pretty sweet film

Rating: Null/10 (11 April 2009)

I had no intention of EVER seeing this, but a couple of friends recommended it, so I thought I'd give it a chance. After all, it does have James Garner and Gena Rowlands in it, not to mention Joan Allen and Sam Shepard, the latter two coming as a complete surprise to me. I've loved James Garner from back in the Support Your Local Sheriff days, and I always enjoyed him in The Rockford Files. And we all know Joan Allen can do no wrong, which gave me hope that this wouldn't be a complete waste of 2 hours. To be honest, it wasn't nearly as bad as I always thought it would be. But in my opinion, it's Garner and Rowlands that make it watchable, not Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. McAdams is OK as Allie, but I have problems with Gosling's performance, and Gosling in general. It probably has something to do with the fact that I can't help remembering he used to be on that idiotic TV show Breaker High. I just don't agree with a lot of reviewers who see him as the second coming of Marlon Brando, although he does have that mumbling thing down pat. He was pretty good in Fracture and Half Nelson, although I didn't think he deserved an Oscar nomination. That should have been Jack Nicholson's. He also has a tendency to smirk at inappropriate times, which makes me want to give him a good slap. Anyway, the beginning of this movie definitely stretches the limits of credulity. OK, Noah falls madly in love with Allie on first sight. I can accept that. She's gorgeous. But here's how he goes about winning her heart. First, he dangles by one hand from a ferris wheel, and then he gets her to lie down in the middle of the street with him, which leads to them almost getting run over by an approaching car. Smooth! But the crazy thing is, it actually works. Before you know it, she's also madly in love with him! I'm sorry, but I don't buy it. If I was her, I would be getting as far away from that maniac as I possibly could. But then there would have been no movie, so on we go. It's pretty standard romance novel stuff. Girl's parents forbid her to see boy from wrong side of tracks, girl and boy fight, they break up, she moves away, he goes off to war, loses his best friend, becomes a man, returns home, eventually boy and girl get back together, and so on, and so on. It's not terrible, but it's really nothing special either. And I really think the story could have been written better. There's a point in the film where Garner calls Rowlands Allie for the first time, and then we see their children, and they're calling him Dad and her Mom. At that point, we know they got married and had kids, which took away some of the mystery for me. I have to admit there were a few scenes that got to me, though. Particularly the scene where Noah tells Allie that he wrote her all those letters, and also when she returns to find that he's renovated the old house exactly as she had described it. I do have a heart, I guess. But overall, not really my kind of movie, and at no time while watching it did I believe that Ryan Gosling could ever have transformed himself into James Garner, no matter how old he got!