Remember Me

Grade: B+

Modest storytelling sometimes brings the most welcome surprises.

Robert Pattinson is a young man mourning the death of a beloved older brother and a family torn asunder. Emilie de Ravin is a young woman who as a girl watched her mother being murdered as an after-thought during a subway robbery. The walking wounded finding one another is often the stuff of cloying clichés and high melodrama, but it is also the stuff of simple empathy and ordinary grace. This is a deeply tender and embracing film.

Pattinson is especially fine fangless – tortured yet charming, soulful yet charismatic, outwardly calm but filled with twitchy passions just beneath the surface. It’s a quirky and yet subtle performance until it’s not, and we finally get to see years of barely repressed anger erupt. His relationship with a younger sister (the unaffected Ruby Jerins) is so natural and genuinely affectionate it rips at the heart strings, and provides the true center for the entire film.

And what a smile he has. Great smile.

There is little to surprise in the love relationship, but there is such easy chemistry between Pattinson and de Ravin it’s just nice watching them on screen together. The entire film has an organic energy to it, older brothers and their adoring siblings, the awkward first dates of even highly attractive individuals, divorced parents genuinely trying to place their children’s needs above their own, first time introductions to family, the oddly innocent albeit intentional cruelty of children.

Idiosyncratic humor helps immensely throughout.

The films significant flaws stick out like a sore thumb – a coolly absent Wall Street father (well played by Pierce Brosnan but with a weird accent) and a controlling police chief father (played by an overly erratic Chris Cooper) are far too by the book to be terribly compelling. There are also too many slaps heard round the world, emotionally violent eruptions that make sense in terms of character motivation but still manage to feel jarring and a touch Lifetime Movie Channel. The required best friend is downright irritating, with snappy and ill-advised dialogue that feels as though Bruce Vilanch was subcontracted to add some funniness to the proceedings. And we all know how hysterical his Academy Award intros are…

And yet it still quietly, almost imperceptively, moves, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, haunts.

The film’s last few minutes are genuinely shocking, likely to leave some desolate and others angry - a visceral reaction is assured. For me, they make the film so much greater than the sum of their parts, as we come to understand we are being told one small story among thousands, and are reminded that life should be treated with respect, value, and tenderness.

Unimportant moments, and how we choose to live them, truly matter.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1403981/

Avatar

Grade C+

Director James Cameron has delivered one hell of a 2 1/2 hour visual roller coaster ride. As an amusement park ride, this one gets an A.

Sadly, I really wanted to see a movie.

It is a truism that the “Lord of the Rings” might as well be the only fantasy saga ever written, as everything else effectively flows from it. I begrudgingly admit that “Star Wars” is essentially Tolkien in space, and here Cameron has liberally plagiarized from both of these epics, most notably (but by no means exclusively) from “The Two Towers” and “Return of the Jedi.” Quite frankly, I’m a little surprised Peter Jackson and George Lucas haven’t joined forces in a law suit.

Let’s see – in “Star Wars,” Ben Kenobi tells Luke he must “feel the force flow through him.” In “Avatar,” we are told that life energy “flows through us.” The cloud city from “Empire Strikes Back?” Covered in moss but there. Grand Moff Tarkin style villain, replete with severe haircut? Check. Han Solo flying in to save Luke’s ass during the big final battle? Check. King Théoden dying in battle after a death scene with his daughter? Check. Trees with life energy? Ever heard of Ents? Anakin Skywalker reincarnated? You got it. Nature against technology? Ever heard of Ewoks? Getting trapped under a horse during battle? That would be “Return of the King.” Contacting Avatars from other villages to unite? Pillar lighting sequence in “Two Towers.” Avatars coming to the rescue from another village? Wow I loved Gandalf leading the charge at Helm’s Deep. City in the tress? Elven forest of Lothlórien.

Shall I go on?

For a movie that is so desperate to be visionary it stubbornly manages to be uniquely unoriginal.

And yet, for a good 90 minutes, the film is mesmerizing to watch, so long as you don’t remove your 3D glasses, at which point it just gets rather blurry. You can reach out and touch a whole truckload of cool stuff, and golf balls whiz at your face. It’s dazzlingly colorful and achingly beautiful. A technological wonderland. Then it’s repetitious. Still cool. Just way too long.

Bad people from Earth who have ecologically destroyed their own planet try to get rid of nature-loving Avatars to raid their planet’s resources. The good guys are the scientists trying to study the relationship between the planet and the beings who inhabit it. The bad guys are the military (who fight “terrorism with terrorism,” after all) and the miners who want to destroy all indigenous life that gets in the way of the black gold hiding under the planet’s surface. Stephen Lang is scarred and snarling, Giovanni Ribisi whiny and wimpy – I suspect they were both annoyed they didn’t get much 3D in the forest action. Sigourney Weaver is an icy head scientist, perhaps annoyed she doesn’t get to climb back into the same battle gear Cameron first had her wear in Aliens – the guy even steals from himself. Only Sam Worthington demonstrates any character development as a paraplegic (he could have had surgery to fix his injury but health care being what it is, he couldn’t afford it. Subtle.) living a full life in his Avatar body, treading the fine line between the studying and spying he supposedly signed up for. And, he’s hot. Will love conquer all? Uh, duh.

There are stunningly beautiful and heartfelt moments to be found, especially as we watch Avatars connecting and communing with the nature that surrounds them. Only here is the film not derivative of so many better films, and it is a life philosophy lesson to be humbly embraced.

In the end, a film must enthrall, interest and inspire once the glasses are taken off, and I would imagine sitting through this one in 2D would send one immediately into a dream state, one would hope in 3D again.

I saw the film yesterday, and I can barely remember it at all. It’s faded into the mists of Endor. I mean Pandora.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/