Remember Me (2010)

When they advertised Allen Coulter's Remember Me, it was a movie about love. (Watch the trailer here.) Two lonely people -- Tyler (Robert Pattinson) and Ally (Emilie de Ravin) -- who find each other and overcome obstacles like her over-protective father and the reason why Tyler approached her in the first place. I wasn't really excited to see it. Something about it told me that I shouldn't but when I went with my group of friends to the movies, it's what we ended up seeing. Turns out, I was right.

Don't get me wrong. It's well acted and engaging. You root for the couple. You hope that the problems they're facing will get resolved and/or overcome. But, for me, it was soul-crushingly painful to watch.

What the trailers didn't show you is why these two lonely people were lonely. Ally's mother was shot in front of her. Her cop father became hyper vigilant to protect her, to the point that he's smothering her. This I could handle. It's Tyler's family drama that haunted me for days afterward.

Three years before the movie begins, Tyler's older brother, Michael, hung himself and Tyler was the one who found the body. The aftermath of the suicide saw grief break the family apart. Tyler is estranged and angry at his father. He blames Dad for his brother's death and hates Dad for abandoning them emotionally afterwards. The movie is a good and accurate depiction of the open chest wound that suicide leaves behind for every family member. Watching their pain and stifled grief was gut-wrenching, disturbing and something that still hurts, thinking about it almost 7 years later. It overshadowed any romance for me.

If they had just left it at this, then I would have rated the movie about a 7 out of 10. As I said before, it's well-acted and engaging. There are no bad guys or characters you hate (they even paint Dad in his prideful misery in a sympathetic way). But then there was the ending. The stupid, manipulative, insulting ending. That ending is why I only gave the film a 3 out of 10.

Right when things were looking up for the pair, and things are finally getting better between father and son, Tyler drops by Dad's office. It just happens to be located in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  It was an unexpected visit so Dad is in a meeting, so Tyler waits. It's easy to imagine what happened after.

So, when they all were finally starting to move on and heal, not only do they have the scars of those previous deaths (Tyler's brother's and Ally's mother's), but they also get to weep over his senseless death, too. I guess that's why they named the movie 'Remember Me.'

I really wish I didn't.

My Rating: 3/10

Links:
IMDB page for the movie
Wikipedia page for the movie

Reviews:
AV Club review
Entertainment Weekly - I'm Still Not Over ... The twist ending of 'Remember Me'
Plugged In review
Roger Ebert review

A Snarky Blow-by-Blow Retelling of 'Noah' (2014)

Our movie begins. Foreboding music (drums mostly) accompanies its beginning narration.

In the beginning there was nothing...
We see an image of the serpent, slithering forward.
Temptation led to sin...
Image of the apple (even though the forbidden fruit *wasn't* an apple, except in religious tradition), a hand picking it, sound of someone eating it
Cast out of Eden, Adam and Eve had three sons:
CAIN, ABEL and SETH.
Shadowplay of Cain killing Abel
Cain killed Abel
and fled to the East,
where he was sheltered by a band of fallen angels:
The Watchers.
Huge mishapen disjointed rock creatures (there's no way that these things would legitimately live if they were real)
These Wachers helped Cain's descendants
build a great industrial civilization.
Say what? Since when was the technology of Noah's era industrial?
Elizabethan-looking city grows and grows (like there were that many people...)
It reminds me of a plague.
Cain's cities spread wickedness, (Cain's still alive then?)
devouring the World.
The blight of Cain's people spread across the land (that looks a lot like Pangaea, something that broke apart 175M years ago)
Only the descendants of Seth
defend and protect what is left of Creation.
Today, the last of Seth's line becomes a man. (What about Lamech's other sons and daughters?)
The action starts...