Miley's most honest display of human emotion since deleting her Twitter account.

Rating: 1/10 (30 March 2010)

Most writers would sell out by repeatedly writing screenplays that are vastly different from one another. Take Christopher Nolan for example; going from a psychological thriller where the storyline is paced backwards to an Oscar-winning blockbuster in which a world renowned superhero faces off his arch nemesis. Talk about a lack of consistency. A true writer gracefully keeps revisiting the same story over and over and OVER again and a great example for that kind of writer is Nicholas Sparks.
If recycling is healthy for our environment, it has to be with movies too, right? Never before has this man forgotten to add a romantic scene at the beach of an Eastern Seaboard sunset where two lovers mutely stare at one another. And who else can gorgeously stir up a tear-inducing ending as much as he? Forget 500 Days of Summer trying to explore the complexities of falling in love with a Hall and Oates dance sequence and an Expectations vs. Reality analysis. Instead he always remembers to kill off a protagonist at the end. M. Night Shyamalan calls HIMSELF the master of unpredictable twists? Puh-lease! Mr. Sparks's death sequences are so surprising, that you could almost say they're completely unrelated to the genre that the previous two hours were aiming to be.
And when a movie like Precious thinks its portrayal of a teenage girl in emotional turmoil is accurate, it's alarmingly mistaken. There, the leading lady is impregnated by her own dad, sadistically beaten down by her mother, all while dealing with obesity and illiteracy on a daily basis. Ha! Like THAT happens in real life. It's really the Last Song's Ronnie who deserves our sympathy. I mean, she has to spend the entire summer in an intimidatingly adorable Georgia beach house, embrace the pressure of getting accepted into one of the country's most respected art schools and endure the creepy smile of her overly kind father. Now that's plausible drama – I only wish I had the guts to sullenly disregard MY dad whenever he greets me with genuine concern. This vision of teen angst fantastically brought to life by none other than Miley Cyrus.
Now there are those jealous haters out there, determined to bring her acting career down. But they don't understand the effort it takes from a performer to purse your lips and cross your arms for 90% of a film. Like me and my fellow Miley fans said – she's just playing herself. It's really those hacks like Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep who are destroying everything classic cinema stood for. Who do they think they are to disappear into the heart and soul of characters they don't relate to or resemble in reality? When I'm watching a character on screen, I want to see the actor playing them. That's what made the most recent, Valentine's Day, so brilliant was that I could watch Jessica Alba being Jessica Alba the whole time yet grow blissfully unaware to her character's traits, abilities...heck, I couldn't even remember her name.
And mad props go out to Greg Kinnear in the role of a lifetime as the "antagonistic" father. A previous family drama of his called Little Miss Sunshine featured too much family and likedrama. It acted like each member had their own ambition and obstacle to deal with at the same time. What a load! This movie knows better, rather by making every other character's problems bow down to Ronnie's. In the Last Song, he delivers this performance, deserving the praise that Mo'Nique received playing Mary Jones. Never mind the fact Ronnie frequently shoplifts and snubs Julliard just to make a point. It's really him who's to blame for everything. How dare you fall out of love and pursue a career that makes you happy, only to have the audacity to want to mend the wounds of your broken hearted family? I rooted throughout for Ronnie as she continuously tried to reconstruct the layers of guilt and avoidance upon his shoulders. That leads me to my one grievance of this movie; a rebellious teenage girl visiting her estranged dad and blames one of her separated parents for breaking the family apart. Really Nick? That's all just too unfamiliar of a premise for me. At best, the closest Ronnie ever came to resembling a character from one of your previous features was Diane Keaton's daughter from Nights in Rodanthe (pauses) Ohhh!