187 closeups, 23 handkerchiefs, & 2 entirely different movies...

Rating: 9/10 (10 November 2013)

My Notes 1. One of the greatest setups in the history of film. Boy meets girl. They appear to have nothing in common. She has only one condition to their relationship. "Promise not to fall in love with me," 2. How many closeups of Mandy Moore's face are there in this film? I stopped counting after about 110. Every one was justified. Funny thing, Mandy Moore was 18 when this was filmed. In the grand scheme of things, she will never be 18 again and that particular face will never exist again. Is that not what the essence of "time travel" really is? Every time you watch this film, you are transported back to 2002. And you can make the trip as often as you like. 3. Were all those closeups justified? Darn straight. Even now there are social anthropologists out there still trying to catalogue all those different facial expressions, because many of them had never been seen before. 4.My beef with this film -- and it is a beef which needs someone to give it voice - is that it is actually two different movies, fused at the centre by sheer star power and will. The first film is about a boy who falls in love with the preachers daughter. I believe that such a film would have been a hit on its own, and I hope that someday someone has the will to try to make that film. The second film, which starts about 3/4 of the way through, is about a boy who falls in love with a girl who has cancer. This film succeeds in spite of the melding of the two, but this reviewer says that you did not need the second film to make the first a hit.