Simply Perfect

Powerful

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

I found this movie on Netflix streaming movies.I became a Christina Applegate fan years ago when she was the ditzy Kelly Bundy on the "Married With Children" TV series. I have seen her in several things since then and always enjoy her roles.Here she is Dr. Suzanne Bedford but as a relatively young 30-something has an unexpected heart attack. With surgery she is fine but the threat of another causes her to abandon her big city practice and buy a small town practice on an island north of Boston.There she meets Johnathon Schaech as college graduate Matt Harrison who writes, as yet unpublished, so he makes ends meet as a handyman on the island. He and Suzanne hit it off, he proposes, and against medical advice she has a baby.But there is another women in Matt's life. It is Kathleen Rose Perkins as publishing house editor Kate Wilkinson. She and Matt have a good chemistry also, but right when things seem to be going great he tells her "I can't do this" and he goes away, out of her life.But the story is a lot more complex than that, and overall makes an interesting and enjoyable 90-minute movie that plays like a TV movie. SPOILERS: The two women in Matt's life were consecutive, but the stories are shown as parallel events. After the baby was growing Suzanne got in the car with their son, she had another heart attack while driving, went off a bridge, the baby didn't survive either. So Matt's new book, which Kathleen is editing with him, was written after he had become single again. He was falling in love with Kathleen but still had memories of his dead wife and son, hadn't worked them out yet. But he gave her a diary to read, it was written by Suzanne, and then she understood. Eventually they got back together, married, and as the movie ends we see a family portrait of Matt, Kathleen, and the young daughter.

Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas is one of the best books I have ever read. I'm not much of a reader, but I read this book 3 times. I guess I should have known better than to expect the movie to be as good as the book.The acting was TERRIBLE. They left out some of the best parts of the book. The movie was horribly cheesy, and did not do the book justice. This could have been such an amazing movie. I'm not sure if the budget was low or what, but it was just so disappointing. Maybe someone else will try again with a better cast and a bigger budget. I hope they apologized to James Patterson after making it.I need to go re-read the book now just to get the movie out of my head!!

Kate Wilkinson is a book editor who receives a copy of the diary of Dr. Suzanne Bedford, started in 2003 for her then unborn son Nicholas. We go back and forth from Suzanne's life to Kate's, which is unfortunate because I enjoyed Suzanne's life so much more.At the start of the movie, Suzanne is a busy Boston physician who discovers she has heart problems. Because having a baby would risk her health, Suzanne ends up breaking up with her boyfriend who wanted children, and also moves to a less stressful island community to take over a general practice.Among her neighbors is the quirky Melanie, who advises her that the house where Suzanne lives and works needs fixing up. Melanie refers her to a man who calls himself Picasso, a Brown graduate who gave up the corporate life working for his father in order to become a writer. Soon the relationship between Suzanne and her handyman becomes more than just friendship. When she becomes pregnant, Suzanne is advised to have an abortion but she refuses.Suzanne's patients, including hypochondriac Earl ('What seems to be the problem?' 'What isn't?') care a lot about her. Sadly, all is not perfect in this paradise.Kate starts a relationship of her own with Matt, a client who wrote about the same community where Suzanne lived. Meanwhile, Kate reads the diary and wonders if the story is true, and she learns lessons that help her in her own life.It took a while, but I ended up liking Suzanne a lot, and I enjoyed her story, even with the problems she experienced, and I wished things had ended differently for her. I thought Christina Applegate did an admirable job, and I liked her goofy neighbors. I even sort of liked her sensitive bearded husband.As for Kate, I couldn't stand her. I won't take anything away from Kathleen Perkins' performance, but somehow I couldn't find her appealing, even when the character mentioned growing up in North Carolina. That's the only part of her story I enjoyed, and it lasted about five seconds. Worse yet, Kate's story wasn't even completely in chronological order, though later I understood certain things better.I would have been much happier if the entire movie had been Suzanne's diary, with no flashbacks.

I really liked that movie. It made me cry! I felt so bad for Matt because he lost his wife and his son, and the boy was only 4 months old! But I'm glad that Suzanne found someone who appreciated her even if the risk of having children is severe. I just felt so sad to see someone go through so much pain. And the fact that at the end of the diary he wrote how he'd rock Nick's cradle at night, though he wasn't in it because he was in the car accident with his mother. And I have to say that I love Christina Applegate, she's a terrific actress! I love all the movies and TV shows she's been in. And the actors in this film were so believable. The emotion they gave was so strong that I could feel the emotion that the character was portraying. I give this film a straight 10 out of 10 because I haven't seen a film that was made throughout the millennium that I've enjoyed this much.