We must always remember that we're the real news," sneered Albert Brooks in 1987's Broadcast News, anticipating the current age of celebrity journalism, when headlines battle for attention over the preening simps who read them. Victory is finally declared in Life Or Something Like It, a banal message movie about a TV personality who openly considers how the events of the day—sports scores, weather anomalies, natural disasters—relate to her own grand destiny. Amazingly, director Stephen Herek and his screenwriters don't betray a hint of self-consciousness about how her job might affect other people, so they've basically made a narcissistic movie that decries the evils of narcissism. Looking ready for the scathing news satire that might have been, Angelina Jolie adds a platinum-blonde fright wig to her already striking features, as she plays a Seattle TV reporter trying to split the difference between Marilyn Monroe and Barbara Walters. Ambitious and obsessively career-minded, with a luxury apartment and a Mariners star for a fiancé, Jolie has put herself on the fast track to a dream job at a network morning show. But her plans are derailed when a street prophet (Tony Shalhoub) tells her she's going to die in a week—a prediction she takes seriously when his visions of a football score, a hailstorm, and a San Francisco earthquake all come to pass. In an effort to buck fate, Jolie reconsiders her priorities and steers her life on a radically different course, with a renewed interest in family and a more meaningful romance with modest, unpretentious cameraman Edward Burns. Life Or Something Like It is more or less a straight-faced equivalent of Groundhog Day, except that instead of reliving the same day in an endless loop, the heroine knows when she's going to die. This knowledge comes with a sort of devil-may-care freedom, but apart from a scene in which Jolie scarfs down Oreos and pizza in a Social Distortion T-shirt and sweatpants, the film does nothing with her abandon. The screenplay sounds like a pitch meeting at an ad agency, with slogans in place of profundities ("live for every moment") and a beer commercial's contempt for ambitious women. And no point in searching for subtle insights into theme and character: It's all right there in the dialogue! As always, Jolie's boisterous presence assures that all eyes are drawn toward her at any given moment. But in this case, her magnetism undercuts the film's scolding lecture on self-absorption, leaving the opposite impression instead.