blog@cliffdweller

So we decided to go see the new Miley Cyrus film today. Tim and I are both (not so closeted) Miley fans, so it didn't take much to talk him into going after lunch.

I still can't remember the name of Miley's film, so I looked it up on Fandango on my iPhone, saw the poster and thought that was it. We made it to the theatre with about 10 minutes to spare, stood in line with a bunch of 14 year old girls and felt a little embarrassed about being the only adult males going into the theatre.

We watched all the trailers (who knew there's another Twilight segment coming so soon?) and were doing just fine. Waiting patiently for the movie to start.

It did. It started with a little girl seeing her mom get murdered on a subway platform in NYC back in the 90s. Ouch. That didn't seem quite right, but maybe the filmmakers were trying to show us some backstory before Miley grows up, runs off to the beach, and has a summer fling with hottie mc hot hot.

But noooooo. Twenty minutes in, there's Robert Pattison. I don't remember him being in Miley's new movie. Uh oh. I think we're in the wrong place…

Turns out we weren't in the Miley Cyrus movie at all. Turns out that Miley's movie doesn't come out for several more weeks. D'oh! And yet it felt like such a Miley Cyrus crowd when we sat down in the first place.

We stumbled unwittingly into a unspeakably boring movie about dysfunctional family who's oldest brother committed suicide a few years ago and the middle brother has anger issues and always looks constipated while the father is a really busy lawyer with no time for his kids and the youngest sister is an art savant who lives with the mom who has remarried some guy. The movie really gets rolling when the angry middle brother, played unsparklingly by Robert, gets beat up by a cop whose daughter is hot so he starts dating her and she turns into his girlfriend until she finds out he knew her dad before they started dating and breaks up with him for a few minutes right towards the end but gets back together and everything seems to just be sorting itself out when the horrific twist happens. Queue slo-mo music montage, float a final voice over or two, and then the movie ended.

So I'd warn you about spoilers but the first 9 hours were lifted from the same old formula that was already 50 years old when that chick who played Sabrina The Teenaged Witch did it in that movie with the song by Britney Spears. How can their be spoilers for a movie using this formula?

If I had known anything about this film going in, I most definitely would not have gone. Plus we kept expecting Miley to show up for the first 20 minutes until we were absolutely sure it was the wrong movie.

Sigh.

Still, after 98% of the movie had passed, they threw a twist out there. It was enough of a twist that we talked about it in earnest three or four times this evening after seeing it. They lead up to the twist very well. There are little clues all through the film. But I didn't actually see it coming until about 30 seconds before it arrived. And that's always welcome, even in slow moving painful movies like this one.

So thanks, Hollywood, for abandoning the formula for just a second. It is the only thing that made this film memorable at all. Now don't make me sit through 5000 more of them.

The title of the film we saw was "Remember Me". If we had walked out before the last 5 minutes I would have given it a D-, but those last 5 minutes were really good ones. So I bumped the whole movie up to a C.