I hereby admit my weak spot for trashy teenybopper films. They're my sinful indulgence, my guilty pleasure. And I no longer feel the need to hide it.
So I confess – I've seen "Center Stage." More than once. I can recite dialogue to "Bring it On." I own a copy of "The Cutting Edge." (And, if anyone out there has Mariah Carey's box office dud "Glitter," please email me because I'd love to borrow it.) My cure-all for the soul is a movie that makes my stomach hurt from laughing, but after which my brain will never ache from overuse.
"A Walk to Remember," starring pop singer Mandy Moore, is one of those films. Based on Nicholas Spark's best-selling novel, it is the story of Landon Carter, a popular high school senior living in small-town North Carolina, and Jamie Sullivan, the very un-popular daughter of the town's reverend, and their encounter with true love.
From the very first scene of the movie, I recognized the age-old plotline. The premise was undeniably stale: popular Boy gets in trouble. As a factor of punishment, he deals with unpopular Girl (who — of course — he was best friends with as a kindergartner, but then social pressures kicked in and they haven't talked since).
Despite initial friction, they come to enjoy their time together. Boy falls in love, Girl rejects him until Boy learns some sort of life lesson and they can finally be together in a state of hormone-driven teenage bliss.
The story itself was cliché (deviating only somewhat from the formulaic plot above), but, as a film, it got even worse.
Most characters were completely one-dimensional (the leader of the 'cool clique' in a high school can only have so much depth in a teenybopper movie). There were plot inconsistencies that simply could not be overlooked (the opening scene has a guy take a nasty spill as a result of a peer-pressure stunt; we think his neck must be broken, but it turns out that he only has a broken arm, leading the viewer to wonder why he needed extensive physical rehabilitation).
There are 10-second scenes that contribute nothing whatsoever to the plot (actually leaving the viewer questioning what they were even about) and there was poor editorial attention to detail (in one scene, Jamie goes to hug Landon and, in two shots of his watch, the second-hand jumps by seven minutes though, oddly enough, the hug itself didn't last that long).
Despite its failings in plot and direction, though, "A Walk to Remember" succeeds on a purely emotional level. Though the over-the-top, sappy melodrama occasionally made my skin crawl, the film captures perfectly the excitement of first love . . . that time when just accidentally brushing arms induced a full-body electric shock....when you wished more than anything that a slow dance would last forever . . . and when one couldn't ask for more than a starry night and a hand to hold.
The few tears I shed during the movie were nothing compared to the floodgates that were released by those sitting around me. I have never seen so many sets of red eyes in the girl's restroom following the roll of the credits. As an audience, we allowed ourselves to get wrapped up in a story that, at times, was so ridiculous the theater erupted in laughter, but that, at it's very core, was just beautiful, honest and true.
I do recommend this movie if a teary teen love story is what you are looking for (my movie companion compared it to the heart-wrenching "Love Story" with Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal, only for the younger set). But do beware that your movie-going peer group will probably be an acne-riddled, hormone-raging, unlicensed one. Don't let that deter you.
If this is the kind of movie you love, I don't think you ever grow out of it. And that's okay. I got caught up in the story just as much as the thirteen year olds in the theater with me. So for those two hours in the dark with my popcorn and large soda, my just-shy-of-my-21st-birthday cynical self got to believe in love like that.
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