. With this exception, her face is otherwise never seen during the scenes depicting Seattle landmarks. A body double always facing away from the camera was used instead. The interior of Eloise's Garden was actually a high-end lingerie shop in Vancouver and the filmmakers redressed it as a flower shop. When Burke & Eloise are on their first date, they are seen exiting the Water St. Cafe. This is a real restaurant in Vancouver British Columbia and parts of the movie were filmed there.
Mistakes: When Burke arrives to the hotel for the first time and drinks a vodka on ice, the ice cubes disappear while drinking. But you can still hear the ice cubes? Eloise chides her assistant for not cauterizing the roses. Roses are never cauterized. That would seal the stems so they would not be able to take up water. Roses in fact should be cut daily since the stems seal up naturally. At the end, Burke tells Eloise that he has not talked to his wife's parents but at the beginning of the movie, he talks to his wife's father? When Burke is releasing Rocky the cockatoo, the weather conditions vary from authentically gray and misty, to sunny with fake fog and back again repeatedly.
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