A Walk to Remember (2002)
Directed by Adam Shankman
When the popular, restless Landon Carter is forced to participate in the school drama production, he falls in love with Jamie Sullivan, the daughter of the town's minister. Jamie has a "to-do" list for her life, as well as a very big secret she must keep from Landon.
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Ever since Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet it's been somewhat of a maxim that mismatched couples are eventually doomed, romantically if not otherwise.
Jamie does not stride through the high school beating her Good Book; Hollywood doesn't like their religious folks to get too religious, lest they turn into Piper Laurie in Carrie.
The pair dance around the usual teen hurdles as Jamie initially tries to remain cool with his friends, his friends pull a "Carrie"-light on Jamie, Jamie's father stands in the way, etc. Once the ultimate cliche is announced, however, the film never quite recovers from what had, against all odds, been working.
After a kinetic opening sequence that recalls a nearly identical scene from The Lost Boys while giving false hope that A Walk to Remember will be an agreeably nostalgic diversion, the film becomes a vaguely surreal morality play scripted along the straitjacket genre conventions that indicate each of Sparks' novels.
The film may look like a relative to the Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle She's All That (1999), but it's more like a cousin to Robert Mulligan's The Man in the Moon (1991).
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Her reaching out to Landon isn't the least bit contrived, nor is her determination to find the good in him, even turning the other cheek when he belittles her in front of his buddies in the early stages of their friendship (a la John Travolta in "Grease").
Landon (Shane West) is a long way from Jesus, doing Rebel Without a Cause at the local reservoir with the bad kids.
But he does, and the two endure "West Side Story"-style criticism -- he with his cool-but-cruel crowd, she with her concerned father (Peter Coyote).
If you think that sounds like I'm referencing 2000's "Here on Earth," you'd be right.
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But I have to say, it's better than previous Sparks adaptation Message in a Bottle .
This Warner Bros. release follows "Message in a Bottle" as the second of the romantic novels of Nicholas Sparks to reach the screen.
Like Message in a Bottle , the other Sparks book made into a movie, A Walk to Remember aims for the tearducts.
"A Walk to Remember" is based on a book by Nicholas Sparks, also the novelist who wrote the romance "Message in a Bottle."
"A Walk to Remember" was adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, who also wrote the waterlogged "Message in a Bottle."
Adapted from a novel by sap-master Nicholas Sparks ( "Message in a Bottle" ) and directed by the desperately uncreative Adam Shankman ( "The Wedding Planner" ), this is a movie that launches soggy spitballs of sentimentality in nearly every scene as in-crowd malcontent Landon (the blasé and insincere Shane West) falls for candied outcast Jamie (pop princess Mandy Moore ), in spite of her mousy brown hair and burlap sack wardrobe (it's hard to make Mandy Moore look dowdy).
But Mandy Moore only has herself to blame for choosing such a tooth-rottingly sentimental weepie as this, which grafts a "Terms of Endearment"-style tragedy onto a by-the-numbers teen romance.