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"Heartless, a dark but transformative work that invokes existential dread while promising that the mystery of life may be engaged by living—frantically, formidably and fantastically."

Directed by Catherine Hardwicke Cast: Toni Collette, Drew Barrymore

Opens Friday 11/6

Miss You Already has got all of its ducks in a row. It wants really badly to be a tender, emotional, gently funny story about female friendship in the face of adversity. It’s just itching to impart all sorts of lessons about life and death and female empowerment and body issues and whatnot. It’s hired a couple of solid actresses to express all the deep feels it’s trying to express. And it’s placed several credible women behind the camera for maximum authenticity. It’s a real shame then that Miss You Already doesn’t go through the trouble of actually delivering a compelling movie.

We start off with our no nonsense narrator Jess (the nearly always lovable Drew Barrymore) recounting her lifelong friendship with wild child bestie Milly (fantastic Aussie Oscar nominee Toni Collette). The two met in elementary school when Jess’ father was transferred to London on business. Since then they’ve been inseparable, going through life’s ups and downs together with humor and resolve. Milly married a rock star roadie (Dominic Cooper) and had a bunch of kids. Jess met a nice construction worker (Paddy Considine) and started living on a houseboat. This lengthy, pre-credit monologue/montage tells us everything we need to know and saves the actresses the trouble of—you know—actually establishing a chemistry with one another. It’s all spelled out for us, neat as a pin.

Shortly after the opening credits roll, we get our drama bomb when we’re informed that Milly has breast cancer. The Big C. That’s a pretty serious crisis for best friends to overcome, no? Since Jess has to have some story as well, there’s a subplot about her trying to get pregnant and going through in vitro fertilization. Two medical crises for the price of one; imagine the drama! Please, continue to imagine it. Because Miss You Already would rather you do most of the heavy lifting yourself. All the cliché signposts have been laid out along the route for you. You just need to laugh and cry and sympathize on cue. And fill in all the blanks that a more conscientiously constructed drama would have taken care of.

It’s not that Miss You Already lacks sincerity. It’s oozing with the stuff. Everyone involved seems to want it to work. But it just doesn’t build up much of a compelling narrative. What’s there lacks detail and nuance and the tiny, unexpected moments that bespeak authenticity. The simple, linear story doesn’t add anything new or fresh in the way of flavoring. Milly learns she has breast cancer. She shares the info with her best friend. There’s a lot of crying and commiserating. Later, there’s some drinking. Then there’s the chemotherapy. And the bit where Milly’s hair falls out. There’s the sequence where the girls go wig shopping. Then there’s the dark scene where the doctor talks about mastectomies. Milly worries she'll lose her sex appeal. More drinking. At some point people sing along to REM. There’s the inevitable falling out. And the just-as-inevitable reunion. None of it’s unrealistic, mind you. Plenty of people have gone though this exact sequence of events. But there’s nothing here you couldn’t learn from ticking off bullet points on a brochure in your oncologist's waiting room.

The film is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who started out strong directing edgy films Lords of Dogtown and Thirteen—then got really boring by doing the first Twilight movie. Here, she retreats to her indie roots, but she doesn’t seem to have the chops for it anymore, relying on simple montages and easy narrations to tell rather than show. Jess spends an awful lot of time explaining what’s going on—as if we needed the hand-holding. Her best friend has cancer. They’re dealing with it. That’s pretty much it.

Miss You Already wants you to laugh and cry as if you were watching Steel Magnolias crossed with Beaches. But you’re not. The film’s script, by longtime British TV actress Morwenna Banks (“Hyperdrive,” “Skins,” “Absolutely”), intersperses its tear-jerking not with moments of actual humor, but with brief flashes of flippancy. It’s like those Hallmark birthday cards with pictures of the grim reaper on them. They aren’t actually funny, but you get humor credit for the symbolic honesty.

Miss You Already means well. Its rare that we get to see movies about relationships between women, particularly women in their 40s. But this one’s little more than a well-cast Lifetime Channel movie. Toni Collette deserves better. The girl who starring in Charlie’s Angels deserves better. Hell, cancer deserves better.

Dateline: Ukraine

Chewbacca has been arrested for,uncharacteristically, supporting Darth Vader in his bid for political office. Witnesses in Odessa recorded a video of a man dressed in a Chewbacca costume being arrested for allegedly campaigning for Darth Vader. The Internet Party candidate, whose real name remains unknown, is running for mayor of Odessa. Unfortunately, Ukraine law prevents campaigning on voting day—which is why Chewbacca was arrested. The wookie was fined the equivalent of $8 and released. The eccentric Internet Party—whose slogan is “electronic government against bureaucracy”—has tried running Darth Vader for president of Ukraine as well as mayor of Kiev and Odessa. So far the candidate has been booted from most elections because his real identity could not be verified.

Dateline: England

The last surviving cracker from the Titanic was auctioned off on Oct. 24, fetching a staggering 15,000 pounds ($23,000). The Spillers and Bakers “Pilot” cracker, now dubbed the “world’s most valuable biscuit,” originally came from a survival kit aboard one of the Titanic’s lifeboats. The long-lived snack item was reportedly sold to a Greek collector by the Henry Aldridge & Son auction house in Devizes, England. Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said the historic baked good was saved by James and Mabel Fenwick, passengers on the Carpathia, a ship that picked up survivors after the Titanic’s 1912 sinking.

Dateline: Washington

State troopers in Tacoma pulled over a motorist who tried to use the Interstate 5’s multiple occupancy lane with a zombie baby in the passenger seat. Police weren’t fooled by the rubber Halloween decoration and handed the man a $136 ticket for an HOV lane violation. Washington State Police’s public information officer tweeted a picture of the driver’s zombie baby strapped into the passenger seat and said, “At least he’s in the [Halloween] spirit.” The officer who issued the ticket followed up on the initial tweet, saying things could have been worse for the motorist: “We gave him a break for not having a [child] car seat.”

Dateline: West Virginia

Chris White, an assistant prosecuting attorney in Logan County, has been suspended for pulling a real gun on some fake spiders. According to WCHS in Charleston, White suffers from arachnophobia and did not take well to his office’s Halloween decorations. “He said they had spiders everyplace and he said he told them it wasn’t funny, and he couldn’t stand them,” Logan County Prosecutor John Bennett told WCHS. White allegedly pulled out a handgun in the office on the morning of Oct. 5. Although witnesses say he didn’t wave it around or point it at anyone, he did threaten to “shoot all the spiders.” Bennett admitted White’s gun did not have a clip in it at the time. “Of course, they wouldn’t know that,” said Bennett. “I wouldn’t either if I looked at it, to tell you the truth.” Bennett told the station White has been suspended, but the prosecutor’s office does not intend to fire him over the incident. White has been with the attorney’s office for five years, reportedly without incident. Bennett said he sent out a memo after the incident banning firearms from the office.

Dateline: Indiana

Authorities say a dog “ironically and aptly named Trigger” shot his owner in the foot with a shotgun. According to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, 25-year-old Allie Carter of Avilla was hunting waterfowl at Tri-County Fish and Wildlife Area on Saturday, Oct. 24, when she set her 12-gauge shotgun on the ground near her feet. Her 10-year-old chocolate Labrador, named Trigger, stepped on the gun, causing it to discharge. Carter was taken to a local hospital with injuries to her foot and toes. “It was just an accident that occurred and just to serve as a stark reminder of some of the safety measures we should take,” Indiana Conservation Officer Jonathon Boyd told WBND-TV.

Dateline: Washington

A man who failed a paternity test for his child just discovered that his unborn twin brother is the child’s genetic father. Barry Starr, a geneticist at California’ Stanford University, announced that he and his colleagues have been studying the 34-year-old man who failed a paternity test after he and his wife discovered their child did not share a blood type with either of them. The child was born in June of 2014 with the help of a fertility clinic. The clinic that helped the couple insisted the man’s semen sample was used. The man took a genetic ancestry test, which determined he was the child’s uncle. University researchers eventually figured out the man was a human chimera, a rare condition that results from absorbing cells from a deceased twin during the early stage of their mother’s pregnancy. Starr said the case is the first known incident of paternity tests being fooled by a human chimera. “Even geneticists are blown away by this,” he told BuzzFeed News.

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