Remember Me -Review-

Let me be the first to admit something, I love writing reviews of bad movies. It's just so much fun, I don't have to gush over lines I liked, or directing, acting, anything like that. I can just spew out line after line ripping apart what I just saw, or giving colorful metaphors for things I'd rather have done than just watched the film.

Good films, for me at least, are a little trickier to review. If I give too much praise I make it sound better than it is, too little and I don't do it justice. Finding that fine line is hard, but I have to try to find it.

I say all of this, because I am about to write a review for a movie I liked, Robert Pattinson's "Remember Me".

"Remember Me" is a story of a man in his early twenties, and like a lot of men in their twenties he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, his family is torn apart by divorce and his Dad functions as a father merely in name only. Also, his brother killed himself when he was twenty-two, now our protagonist is reaching that ripe age himself.

Along the way he falls in love with a beautiful woman, who happens to be the daughter of the police officer that arrested him. Here there is a sub-plot that I didn't enjoy (the whole, I dare you to date her -that'll learn her father! BS story I've heard before - so ignore that tripe). She is as dysfunctional as he is, having watched her mother be murdered at the age of ten while they waited for the sub in New York City.

Throughout the film they both have their highs and lows, her father is an abusive drunk, but when he's sober he becomes just a scared man, afraid of losing his only thing left in the world he cares about. His father is a workaholic, but loves his family - even if he has no capable way of showing it. His sister is mistreated by her classmates, and he strikes back at them in a interesting fit of rage. Something I'm sure any parent wants to do to the kids bullying their children.

The end is somber, as I knew it would be, but it also felt really exploitative, when I saw what it was I sighed. I mean, it seemed tacked on just to get that final tear jerk out of people. This is unfortunate because it really detracts from the rest of the film, and for what? It just seems like the filmmakers tacked this on because they knew it would hurt a lot of people, people who could relate to that sense of loss. Tacky move on their parts in my opinion, really tacky.

Taking away the trite romance scenes (spaghetti fight, awwwww) dumb sub-plot (didn't they ever see She's All That?) and incredibly tasteless final moments (seriously, it was tasteless) this was actually a good movie. Hard to believe, but it's true.

The directing is done pretty decently, nothing groundbreaking or life changing, but it is done well enough to keep you engaged with the story. Each shot chosen to accentuate the mood by use of lighting and angles.

The acting is incredible here, going in I thought Robert Pattinson would deliver his "Twilight"-esque wooden performance, however here we get to see that he actually has a rather large range of emotions. I grew to like his character a lot, and could associate with how he felt about a lot of things. Emilie de Ravin, his love interest, provides an adequate performance. I didn't believe some of her emotions, but she was a good fit for her character.

The plot, while a bit contrived at times, was still good. Best when it was focusing on the human element to the story, and not the rather uninspired sub-plot. The characters were well written and fleshed out, they felt real, and that is all that matters to me.

All in all I'd say this was pretty good, not fantastic, but what I enjoy more than anything else is believable characters that I can relate to, and I was able to do just that with this film.

Carriers (2009) - Review -

If there was ever a genre of film that was overly saturated with bad movies it has to be the zombie survival genre. For every good movie, you have about twenty bad ones. Sadly, as a big fan of this genre I tend to watch just about all the films that come down the pipe (and that pipe is usually a sewer pipe).

So last night I decided to watch the film "Carriers" which is loosely tied to the zombie genre, in that they have one 'kinda-zombie' in it and a disease that starts to erradicate the population of the planet. I'm sure the filmmakers would tend to disagree with it being a zombie flick, but that just begs the question why they included one. I'm guessing to grab the crowd that loves zombies.

Basically the story follows four uninfected survivors of this disease who are trying to make it to a beach that the two main protagonists went to as children. Supposedly this beach is still safe and hospitable.

Well along the way they encounter more sick people, crazy people, and for some reason a dead Asian guy with the sign "Chinks brought it" tied to his corpse. Is that a nod towards the bird flu epidemic? Some people die, some live, but that's not important, because you never really feel anything towards the characters.

The directors (yes, there are two directors) don't seem to understand the human psyche, instead of showing the characters having real human emotions and struggling to survive in this new barren world (we never once see them eat, yet they seem perfectly fine) they choose to show odd scenes of joviality where they are playing golf or joking around in the car they're driving.

I found this to be the strangest thing, why play golf when you can forage for food, or weapons? I know if something like this happened to me, I'd be grabbing guns, tins of food an going somewhere incredibly isolated, not heading to the beach.

The biggest problem, aside from the detachment to the characters, is how incredibly off balance this movie is. The directors go from incredibly high moments to dark, deep moments without any idea of what a meaningful transition is. It feels like they take quick and easy cuts to jump around emotionally but with no real affect to the viewer.

I wanted to like this movie, I really did, it had some promising things going for it. The story was interesting, but the way it is told here is just too detached from any real emotions. I felt like I was waiting for something, anything, to happen and when it did. I just didn't care.

Score:

Acting = Pretty good, the actors do their best with what they're given, but the directing really shoots this one down.

Directing = The vistas look incredible, everything is wonderfully bleak, but when it comes to capturing any kind of actual human emotion - or getting the viewers to become attached to the characters they fail. Perhaps it's because there is just one too many directors here...

Final Thought = It's a decent flick, I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it to anyone for an evening of post-apocalyptic thrills. Instead go watch the much better directed, "28 Days Later", there you actually feel something for the characters and care what happens to them.

Our Family Wedding - Review -

At this point in time I believe Hollywood feels that the average film viewer has the memory of a goldfish (and that's an insult to goldfish everywhere). Every time I turn around I see another rehash of a film that has already been made before, over and over again. Yet some new spin is placed on it which makes it "fresh" . . . sure.

So here we have the film "Our Family Wedding" in which we get the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" theme remade, horribly, and more racially charged.

It seems to me like Hollywood has no idea that integration happened and that people marry into different races all the time now, I myself come from a racially mixed family (Mexican and American) an no fuss was made over my parents marriage.

However, my parents weren't in a Hollywood film. In "Our Family Wedding" an African American man is engaged to a Mexican American woman and she has hidden that fact from her father (played by Carlos Mencia, in what may be his only funny role to date) because, as far as I can tell, the filmmakers are informing me Mexicans are racist against African Americans . . . wow.

On the other hand we have the soon to be groom who has informed his father of the situation, but due to a run in with the brides father (who owns a towing company an tows the other mans car) he can not stand the Mexican family at all.

Over the course of the 103 minute running time we get racially charged dialogue (the two fathers bickering back and forth and using words like "Bro" "Esse" "Vato" and "Cuz" to describe the other man) a cookie cutter dilemma of the bride bucking tradition and fighting with her fiancé, a Mexican grandmother fainting at the sight of her granddaughters African American fiancé (which is horribly racist), Viagra jokes (seriously? Viagra jokes?) and we top it all off with Forest Whitaker (who plays the Groom's father) being molested by a goat.

At this point, I honestly don't want to go on describing this film. The plot is the same old same old, nothing new is added and the acting is probably worse.

Strangely enough Charlie Murphy (Eddie's brother) is in here and is over acting so bad he is the worst racial stereotype of the bunch. Which is odd, because the film is a giant mess of insulting racial stereotypes.

I found this film insulting, not only to my Mexican heritage, but to my intelligence, and the intelligence of everyone involved.

I understand the allure of making films like these, but honestly this is a black eye for all those involved. Tasteless humor, tasteless racial stereotypes, and goats hopped up on Viagra. This film is just awful.

Score:

Acting = Terrible, seems like most of the people phoned in their roles, except for Carlos Mencia who I enjoyed here. . . oddly.

Directing = Nothing new or groundbreaking, just the same thing you'd expect from a film like this.

Script = Nauseating, racially charged dialogue and racial stereotypes do not make for a good film.

Final Thought = Skip this and go watch "Guess Who's Coming for Dinner" the 1967 Sidney Poitier film which started it all, and is fantastic, coming from a time of true racial tension.