BEFORE: Jon Tenney carries over from "Fools Rush In". Today I want to highlight the importance of keeping the horror movies separate from the romance movies. I mean, one group belongs in February and the other ones clearly go in October, but I've got FIVE actors today who are trying to bridge the gap, trying to have it both ways. James Marsden is also in "Disturbing Behavior", Michelle Monaghan is also in "MaXXXine", Jon Tenney is also in "I See You", David Jensen is also in "The Mist" and Douglas M. Griffin is also in "Maggie". Nope, not gonna do it - I'll find another link and not fall into that trap. We gotta keep 'em separated...
I could also link to "The Longest Ride" from here, which is another movie based on a Nicholas Sparks novel - after watching "Safe Haven" and "Dear John" last year, I've tried to get to them all, and it would be great to cross off that last one, however link-wise that's a dead end, I can't get to where I need to get to if I follow that link, so scratch that, I'll find another one.
Getting very close to the end of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar", tomorrow, March 11 will be Day 27, and the themes will be "Oscar Goes to the City" and "Oscar Goes to the Doctor". Here are the films:
8:00 am "Tulsa" (1949)
9:30 am "San Francisco" (1936)
11:30 am "The Toast of New Orleans" (1950)
1:30 pm "The Young Philadelphians" (1959)
4:00 pm "Meet Me in Las Vegas" (1956)
6:00 pm "Meet Me in St. Louis" (1944)
8:00 pm "Dark Victory" (1939)
10:00 pm "Magnificent Obsession" (1954)
12:00 am "No Sad Songs for Me" (1950)
1:45 am "Not as a Stranger" (1955)
4:15 am "Johnny Belinda" (1948)
Yesterday's movie was set in Las Vegas, and I think tonight's film is set near New Orleans, so I'm kind of in sync with this. (Alabama tomorrow?) Well, I remember the "World Tour" of 2012 (I think) when TCM based their Oscars schedule on WHERE every film took place. That inspired me to virtually travel around the world, I programmed a 64-film chain in late 2012 that started in San Francisco with "They Call Me Mister Tibbs!" and went across the midwest ("Meet Me in St. Louis", "Biloxi Blues"), spent some time in NYC ("Brighton Beach Memoirs", "The Muppets Take Manhattan") and then Europe ("Oliver Twist", "An American in Paris"), Africa ("Gorillas in the Mist", "Born Free") and Asia ("The Quiet American", "The Killing Fields"), and then up through South America ("Missing", "Kiss of the Spider Woman") and Mexico ("All the Pretty Horses", "Touch of Evil") to end up in San Francisco again ("The Lady from Shanghai"). Then I watched "Around the World in 80 Days", even though I beat that record by 16 days, without really going anywhere. Ah, they don't link 'em like they used to...
Anyway, I've only seen "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Dark Victory", so only 2 today, now I'm at 128 seen out of 306, or 41.8% with 4 days to go. I've also only got 9 days to figure out where the chain wants to go next...
THE PLOT: A pair of former high-school sweethearts reunite after many years when they return to visit their small hometown.
AFTER: Well, it's based on a Nicholas Sparks story, so we can expect to have someone in a coma or a similar medical problem, an older guy with a dead wife and a lot of scenes of people kissing in the pouring rain. Hey, if it works and puts asses in the seats, don't mess with it. There's also bound to be some shady characters and a couple of action sequences, because somebody knows that men may be forced to watch this movie, too. But here in the next-to-last week of the romance chain, we seem to be dealing with a lot of death, divorces and umm, heart transplants (two of those, anyway). I don't know what the chain is trying to tell me, exactly, about life but I guess it's got something to do with the fragility of it all.
This is one of those "toggle" stories where they alternate scenes of the present with a flashback storyline, each story moves forward but at different rates I suppose, and we slowly learn everything we need to know about the characters when we put all the scenes from the past and all the scenes from the present together, assembled in our heads because they're all intertwined together on the screen. Only movie characters can live non-chronologically like this, jumping around in time because GOD FORBID you put all the past scenes first and then all the present scenes, which is really how time works. But then we'd find out too much too soon, I suppose, or the screenwriter wouldn't be able to withhold certain information that would go a long way toward figuring out who they really are, or how much their present life is affected by the past trauma.
The story starts in the middle, really, as adult Dawson is thrown off a Louisiana oil rig by an explosion, and somehow he doesn't die from drowning or from the explosion, but instead he has a vision of his high school girlfriend. Then when he's released from the hospital he gets a call from a lawyer informing him that someone named Tuck has died, and he's mentioned in Tuck's will so he has to show up at the lawyer's office. Dawson returns to his hometown and visits Tuck's house, before long Amanda, his high-school girlfriend, shows up there, too, she got a similar call from the lawyer. But she's married now with a college-age son, so she's not eager to get back into any relationship, even if her husband is a total tool.
The flashbacks show us how they met in high school, Amanda helping to push one stalled vehicle to get Dawson's attention and then her faking a car problem of her own to try again because he really is terrible at picking up signals. But to be fair, Dawson's kind of distracted because his father's an abusive local criminal, who pulled him out of school to help with crimes or something, but beating Dawson up and degrading him at every opportunity. So Dawson ran away from home and lived in Tuck's garage for a while, eventually moving into the house and considering Tuck his adoptive father. Meanwhile Amanda finally got through to Dawson and they began dating, spending time together at Tuck's place and spending romantic nights at the cottage a few towns away where Tuck vacationed with his wife back when she was alive.
On prom night, however, after Dawson and Amanda headed off to prom, double-dating with Dawson's cousin Bobby and his pregnant girlfriend, Dawson's father and his brothers attacked Tuck's house, beating him up and destroying his garden. An angry Dawson drove to his father's place with a rifle, intending to kill his own father, but in the scuffle it was cousin Bobby that got shot. Dawson fired the shot, however he testified against his own family to get a lighter sentence, however at that time he cut ties with Amanda so she wouldn't wait four years for him to get out of prison, instead he wanted her to move on with her life.
Back in the present, after 21 years apart, Dawson and Amanda re-kindle their relationship, scatter Tuck's ashes and spend a night at that cottage, and somehow they get over the fact that she kept trying to visit Dawson in prison and how he wouldn't let her. But also Dawson can't ask her to give up her strained marriage just to start up again with him, he wouldn't feel right about ruining her marriage (it's already ruined, though, really) but he believes that ultimately she wants to fulfill her commitment. Amanda's got other ideas, though, and she's totally bored with her husband now - it makes sense, he's no Dawson - but her husband doesn't take her seriously.
Two tragic incidents then take place, Amanda's son is in a car accident and now has a damaged heart, and Dawson is attacked again by his brothers, who try to push his car in front of a moving train. He knocks them out, but after calling the police, he's spotted by his father who is on the other side of the railroad tracks with a rifle. The exact timeline of when these two events happen and whether they coincide is a bit confusing, due to the editing - but really this is the focal point of the timelines coming together, still maybe some of the scenes aren't shown in the right order. You don't really need to be a genius to figure out where the transplanted heart came from, but it does take the characters some time to put it all together. It's hokey, of course, in addition to being an impossibly wild coincidence. Right?
There's nothing flat-out terrible here, though I wish that the casting would have allowed the actors playing the older & younger versions of Dawson & Amanda to resemble each other a bit more closely.
Directed by Michael Hoffman (director of "Game 6" and "The Emperor's Club")
Also starring James Marsden (last seen in "Bachelorette"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "Better Living Through Chemistry"), Luke Bracey (last seen in "Elvis"), Liana Liberato (last seen in "Scream VI"), Gerald McRaney (last seen in "Focus"), Caroline Goodall (last seen in "Dorian Gray"), Clarke Peters (last seen in "The Benefactor"), Sebastian Arcelus (last seen in "Split"), Sean Bridgers (last seen in "The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot"), Rob Mello (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Hunter Burke (last seen in "Insurgent"), Robby Rasmussen (last seen in "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot"), Caroline Hebert (last seen in "Jack Reacher: Never Go Back"), Ian Nelson (last seen in "The Boy Next Door"), Schuyler Fisk (last seen in "Orange County"), Douglas M. Griffin (last seen in "Runaway Jury"), David Jensen (ditto), Bill Martin Williams (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Julia Lashae (ditto), Jimmy Gonzales (last seen in "Godzilla: King of the Monsters"), Mia Frost, Donna Duplantier (last seen in "Unhinged"), Jim Gleason (last seen in "The Iron Claw"), Kesha Bullard Lewis (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), Bailey Winston (last seen in "Five Nights at Freddy's"), Keith Cieslinski,
RATING: 6 out of 10 DEA agents
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