Ann (Sarah Polley) lives with her two kids and her one and only lover husband (Scott Speedman) in a trailer. Then she gets uterine cancer and only two months to live. To deal, she draws up a list of things to do before she dies. She makes tapes to be played by her daughters on their birthdays, finds a new wife for her husband after her death, and have an affair.Isabel Coixet writes/directs this sentimental film. Mark Ruffalo, Amanda Plummer, and Deborah Harry also star in this drama. It's definitely a high concept movie. Sarah Polley plays tired and beaten down very well. The pace is slow. The tension doesn't really build. The ending is pretty much pre-ordained. A few surprises would have been helpful.

At first when I saw the IMDb score and read the synopsis, I thought this will be a great movie... And for the first 5 or 7 minutes I had this impression. But then the movie started to slowly kill my hopes. This is a movie about a girl who discovers she is going to die and so she decides to go out and punish the whole world for it, including herself. There's a thin line between moving and pathetic. And this movie is about pathetic people, not unfortunate, poor, struggling people. First she starts off writing her list of "things to do before I die", like: telling her kids she loves them more often, finding another woman for her husband, going to the beach with her husband, going to see her dad who's in jail, smoking and drinking... But the following is where the list goes a little mischievous: 1- Record birthday messages to her 6 and 4 year old daughters until they're 18 (If they can move on, let's make sure we turn each and every birthday a depressing occasion of remembering mom is dead) 2- Have sex with other men to see what it's like (she lies to the husband -who she seems to love- about going to die and cheats on him too, no harm in that too!!) 3- Make someone fall in love with me (She seems to be in love with her husband and keeps telling him she loves him, but then she wants to torture another man by making him fall in love with her, while she's supposedly happily married and also... DYING!)So, on top of her list is to tell her girls she loves them everyday, but instead of wanting to spend what's left of her life with her loved ones, she leaves them with the neighbor, who has just moved in, after a 5- minute talk to go and screw the new guy's life. I can understand if people decide to become a little selfish when they realize there's very little time on their hands, but to decide to be mean to her mother, to cheat on her husband, to lie to another man and make him fall in love with her and to ditch her girls with a total stranger is just pure nonsense when the plot tries to convince you she's sacrificing for everyone's sake!There almost isn't anyone who's normal in this movie. A pathetic work colleague who's obsessed with diets and food (as in literally talking about diets/food in every scene she appears on). A pathetic grandmother who tells her grand daughters creepy stories and whines about her life in a super pathetic way. A pathetic waitress in a coffee shop who wishes to win the lottery in order to transform her looks to look like Cher! A pathetic boyfriend who has absolutely no furniture, God knows why! A pathetic father in jail who sews shoes and asks the daughter he hasn't seen in years for her daughters' shoe sizes. And ultimately a pathetic, dying, 23 year old girl who wastes entirely all the time left in her life over things that cannot even qualify to be labeled wishes, to say the least. This is it about the plot and the characters. The script is weird, creepy and makes no sense, interrupted by irrelevant, pathetic, emotionless voice-over. The acting is terrible, you can hardly sense any emotions from all actors. Like when she receives the news of her terminal cancer so she weeps for a few seconds then asks the doctor for a piece of candy! The movie is so boring, moving slowly between unreasonable events, to eventually meet the inevitable, very expected and disappointing end. I really can't get my head around why this movie scored 7.6 on IMDb!

Aside from a couple good acting performances, this film has nothing going for it. A (very) young woman finds out she has only a couple months to live, and takes this news as if she had been told her car needed a new transmission. Get a second opinion? No--why bother? See an oncologist? Nah... Just ask for candy from the doctor and make a few tapes for people to listen to after you're dead.So, we don't get to witness any real emotional response from the main character. And because she refuses to tell anyone she's dying, we don't get to experience any other characters' responses, either. The whole film is thus boring, tedious and pointless.The role of the "other man" is underplayed and just... weird. The voiceovers don't add much, and even if they attempted to, it would be a cheap, easy way out.But of course, any movie with a person dying of cancer gets an automatic 8-to-10 vote from most people. Ridiculous.Please rate this review as "not helpful". I WANT you to!

a great movie about real people, beautifully played, very well shot the lines the characters got are great too, as are the characters them self it's interesting how the movie manages not to drag you down, how it manages to stay positive, while the main character is dying ... beautiful - watch it if you get iti watched it by incident ... just cached it on TV and the title sounded interesting to me. now i'm very happy i stayed with this movie--- Ann: "Now you feel like you wanna take all the drugs in the world, but all the drugs in the world aren't gonna change the feeling that your whole life's been a dream and it's only now that you're waking up."