KC Concepcion and Sam Milby star in Forever and A Day
Today I’m just ranting. If you’re not into spoilers OR you’re a rabid KC/Sam fan—I suggest you stop reading here.
The essential flaw of Forever and a Day, directed by Cathy Garcia-Molina, is that it smacks of manufactured commercialism. Old ballad plucked from the wastelands of love radio and re-recorded into a theme song, check. Predictable plot where boy meets dying girl, they fall in love, and surprise: she dies, check. Heavy media promotion, check. Big stars without real chemistry doing heavy media promotion, double check—it’s all here!
It’s been done before and perhaps the classic example, the most properly sentimental one, is Love Story from 1971 with Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw. What could be better than a three hanky romance from the early 70s? Oh, the innocence, oh the fashion, oh the hair! Remember the line “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”?
Clip from Love Story
But if you were, like, born in the 90s and Ryan O’Neal doesn’t float your boat and you’ve never seen Love Story, a more recent example (well, from 2002) is A Walk to Remember with Mandy Moore and Shane West. Whatever happened to him? I saw it on DVD years ago and didn’t like it primarily because I can’t bloody stand Mandy Moore. And honestly, Shane West wasn’t that cute. Here’s a clip: they have the big are-you-afraid-of-dying talk and the killer line is “I’m scared of not being with you.” Ugh.
Mandy Moore and Shane West in A Walk to Remember
In the current Star Cinema version of this plot, Sam Milby stars as Eugene, an ambitious young shoe maker who falls in love with Raffy (KC Concepcion), a sick girl who is determined to make the most of her last days. They meet at an adventure park where it is love at first zip line. In the tradition of completely unrealistic romantic dramas such as this one, Raffy and Eugene fall in love in one day. There’s an interminable montage of adventure park bonding scenes where she faces her fears and he realizes her vulnerability and his own. There were many clichéd lines to express this newfound love and angst but my favourite one is this: “I’m sorry if I can’t live long enough to love you,” says Raffy to Eugene. What about loving him right now instead of saying cheesy things like that? Life is too short for terrible lines.
Watch the trailer of Forever and A Day
By now, you know the drill. Sam smoulders, he overacts and pulls all the leading man tricks: the intense gaze, the angry stare, the teary-eyed look. Meanwhile, KC gets to flex her “acting chops” by playing a sick girl. For the most part she affects a dewy-eyed-I-love-you-but-I’m-dying look and even in her purposely de-glamorized state she delivers a lukewarm and unsympathetic performance. It didn’t help that the hilarious dying girl makeup that they applied on her was so distracting. I could see the carefully blended dark shadows under her eyes, the patches of lipstick made to look like lip blisters, and her hair which did not look thinned out, merely greasy.
Would it have worked better as a zombie movie instead of a tearjerker? Zombies are everywhere these days, why not in this one? Forever and a Day could have been slightly less histrionic and slightly more ironic—but that sounds impossible.
I dragged a friend to watch this movie with me and afterwards she said: I want the one hour and fifty minutes of my life back. I said, that’s not the way it works. You just have to live with it.
Photos from the Facebook page of Forever and A Day
