A Life Less Ordinary (R)
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This came out in 1997, and I'm pretty sure I saw it on TV sometime in the late 90s or early 00s, but by the time I watched it again in 2023, I barely remembered anything about it. It did not do well either critically or financially, which I think is a shame. It's a pretty weird story, but I like that about it, and I think at the very least it deserves to be a cult classic. (It's not, as far as I know, but it should be.)

It starts in Heaven, with a part of the plot I had completely forgotten existed. There are a couple of people who work there (I don't know if you could call them angels, because they apparently used to be living humans before they died) named Jackson (Delroy Lindo) and O'Reilly (Holly Hunter), whose job it is to make humans fall in love. (This sounds to me more like a job for Cupid, but I suppose the screenwriter took the expression "a match made in Heaven" to heart and ran with it.) They get called into the office of their boss, the angel Gabriel (Dan Hedaya), who is upset that it's been a long time since Jackson and O'Reilly have had any success in their assignments. Apparently, orders have come down from above that if they fail in their next mission, they'll have to stay on Earth, which they really don't want to do.

Meanwhile, on Earth, a janitor named Robert (Ewan McGregor) gets fired, loses his girlfriend, and gets evicted. (Jackson and O'Reilly repossess all his stuff and serve the eviction notice.) Robert goes to the office of the CEO of the company where he worked, Mr. Naville (Ian Holm), to demand his job back. That goes more poorly than you would have expected, but somehow he ends up kidnapping Naville's daughter, Celine (Cameron Diaz). Her father had just been upset with her because she had turned down a marriage proposal from a dentist named Elliot (Stanley Tucci), and he told Celine that she had to start working. So she's upset with her father, which leads her to help the hapless Robert with his ill-conceived kidnapping, hoping to split the ransom money with him. Naville hires Jackson and O'Reilly to get Celine back and to kill Robert. Somehow, this is all part of their plan to make Robert and Celine fall in love, which is their current assignment. The two seem like an incredibly unlikely match, but somehow, the plan eventually starts to work. But Robert and Celine (especially Celine) are... disinclined to follow their hearts.

I guess that's all I want to say about the plot. The only thing I remembered about the movie was that McGregor played a guy who kidnapped a woman played by Diaz (I didn't remember the characters' names), and that she was better at it than he was. And I remembered one of McGregor's lines, "Well I'm trying to do my best here under really difficult circumstances". And then there's Beck's music video Deadweight, which is even weirder than the movie. Anyway, I like Robert and Celine, but my favorite character might be O'Reilly. I wish I could think of more to say about the movie. I wish I could at least get a clear idea of other things to compare it to. (At one point I think it slightly reminded me of Moulin Rouge, but there are probably more apt comparisons that elude me.) But if you like absurd, surreal movies, you should like this.