A warm and natural romantic movie.

Rating: 8/10 (6 April 2004)

Shane West stars as the local playboy, Landon, the popular guy, who has some moral issues and is quite a bad boy, he messes up from the start and is forced to take extra special classes, sort of a community service for his wrongs, here he gets to know the geeky and unpopular Jaime (Mandy Moore), at first Landon refuses to talk to her and avoids her at all costs, but slowly Jaime gains on Landon..
The geeky girl inspires the popular guy for a 180 degree change, the stereotype hollywood story have its prints on this movie, but compared to all the other teen movies now a days this movie is after all different, it does not try to be funny with stupid jokes, it's natural and realistic and deals with more than just love, there are many other things to be considering in this movie, there's a lot of moral questions which are put up to question, but this movie is very warm and is told with great patience.
The strength of this movie is definetely that it tries to be a serious romantic movie that will make you feel and think rather than the usual dumb crap that Hollywood spits out, there is never any doubt this is a Hollywood story, but it still manages to engage it's viewer and i must admit i at several times were at the verge of dropping a tear, or even two.

The cast is very well done, shane west and mandy moore have a great chemistry througout the movie, and i think it's good to see that Mandy Moore can more than just sing, but actually also act, multi talent i guess, at least she does a fine job in this movie.
Now one thing i really loved about this movie as well was that it does not rush into romantic sequences, i loved all the weird small moments where Landon tries to act cool towards Jaime, especially the scene in the bus where he's a cold hearted b*****d i liked, it's good to see that it had no rush reaching it's initial goal.
Now as i made this sound all very well, and it is a good movie, but there are some flaws which i kinda disliked, for a starter i think it all became a lil bit typically hollywood when everybody made up with their wrongs towards each other and it ended with everyone happy and smiling, and the end is also a pretty poor attempt on making the perfect ending, in my opinion it should have ended with Shane West's voice over while looking at the fall weather.
However, even though this movie has it's parts of typical hollywood scripts, it also has many parts where it stands out, and among them are the story itself, i think this is one one of the better romantic movies from USA lately, it's nice to see that not all romantic movies have to be dumb now a days, that there still is a market that focuses on touching ones heart, so even though many parts of this movie has been seen before, i can not deny that it touched my heart a lot, and it was a very moving and well told story, i think it should have a lot of credit for that. lately it's not many movies that really can touch my heart i think, but this did a fine job doing that, which is brilliant, i love it when a movie reaches inside.
8/10