A Walk to Remember: DVD Review
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Page 1 of 3 Warner / 2002 / 102 Minutes / Rated PG / Street Date: July 9, 2002 It may not seem like much of a battle, but for anyone who cares about pop music, it's a near-war of epic proportions... In one corner we have Mandy Moore, that quasi-prepubescent diva and singer of such pop classics as "I Wanna Be With You" (from Center Stage) and "Candy" (the remix of which on Mandy's long-playing "I Wanna Be With You" CD is still one of the best pop songs of the last few years). She's hosted MTV shows and proven her acting chops with supporting roles in kid's fare like The Princess Diaries. Now, with A Walk to Remember, a light-as-air adaptation of Nicholas Spark's saccharine novel, she has a chance to not just be the neighborhood teen beauty queen, but to dig her well-manicured fingernails into a surprisingly (and unbelievably) dynamic character. But does she pull it off? Wait! In the other corner - you might have heard of her already - we have (drum roll, please!) Miss Britney Spears, or Ms. Britney if you're nasty. Yeah, she's everywhere - promoting Pepsi products, cranking out multi-platinum albums one after the other, and (sniff sniff) presently dealing with her breakup from fellow platinum-seller Justin Timberlake. She's America's darling, a NASCAR princess, and even gave Bob Dole a hard-on in one of the sickest commercials ever aired. But with her feature-film debut in Crossroads, it seems as though the backlash might finally drown her out. It did moderately well during its theatrical run, but it didn't shake anything up. And while critical response was predictably biting, a few writers had not-so-bad things to say about Miss Spears' debut performance, so it was no Glitter-sized bomb. But is Britney: The Movie deserving of Britney the mega-star? Let's talk Mandy first: Hers is not an entirely incompetent film. Sure, the story about a preacher's daughter falling in love with the town rebel is as old and tired as the new Michael Jackson record, but it's presented to us with the full power of new-millennium teen angst. Everyone looks beautiful, the streets picture-perfect, and the birds are all tweeting - it's a cavity-causing pleasantville, the ideal, surreal setting for a pop princess to reign. Yet it lacks camp appeal, the essential ingredient in any pop star movie. That is, until Mandy reveals her tiny, "tingly" little secret... In any overblown melodrama, the main character has to have a tingly secret (a liaison, a deathly illness, etc.) that, after being hidden for about an hour-and-a-half, which then explodes in everyone's faces with such virile, unbelievable silliness during the final act that one can't help but marvel at how ridiculous it all has become. For example, let's take Here on Earth with Lelee Sobieski: In that terrible movie, she's just another country girl until the film's last half hour (please, for the love of God don't read the rest of this paragraph if you haven't seen the movie) when she gets cancer and dies. Yep, the film goes from being a moderately inept romantic comedy to becoming an unbelievably weepy, histrionic sob-fest. So embarrassing it was, it gave me the tingles. Yes, Mandy has a tingly secret (trust me - I won't give that one away), which sends the last twenty minutes of the film into a painfully silly tailspin, but - honestly - that's when the it's the most fun. We like celebrities with hidden pasts and dark secrets; it's fun, and how boring would it be if Matthew Perry didn't weigh 300 pounds? So while Mandy's movie may be a weepy bore, she emerges as a true teen diva, giving a performance that isn't so much good as it is memorable. She's the MTV princess we can't help but like - even if she the musical version of 7th Heaven. Britney, on the other hand, tries to her credit t to keep Crossroads more of an ensemble piece rather than a star turn. It's the story of Britney and her two far less pretty friends, one a stuck-up town princess, the other a trailer-trash sass-basket with nothing to lose. They travel across the country with their requisite boy toy (Anson Mount), looking for adventure and opportunities to sing and dance like the circus monkeys that they are. And you know what? I'll end this competition right here: Crossroads is ten times the cinematic chuckle that A Walk to Remember is. Sorry, Mandy, it's a hundred times sillier, a thousand times more inept, but a million times more fun. Watching this new packed DVD edition of Crossroads is even more exciting than it was watching it in the theater. You can rewind and rewatch the scene where Brit sings her "Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman" song for the first time (one of the more embarrassing and wonderful camp moments ever put on celluloid), or play the Madonna's "Open Your Heart" in her skivvies bit nonstop - there's no end to the good times via the wonder of digital technology. A Walk to Remember may try harder to be "legitimate," but Crossroads is everything a Spears fan could possibly want from their idol. You see her in her underwear. She gets multiple chances to sing in her lovely nasal whine. She gets to wear a smorgasbord of different types of clothes (cute, mysterious, vixen.) What more could you want? If you're a pop music aficionado and haven't had a chance to see either of these films, I'd give both of them a look, especially Crossroads. It's so memorable (read: embarrassing) you just have to watch it six or seven times to really understand why it is so brilliant. |
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