The Funniest Movie So Far in 2002! (WARNING: SPOILERS)

Rating: 1/10 (20 July 2002)

A WALK TO REMEMBER is one of the best comedies to hit the screen in a long time. It seems to have everything: a virtuous "delicate flower" of a girl who seems dedicated to seeking out the most frumpy, spinsterish outfits (and dies, to boot), the jerk popular boy who is calculated to make middle school girls swoon, what with his James Dean wannabe look, and his one facial expression of a pouty glower that miraculously never changes throughout the film, whether his emotion is anger, sorrow, or love, a hick preacher father for the girl and a mother for the boy who looks like a female impersonator, with her squared off jaw and hilarious hairdo. Throw in a school play in which the boy is forced to star in as punishment for his delinquent behavior (somehow, in these movies, jail, expulsion, or suspension is never used, only performance!), a requisite scene in which the plain girl glams up for the play to reveal Mandy Moore underneath, and the cheesiest looking comet imaginable, and you have a great satire of the "doomed teen love" genre. The only problem is that this is not a spoof, but an actual tearjerker starring Moore and Shane West in which tears are in fact generated, but from laughter and not pathos.
The plot is derivative and cheesy, and the dialogue is worse, but that could have been overcome by bravura performances by the leads. Shane West, as mentioned before, has the expressive capacity of a brick wall, Moore is slightly better but still blandness personified, and the two have no actual chemistry! I may sound like the ultimate cynic, but I am actually quite the softy, and have cried at the endings of many films. However, as a teenage girl, I am appalled at the dreck being forced down my throat. If it's doomed romance I want, give me GONE WITH THE WIND, CASABLANCA, or the more recent MOULIN ROUGE any day. There is one scene, though, which makes this an absolute must rent for everybody. About 54 minutes into the film, West asks Moore out in his car, she turns him down, and he makes the strangest face I've ever seen on an actual person! It's technically a frown, I suppose, but actually looks exactly like an upside-down smile. The facial contortion that he achieves is amazing to behold, and I had to rewind it several times to make sure that I saw it correctly. Good stuff, too bad about the movie. For actual merit, A WALK TO REMEMBER gets a 1, but for sheer camp entertainment value I give it an 8/10.