Thursday, April 8, 2010

Clearly Claire: 'Remember Me' has unnecessary ending

It was Saturday afternoon, I had just woken up and was still groggy when I went to my computer to read reviews from RottenTomatoes.com. (I love the show, so I always check the website before seeing a movie.) I had been planning on seeing the movie "She's Out of My League" and was checking to see if it had gotten good ratings. I stumbled upon angry blogs about a movie called "Remember Me".

This intrigued me. What about this non-vampire-loving Robert Pattinson movie had gotten all these viewers so steamed? Everyone said that movie was unnecessary. It's ending was cheap and only there to get a quick tear from everyone in the audience. I had heard all of this but it only made me want to see it more. No one would say what the ending was, but I had to know what had rilled up so many feathers.

I drove as quickly as I could to the 4:45 showing, sat in the plush chair with an arm full of Sour Patch Kids and Popcorn, and prepared myself for a teen drama about finding yourself. Something I had see before, but I was not prepared for what I was about to see.

(SPOILER: I am going to reveal the ending, so if you want to see the movie don't read. It isn't really worth seeing, but just in case.) Pattinson's character falls in love, endures a brother's suicide, and finally makes up with his stone-hearted father when the ending rolled around. I thought the movie was about to be over, so I packed up my purse, unsure of why a nation had been angered by this movie and then it happened.

A teacher on screen wrote September 11, 2001 on the board and the cameras pan away from Pattinson to show him inside one of the Twin Towers.

That is when I lost it. Tears began to pour from my face in buckets. My nose began to run and I sniffed along with every other person in the room. This all happened before the airplanes even hit. The little boy who had been sitting next to me bored through the entire movie looked up at his teary-eyed mother and asked "Why is that girl crying?". I lost it again. It had been so long since I had thought of that day, but when I saw the crash, it all came rushing back. The fears, the emotions, the knowledge that nothing was ever going to be the same.

The thing was, I wasn't crying because Pattinson's character died, although it was sad, I was crying because of the Towers falling and remembering the way I felt that day. I was suddenly as angry as the Rotten Tomatoes bloggers. How dare the filmmakers take advantage of our tragedy in order to get cheap tears, especially from pre-teens who probably didn't even remember that day, let alone what it represented. The movie would have been fine without that ending, better in fact, because I wouldn't have felt so awful. I get that the filmmakers wanted the ending to be sad, but they did not have to do it in that way.

I'm not saying that we can never have movies about 9/ll, but if we do, I want them to be worth something. If you are going to make me cry, do it for a better reason than, just because you can. I hate movies that take advantage of dire moments in history in order to get people to cry. I now understand the anger and decided to add my own blog to Rotten Tomatoes. You filmmakers did it, you rilled my feathers.

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