Nearly as big as the Britney movie and twice as profound, it is time for the big-screen debut of jail-bait singing sensation Mandy Moore. In \A Walk to Remember,"" Moore plays Jamie Sullivan, the daughter of a small-town minister. Jamie has a list of life ambitions and a secret to keep from the handsome boy who steals her heart.
The movie begins as most rebel-turned-puppy-dog movies do: popular bad boy Landon Carter (Shane West) causes trouble and his punishment includes participating in the school play and tutoring underprivileged children. Enter his savior/love interest Jamie Sullivan (Moore). Jamie voluntarily enjoys these activities with all her blessed little heart. They meet, they fight, then they kiss and exchange poetic professions of love. As formulaic as any under-budget, small-name-actor teen movie, ""Walk"" does little more than insert fresh faces into a recycled love story.
Overall, while ""Walk"" promotes morality and true love, little can save the film from being as ordinary as a preacher's daughter. Lacking spark, the acting was probably weighed down by laughably sentimental dialogue like ""You put on an act, but that only works with an audience.""
Only West, a relative newcomer to Hollywood, appears believable and likeable. A capable actor, though with few facial expressions, West exceeded expectations as the good-looking lead, putting energy and sincerity into his role.
On the contrary, Moore waltzed through most of the movie like a mousy, ridiculously naive extraterrestrial. Taking everything at face value, Jamie's soft voice and fondness for juice-boxes and knitted cardigans overstep the angelic stereotype into bizarro world. Her curious character resembles Brendan Fraser from ""Blast From the Past,"" as if she does not understand when she's being insulted. The mean kids comment ""nice sweater,"" and she demurely walks by with a saccharine-dripping smile, gently replying ""thank you"" as if she truly believes they admire her fashion sense.
Moore's acting finally loses its pretense when Jamie falls in love with Landon, but her emotional force seems too little, too late. Jamie's grating self-confidence throws off the film's pace, her words creating a verbal halo as she speaks. Moore would fit much better into an attitude-driven comedy role, like her small part in ""The Princess Diaries.""
Unfortunately, the movie's best parts can not be described in detail because that would ruin the ending. Suffice it to say, nothing is hard to predict, and the syrup-factor skyrockets as Landon and Jamie proclaim ""Our love is like the wind...you can't see it, but you can feel it.""
Finally, Moore's publicists should be applauded for their showcasing of the Mandy Singing Hour. She treats the audience to angelic hymns and a five-minute solo in the spring play. To view Moore's lip-synching talents, or lack thereof, see her first hit music video ""Candy."" Even the credits cannot escape more Mandy melodies.
In the end, ""Walk"" succeeds as a nice, romantic Kleenex-fest for the TRL crowd. With decent acting, romance, goofy dialogue and some substance, ""Walk"" was not meant to please the Academy, but audiences do not always need much more.
Very rarely is a wide-release feature film a complete failure on screen. ""Kung Pow: Enter the Fist"" is one of those movies. In ""Kung Pow,"" Steve Oedekerk, the man who wrote both ""Nutty Professor"" movies as well as ""Nothing to Lose"" and the second ""Ace Ventura"" movie, took a 1976 martial arts film from Hong Kong, overdubbed all the voices himself, added a new soundtrack, inserted computer animations and added footage of himself to create a whole new story. In doing so, he fully controlled a movie whose every move was meant to be funny. In almost every conceivable way, it failed.
The first flaw of the movie is its near total lack of story. The story is very thin and at times barely clings to coherence. It follows the Chosen One (played by Oedekerk) from the time his family is murdered when he is a baby through his life's journey, as he trains as a fighter and seeks out Master Pain, the man who murdered his family. The story is hard to follow at times because none of the characters are developed in the slightest, which makes it hard to keep track of them, and because every opportunity for a gag-filled detour is taken.
The second major flaw of the movie is that the jokes just are not funny, which is a real problem for a movie that is nothing but a joke-fest. The jokes that spoof the martial arts genre, like the lips moving well beyond the overdubbed voices, are beyond tired. Other jokes, like the main character as a baby peeing on Master Pain's face, are also clich??d. Visual spoofs of other movies, like ""The Matrix"" or ""Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"" were much funnier the first hundred thousand times they were used in movies.
Meanwhile, a scene in which the Chosen One sees Mufasa from ""The Lion King"" in the clouds to then hear him say ""This is CNN"" is directly lifted from ""The Simpsons."" At the same time, the funniest of the voices he does are the two that very closely resemble Frank Oz's Miss Piggy and Adam Sandler's Goat. The biggest laugh in the movie comes half an hour into it when the Chosen One trains for tough-
ness by having friends beat him to a bloody pulp. But it is not a funny joke laugh. It's more a glad-to-see-Steve Oedekerk-bleed laugh. Other than that, the only redeeming quality of the movie is that Oedekerk seemed to have fun making it, and that's only good for him.
Everyone else is left with an unsatisfying bout of comedic masturbation that is more racist and sexist than it is funny, produces way too much watch-checking for a ninety minute movie and has a plotline sketchier than the clientele at the Steep 'n' Brew on State Street. Friends should not let friends see this movie.
To satisfy their desire for a statuette to place on the mantel, more and more actors seem to be choosing roles based on how desirable the character is by Oscars' standards. The previews for ""John Q,"" show Denzel Washington playing a father who fights the health care system when his ailing child is denied coverage for a transplant, and ""Hart's War,"" has Bruce Willis as a confident, determined army guy. No actor is more guilty of this than Kevin Spacey, an extremely gifted actor whose range has been limited by his recurring role as a weak man who gets strong.
In ""The Shipping News,"" Spacey's Quoyle is yet another emotionally scarred, fragile oaf who finds his inner strength by the end credits. At the beginning, Quoyle is a quiet pushover who is sucked in by the wiles of trashy Petal (Cate Blanchett), who cheats and sleazes all over town before dying in a watery car wreck minutes after selling their daughter, Bunny, to a black-market adoption operation. Enter Dame Judi Dench, Quoyle's crotchety aunt, who, after stealing Quoyle's dead dad's ashes, becomes emotionally involved in Quoyle's strife. She persuades him and Bunny to return to his Newfoundland roots with her. It is only here, in this bleak, backwoods town where every family holds a secret blacker than their neighbors' that Quoyle is able to find his inner strength and create a meaningful life for himself and his daughter.
Spacey's gift as an actor lies in the way he uses body language as a method of characterization. At the start of ""The Shipping News,"" he is the picture of emotional defeat. His father's emotional abuse seems to have directly affected Quoyle's posture, which is hunched, and his movements, which are slow and awkward. After his move to Newfoundland, which brings with it a massive career move from newspaper ink setter to news reporter, and a blossoming romance with Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), Quoyle gradually straightens up and elongates his stride, an outward representation of his increased inner strength.
Director Lasse Hallstr??m has a body of work built on emotionally scarred characters and the secrets that lie within the house walls (""What's Eating Gilbert Grape,"" ""The Cider House Rules,"" even ""Chocolat""). He is successful in bringing the world of E. Annie Proulx's novel to life here, both through the drab landscapes and ramshackle homes of the Newfoundland town and through his actor's understated performances.
With the exception of Blanchett (whose Petal is the most disturbed, loudmouthed tramp ever to traipse across the screen in ripped fishnets), every actor in this film expresses his or her characters' secrets through brief facial expressions and wistful gazes. Moore, particularly, hints at her character's troubled past throughout the film, only to reveal it all in an emotional outburst near the end of the film. All of these characters seem like there is boiling emotion beneath the surface, and, if provoked, they will freak out and tell all.
""The Shipping News"" has the same effect: There are all kinds of larger issues boiling beneath the surface, but Hallstr??m never turns the heat high enough to create any kind of emotional response. The plot moves so slowly and the backdrops are so blah that the acting moves to the forefront, and it is impossible not to notice Spacey's talent. This is what makes ""The Shipping News"" an excellent choice for an actor with a jones for an Oscar, but a little less appealing to an audience seeking a movie with an engaging plot.
