Remember Me
Reputedly a new romance starring Robert Pattinson, Remember Me begins like a vigilante movie: In a racially charged stickup, an 11-year-old girl watches her mother shot on a Brooklyn subway platform, 1991. It’s the first sign that this film won’t just chart the little measures by which two people become able to love — in fact, it’ll barely do that at all. Flash-forward 10 years, to the halcyon days of the Strokes and whatever other significant events happened in New York City circa 2001. Pattinson is the histrionically depressed Tyler Keats Hawkins, a coasting, scruffy NYU student coming up on his 22nd birthday. Meanwhile, that little girl on the subway platform has grown up to be not Batman but fellow NYU student Ally (Emilie de Ravin), whose still-bereaved, overprotective cop dad (Chris Cooper) busts Tyler one night. Some coincidences later, Tyler will pick up Ally on a revenge dare, ensuring an eventual variation on the ever-popular teen-movie breakup “Was I a bet?” There’s an insult-to-injury quality to a plain bad movie with a “seize the day” message (Remember Me‘s tagline: “Live in the Moments”), which heckles you with all the other things you should or could be doing while you’re marking time waiting on the credits, wondering if the movie will ever end. Well, it does — oh, does it ever, with a crazy long bomb heave toward epochal significance. (Far be it from me to spoil the surprise; let’s just say Robert Pattinson dies in 9/11.)
