a sweet little film with a few big flaws

Rating: 6/10 (1 December 2005)

Okay, everyone's got a right to their opinions, and when it comes to this movie people either seem to love it or hate it. I suppose I'd be in the middle to lower end of the "love it" category, as this wasn't really aiming to entertain a woman in her late 30's.
I suppose one of my bigger beefs with this movie is that I'm not sure who gave the young African American man(Eric) the go-ahead to play his character as an oversexed, hip hop homeboy. He's like one of a handful of minorities in a small predominantly white town...not saying he needs to act like Carlton Banks from the "Fresh Prince" show, but as an African American woman who grew up in a similarly small town, it was kind of embarrassing to see him acting out that way.
I'm not trying to make this a big racial statement; actually, it's more to the contrary. Not all of us who grew up in those circumstances turned out to be one extreme or the other-we just found somewhere that was comfortable in the middle. I mean, come on...the kid's name was ERIC for crying out loud! Was he over compensating for not having a more ethnically oriented name? The only time that I witnessed Eric as more as an honestly portrayed teen and less as an ethnic caricature was toward the end when he and Landon were having heart to heart chat by that lake in back of Landon's house.
Granted, guys his age are little more than totally raging hormones walking upright in society, but he seemed to be embarrassingly over the top compared to the other guys. It made me cringe.
And as for the play-within-the-movie...shouldn't the dialogue even remotely have made sense? There were times that it did, but then you were just like, "What is Landon talking about?" And what was up with the cloak on the "mysterious female singer" Jamie was portraying...was that cloak supposed to add that element of mystery? It just felt like the movie was trying too hard to accomplish something and ended up basically killing time to set up for the beautiful song that Jamie sings.
Again, remember these are comments made by a woman who is nearly old enough to be the mother of the target of this movie's audience, so my comments should be taken with a grain of salt. But truthfully, as I turn up my Switchfoot CD and reminisce, "A Walk to Remember" makes it in under the wire as one of my favorite celluloid romances.