Just like Heaven- 2008, Directed by Mark Waters

‘Just like Heaven’ is a stereotypical romantic comedy with a classic opening where we see the logo of ‘DreamWorks ’ but instead of the classic ‘DreamWorks’ music there was an upbeat song playing instead that was very upbeat this straight away indicates that the film is going to be upbeat and have a classic lovey dovey message, the camera pans down from the ‘DreamWorks’ logo and goes through the clouds and titles in bright pink, then blue and yellow appear on the screen and then we continue to go through the clouds and then continues to show ‘Reese Witherspoon’ sitting in a chair in a very cloudy garden, all with bright colours and a warm atmosphere giving the audience a picture of a ‘Garden of Eden’ and Heaven she is wearing bright white clothing and a yellow dress giving her the look of a fairy-tale princess, the camera fades a couple of times to show a passage of time the camera then fades to her sitting on a chair with the title of the film appears to her immediate left reading in bright bold letters saying ‘Just Like Heaven’ we see the camera pan around to her from the back focusing on the chair she sitting on, the chair is not a typical chair that one would imagine in heaven it looks like a chair from a school or workplace.

As we pan back round to the front of her and the song then says “Like a dream” and she is woken up and we are plunged into her reality. When she wakes up it is a quick cut that is unsettling and just shows how fast she is woken up, we see an extreme close up of Reese Witherspoon with a hand on her shoulder being woken up we can see that she is wearing what look like scrubs and has a prop stethoscope from this straight away we can assume that she is either a Doctor or a Nurse, this is a consistent theme for romantic comedies and this is because she is a role model for young girls and the fact that she is a pretty white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. Whoever wakes her up is shouting a name “Elizabeth” (we now know that this is the name of our main protagonist) the next shot is in a handheld fashion and this is to show the hecticity of the hospital.

Although the hospital scene is very hectic and filmed in a hand held fashion the music that is playing is still very upbeat and shows that although her life is clearly hectic and mainly about helping people rather than helping herself in her everyday life. We see that she is a very nice and wants to help everyone around her by even the old man patient asking her to marry him, yes this is in a comedic sense but it shows how likable the character is. We then do a montage of her helping her patients to upbeat music we then cut to female doctors talking in the bathroom and all of the women talking about their kids or having kids and even talking about divorce but because she doesn't say anything straight away we assume that outside of the hospital she has no life or no social life, not married and not in a relationship (as this is the basis of all romcom’s we know this is going to change in the course of the film.)

We learn that she seems to pretty much lives in the hospital and that she enjoys it. We then follow her round again in a backward tracking shot and then we see another male doctor walking next to her and we can assume that she is in some sort of competition with him, they walk up next to a black doctor (we can assume that he is in charge as he is an almost James earl Jones type of character) he asks how long they have been here the other guy doctor says “12 hours” and then she says “longer” the black doctor then lets him know that he must go to tend to a gunshot victim, the black Doctor then tells her that she ‘the job’ (that we assume that they were competing for) he doctor then tells her to go home, as she is leaving when she gets to the elevator she is stopped by a male nurse who wants her to take a look at an ‘impacted bowel’ and she does even though she should go home, we then cut to her walking toward her car in the dark we hear thunder and from this we can tell that something ‘Bad’ is about to happen to her.

On the way home in the car there is still upbeat music playing as she is driving home and talking to her sister on the phone, when she puts the phone down we see an extreme close up of her hand turning up the radio as we cut back to her we see a truck’s breaks fail and she crashes straight into the truck and we see a bright light which symbolizes that she is most likely dead and BOOM light symbolises Heaven which tells us that she has passed on and the rest of the film begins.

Harrison Marlow