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Saturday, March 13, 2010

MOVIE REVIEW
Remember Me
Forgetting A Bad Film, And Quickly

Emilie De Ravin and Robert Pattinson in Allen Coulter's drama "Remember Me".
Summit Entertainment

By Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW 
Saturday, March 13, 2010

Allen Coulter's "Remember Me" is almost instantly forgettable, barring the final ten minutes that are as exploitative as a game of three card monte.  The film is set in 2001 in New York City, where a combustible, wayward lad named Tyler (Robert Pattinson) remains deeply hurt from the loss of his older brother Michael.  Tyler's ice-cold father (Pierce Brosnan) is a Wall Street hawk.  Ally (Emilie De Ravin) seems to be the only person that can connect to Tyler, who has crossed paths with her father (Chris Cooper) once or twice.

The screenplay by Will Fetters consists of lines of dialogue that feel borrowed and worn from many a movie.  One scene evokes a Jason Lee moment from "Vanilla Sky".  Much of Mr. Coulter's film is steeped in pretension.  The main characters are dipped in the yolk of self-importance and self-absorption.  We hardly care about Tyler's predicaments or the others mired in this drama. 

[Please forgive the irrelevant observation: Mr. Pattinson's Tyler has what I've heard described as "emotional hair".  He never seems to have a genuine bath.  Of course, that's his prerogative.  The bottom line: the entire film feels self-worshipping, a paean to Mr. Pattinson's "Twilight" superstardom.  As in, "Remember Me from the Twilight films".]

Had Mr. Pattinson graced the world with this feature film as his debut, he may have been viewed differently, but after the 'tween phenomenon of the "Twilight" films he looks in "Remember Me" as if he's posing in agony until he explodes.  Mr. Pattinson is genuinely trying his best but the performance lacks depth.  There's a line Tyler says: "I worry about it too," or words to that effect, which seem like a wink to Mr. Pattinson's own self-confessed worrying disposition.

The rest of the time "Remember Me" showcases adults and children shouting at or hitting each other.  Such actions form the general language of the film, which is shot in brooding, dank and shadowy tones by Jonathan Freeman.  Any romance meant to surface here is raw and unfocused but ultimately lost in a film where tensions are staged but not sufficiently developed.  It's too bad that Mr. Brosnan, great here and having an excellent 2010 in Summit releases -- "The Ghost Writer" is the other -- is stuck in a film that hardly deserves his talents.  And Mr. Cooper, who's played indignant characters before, deserves better.

Still, it's those final moments of "Remember Me" that are designed purely as a manipulative device.  Those moments add anger and insult, if anything, to a film that could and should have amounted to so much more.


With: Lena Olin, Tate Ellington, Ruby Jerins, Gregory Jbara, Caitlin Rund.

"Remember Me" is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association Of America for violence, sexual content, language and smoking.  The film's duration is one hour and 53 minutes.

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Read more movie reviews and stories from Omar here.

Read Omar's "Far-Flung Correspondent" reports for America's pre-eminent Film Critic Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times - here



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