REMEMBER ME

REMEMBER ME

Dismember Me. That has nothing to do with the film or this review; it's just a mental game I play with myself while I'm watching a movie. You see I come up with alternate titles for a movie or other ways to improve it. This time I thought it would be fun if the producers retitled the film, Dismember Me.

You see, no matter what I say about the film doesn't matter. I realized that during the screening when seemingly hordes of the target audience entered the theater and made them selves comfy. They pulled out their I-Phones and began texting and Tweeting before the film started. Some continued throughout the film.

One next to me remarked to their friend, "He is so cute!" She wasn't referring to me; I would have been quite flattered. No, alas, she was talking about the star Robert Pattinson. You remember him from movies like "Twilght", "Twilight: New Moon", "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" and the upcoming "The Twilight Saga: Eclipse". In "Twilight" he plays Edward, the vegetarian vampire. Yes... the target audience are teen-aged girls.

They aren't coming to see what director Allen Coulter has done with his film "Remember Me". They aren't coming to see any great screenwriting or editing. They are coming to see Robert. I know this because I heard some of the sighs and, again, they weren't for me.

You see, Robert broods. He's a brooder. He plays wounded. And for some reason that is a turn-on to young girls. That aura of mystery. And that's what the girls came to see.

I'm positive about this because the movie begins with a mugging on one of Brooklyn's elevated platforms that ends with a little girls' mother getting shot to death right - in front of the little girl. This incited zero reaction from the audience.

The next scene Robert gets into a fight with some guys who start a fight with someone he doesn't even know. He gets his butt kicked first by the guys and then by the cop who answers the call. Robert, as Tyler Hawkins, taunted Sergeant Craig (played by Chris Cooper) until the sarge decided to give him an additional what fer... then arrested him. The target audience winced and sighed and cursed the cop because he was beating the brooder.

No worries, because like his "Twilight" character, Robert (as Tyler) comes from an affluent family. His father (played by Pierce Brosnen) is a big time attorney and bails him out of jail. Mind you, the two don't get along because Tyler's older brother committed suicide several years prior. The dad doesn't particularly care for his cute young daughter Carolyn (Ruby Jerins) either; in fact he shuns her. (No worries though because she has the brooder of a big brother looking out for her)

Meanwhile Tyler learns, by way of his roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington) that the cops [who beat him up] daughter goes to their school and that he should date her as an act of revenge. Of course the cop's daughter Ally (Emilie de Ravin) is that little girl who witnessed her mother getting whacked.

The plan works and the two begin dating. She even leaves home and moves in with Tyler, because he's a brooder and she's a brood-ette.

They get together, but remember they are both damaged goods; both wounded. So they have a tough time. But they have one thing in common they don't get along with their fathers because of the earlier deaths.

Herein lies the biggest problem. The film never says why they don't like the fathers... they just don't. And Tyler does his best to pull a James Dean "Rebel Without a Cause" bit, but it doesn't fly. Because Jimmy Dean didn't get his butt kicked in every fight he had. He was a brooder but he could fight! Pattinson's Tyler is merely a brooder.

All of which concludes with an interesting ending good enough to elicit a sigh from the target audience once more. Meanwhile the story was weak and fractured, the acting uninspired, the premise formulaic... but that doesn't matter because the target audience isn't even reading this review. They don't care as long as they can see Pattinson and his ersatz James Dean brooding. --GEOFFREY BURTON

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