Walk to Remember, A
Also reviewed by:
Thomas J.
There's this customer at the book store where I work, this big macho looking guy with a leather jacket and motorbike helmet tucked firmly under his arm, who comes in every few weeks and buys a Nicholas Sparks book (author of A Walk to Remember, Message In A Bottle and The Notebook, all turned into Class A movie weepies) and tells me how moved he was by the one he has just finished reading. Bit odd, but anyways, this fellow was telling me that in the book of A Walk To Remember Jaimie's (Mandy Moore) cancer eats away at her until she is in a wheelchair – which she bravely gets out of to walk down the aisle at her wedding – "A walk to remember," you may say. Why this wasn't in the film is anyone's guess. Did they think Mandy Moore would be less attractive in a wheelchair the same way Rachel Leigh-Cook was hideous under those glasses in She's All That?
Anyways, for what it's worth coming from a guy who is willing to watch any pile-o'-crap film as long as the delectable Miss Moore graces its frames, this is my favourite Mandy performance. I cried when she died – or, I would have if the DVD didn't jump ahead after I was watching the first scene straight to the end when she died and ruin it for me. This film has a certain innocence to it in telling what should feel like such a clichéd story. That it doesn't is a result of the way the film is played out: straight and like old-fashioned melodrama (I'm told The Notebook has the same ethos behind it). There's no movie references or winks to camera in this teen drama. Just a simple love story, quite well told. Mind you, Mandy helps in bringing a certain amount of class to proceedings. She belts out a few numbers, both in the film and on its soundtrack, and makes it hard to believe that it really wasn't long before this film that she was singing about missing people like she misses her candy and I don't miss that at all.