the audience applauded

Better Late Then Never

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

If you read the book you can tell within the first 10-15 minutes of the movie that it is going to suck. So to help keep my ranting down I will list the issues I have with the movie rather than go into deep detail.1. Reece is suppose to be in her early twenties and not her forties. It wouldn't be so bad if Ms. Locklear could have at least pass off as in her mid thirties and her botox didn't make her face look swollen. Swollen face does not equal looking like you are 20-some years younger.2. Reece has PTSD, tendencies and is OCD. When being questioned about the cook job she is smiling some time, flippant about having her car break down and can't leave and too perky. When questioned about how long she'd been on the road she is annoyed. Never once did she come across nervous during the "interview" nor when she got behind the grill. She's suppose to be uneasy and anxious. 3. Movie shows Reece sleeping in the bathtub with the door closed. Reece has issues with small space. She was traumatized by being shot inside a closet so doesn't like small spaces. There is a point in the book where she is taking a bubble bath and said other times she had tried with the door locked but always ended up scrambling out of the tub to open the door. When she has the door open can't be in there for that long. Even when she showers she has to recite multiplications to get through being in there. With all that said, there is no way in hell she would sleep in the bathroom with the door shut.4. Joanie is way too nice/soft spoken. Joanie IS a nice person but she doesn't use kid gloves, is rough spoken, straight to the point and pretty much is the kind of "tough love" person. The kind that will be like "that sucks, i am really sorry that happened but it can help make you stronger so get on with it". She won't pity you but push/help you move on.5. The "panic attack" that she had in the store never happened. That was royally stupid, dumb and definitely a WTF moment. In the book she was happy and excited about buying stuff for a place she was going to live in. So if you read the book and see that BS in the movie it will definitely be a "Thats effing retarded!" And then Brody WALKING the box of stuff to her place. I understand they did that to cut time out and jumble their meeting, the backfire Reece thought was gun and her moving into the pace together but still it was stupid. In the book Brody got roped into helping her bring her stuff to the apartment is because he had a car and she had more than just one box of stuff. I won't even start in on how bad Locklear's acting was on trying to look terrified of thinking the sound of a car backfire was a shot gun. The movie plays down Reece's fears and what she was going through. That right there ruined and voided important parts of the story. The story itself isn't just a love murder story but also to see how Reece over comes her battle with the tragedy in her past. 6. When Reece was on the cliff seeing the murder taking place she never tried to run to them to stop the murder in the book. In the movie she saw it happening, without thinking starts to go towards them, almost falling off the cliff, falls down to her backwards, has a flash back, gets back up to see them suddenly gone, stumbles/runs down the trail, out of now where Brody scares her. In the book Reece ran into Brody, before seeing the murder, on the trail while she was hiking up. Brody's reason for being there, he was doing research since he was "killing someone up there later" in his book. Reece goes to the cliff sees a guy strangle a girl till she stops moving, turns around, runs back down the path and literally runs into Brody on the trail rather than him coming out of nowhere. It's only when she is stumbling back down the trail, before she ran into Brody the second time, that she starts to get what she just saw and her memory mixing together. She is indifferent in the movie saying "She's dead. There is nothing we can do for her now" and Brody is the one who says to call the sheriff. In the book she is hysterical and wants to get help. BIG difference in attitude. The little snip in the movie after the sheriff left seemed ridiculously stupid considering the way she was before. In the book it makes sense since she was scared, upset and wanted to get help. In the movie, nope, it was retarded.Honestly, the list goes on and on but we are limited on how many words we can put in here. So these were just the major complaints that affect the whole movie and those were in just 30 minutes into it. If I added the smaller ones and the other issues from the rest of the movie, it would never fit here.My recommendation, don't watch the movie and read the book. If you can't read the book then listen to the unabridged audio book. It is almost 15 hours long but worth the time where the movie isn't worth the botox Heather Locklear use to try to look younger.

**SPOILERS** Having her car break down in the wide open spaces of the state of Wyoming Reese Gilmore, Heather Lockear,is out of money and a place to say until her car in repaired. Stuck in the town of Angles Fall Reese ends up getting a job at Jonnie's place-the Angle Food Diner-run by, you guessed, Jonnie, Linda Darlow.As it tuns out Reese turns the greasy spoon eating establishment into the top gourmet spot in the state having people from as far away as Cheyenne and Jackson Hole travel there to savor the hot and testy dishes that she cooks up. We soon learn that some five years ago Reese was a top chef back in Boston at the top rated Maneo Restaurant. We also sadly learn that Reese was the only survivor of a massacre at the restaurant where 14 of her friends and fellow employees were gunned down by a crazed madman who has never been caught!Trying to put her shattered life back together Reese after months of mental therapy and shock treatment now wants to start a new life at friendly Angles Fall but things don't seem to work out the way she hoped that they would. Hiking in the woods one morning Reese spots, with her binoculars, a couple arguing by the river bank. The argument leads to murder with the man strangling and then bashing the women's head in and then taking off in the woods! After a very traumatized Reese reported the incident to Angles Fall's Sheriff Rick Marsdsen, Gary Hudson, a search was made of the area with nothing, no body no blood no clothing, being found! Wanting to drop the case and get back to the business's at hand, like giving out parking tickets, Sheriff Marsden is bothered by the very insistent Rease in finding the body of the woman that she claimed to have seen murdered and the man who murdered her!As it soon becomes apparent to Sheriff Marsden, and almost everyone else in town, that the trauma Reese has been suffering from, since the Boston restaurant massacre, has effected her mind and caused her to conjure up the incident at the river bank! An incident that nobody but Reese's boyfriend Angels Fall's world famous mystery writer Brody, John Schaech, believes! That's until the murdered woman, through a police composite sketch, was positively identified as being that of Jackson Hole stripper Donna James, Shannon Tuer, who's been missing for over a week!It's then with his victim identified, and the evidence to her murder leading straight to him, that the unknown killer comes out into the open. This in order to shut up Reese by murdering her and making it look like she, being as mentally unstable as she is, killed herself! The only problem the killer has is that Reese's boyfriend Brody who unlike herself is not suffering from severe mental trauma is on to him as well!

I've seen some of the other Nora Roberts' novels that were made into movies. But, this is the first time that I've read the book and watched the movie. While the book did draw me in and kept me reading, the movie just didn't pull at me. I felt that the movie contained a lot of teasers, but didn't expand upon them. One example was Reese telling Joanie that there needs to be fresh herbs. The movie ends with us not knowing whether Joanie got those fresh herbs.Personally, I thought Heather Locklear was too old to play the part of Reese Gilmore. I like Ms. Locklear and think she is a good actress when she is cast in the right role: Sammy Jo Dean Carrington in Dynasty, one of her best characters.Understanding that this movie was a made for TV movie and had to work within time constraints, it could have been presented differently and still told the story in a way that would have kept my interest. I would suggest that if you haven't read the book yet, don't read the book until after you've watched the movie.

I really enjoyed this book and so I may have set my expectations for the movie a little too high - I was a bit disappointed. Although the movie followed the book closely, I thought that Heather Locklear was too old for the character of Reese. She also did not fit the book's description of Reese. I also believed that the actress that played Joanie was not a good fit and she was not as important a character in the movie as she was in the book. Jonathan Schaech, however, was a wonderful choice for Brody as was the actor that played the doctor. I still enjoyed the movie. I should have known better than to expect the movie to be as good as the book.