Robert Pattinson trades his fangs for James Dean’s cool


Director Allen Coulter bites off more than he can chew in a rote romantic drama that finds Twilight’s Robert Pattinson trading his fangs for James Dean’s cool. As Tyler Hawkins, he nails the pretty-boy aura sure to please female fans, but he scotches the finer details, like smoking a cigarette in a convincing way.


Worse, he exhibits little chemistry with Lost’s Emilie de Ravin, who plays Ally Craig, daughter of the New York cop (Chris Cooper) who arrests Tyler just days before the couple’s first dinner date, at which Ally announces: “I prefer my dessert first. I just don’t see the point in waiting.”


Had Coulter dished up Remember Me’s dessert at the outset, revealing the pseudo-poignant, jaw-dropping twist (which helps explain the unwise participation of veterans Cooper, Pierce Brosnan, and Lena Olin), he’d have enabled viewers to skip a distasteful meal that Pattinson’s partisans might mistake for profundity.

Aside from raking in billions in cash, the Twilight franchise has brought its three leads thriving acting careers. Taylor Lautner has become the highest-paid young actor in Hollywood seemingly overnight. Kristen Stewart will star as Joan Jett in a film due in April, and Robert Pattinson has earned enough clout to produce movies such as Remember Me for himself.


But Remember Me, which is more complex and ambitious than the formulaic romance its TV ads promise, is no mere star vehicle. Yes, there’s an element of vanity in Pattinson’s James Dean-ish turn as Tyler, an angst-filled New York City university student at odds with his powerful father (Pierce Brosnan). Tyler smokes cigarettes, quotes poetry, sits alone in diners scribbling in his notebook and runs his fingers through his hair.


Except that Allen Coulter, a recurring producer and director on HBO’s The Sopranos, has surrounded Pattinson with a stable of actors strong enough to force him into his A-game. Remember Me, which follows what happens after the emotionally wounded Tyler falls in love with Ally (Lost’s Emile de Ravin), a kindred spirit, allows him to display an emotional range he hadn’t shown in Twilight, whether he’s holding his own in a screaming match with Brosnan or being a doting older brother to his 11-year-old sister (Ruby Jerins).


Remember Me also features Lena Olin as Tyler’s mother and Chris Cooper as Ally’s widowed father, a cop desperately clinging to his daughter as if she were all he has left in the world. His character at times behaves in ways that seem conceived primarily to drive the story forward (the movie marks the debut of screenwriter Will Fetters). But there’s a distinctly bittersweet undertow to the picture that draws you in and helps you overlook the film’s weaknesses.


This is, at heart, a story about how people get on with their lives after overwhelming loss and learn to live with grief without succumbing to it. Tyler and Ally bond over family tragedy – his brother committed suicide; her mother was killed in a mugging. Pattinson and de Ravin don’t make a memorable happy couple – they’re better when they’re brooding – but, although their relationship is supposed to be a haven from sadness, happiness is an emotion the film has little use for.


To call Remember Me a four-hankie weeper does not begin to describe it, and its climax almost pulls us out of the movie by incorporating a real-life event into a story that had been, until then, built purely on glossy fiction. But Coulter wants to explore the act of mourning as a theme, and how death sometimes reminds us that every minute of life should be savored. On that level, Remember Me certainly succeeds.


Remember Me (**1/2 out of ****) opens in South Florida theaters on Friday, March 12.

GRADE: B+


It turns out Robert Pattinson sparkles after all. Known around the world by millions of teenaged girls as the heartthrob vampire from the “Twilight” franchise, Pattinson proves in “Remember Me” that adults should take him seriously, too. “Remember Me” is a moving and gentle film about the healing power of love and the indiscriminate agony of loss.


Pattinson plays Tyler Hawkins, a sort of modern day James Dean, rebellious and brooding, emotionally crippled by the suicide of his older brother and the indifference of his work-obsessed, filthy rich, Wall Street lawyer father (Pierce Brosnan) who he is obviously terrified of becoming. Tyler is nearly the same age his brother was when he took his life, a milestone that manipulates his emotional state like a marionette on strings.


When Tyler’s not in the dilapidated Lower East Side apartment he shares with his happy-go-lucky, smart-alecky roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington), he can be found with his 11-year-old sister Caroline (Ruby Jerins), whom he obviously looks up to and shares the most intimate connection of their fragmented family.


Tyler is an apathetic student at NYU and it is there that he meets Ally (Emilie de Ravin, in the film’s one preposterously contrived moment), an equally wounded young woman still scarred after witnessing the brutal murder of her mother ten years earlier. Ally’s father (Chris Cooper) is a working-class Queens detective who has had a run in with Tyler before, a bit of information Tyler chooses to keep to himself. Though Ally is prickly at first and rebuffs Tyler’s advances, she eventually lets her guard down long enough to strike up a tender romance.


Both young people come together saddled with the demons of past and impending tragedies that will affect their union in ways they cannot possibly anticipate.


Even before I knew “Remember Me” was penned by first-time screenwriter Will Fetters, I could tell it was the work of a fresh artist, not because it was amateurish, but because the script shimmers with the sensitivity and meticulous attention to emotional detail that is almost always the hallmark of someone who poured their heart and soul into a project they figured might be their only shot.


Fetters infuses his story of youthful angst and romantic discovery with the sort of lost, directionless, outcast souls at odds with their patents. These are, however, rebels with a cause. Deliberately paced (that’s film critic speak for slow), “Remember Me” is helped rather than hampered by Allen Coulter’s confident if low-key direction, perfectly capturing a pre-9/11 New York City.


Almost none of the primary actors are American. There is the British Pattinson, Aussie de Ravin, Irish Brosnan (it takes a little while to get used to Brosnan’s Brooklyn accent), and Swedish Olin (as Tyler’s mother). All are terrific (though none is better than Cooper), but the real standouts of the film are the newcomers: the very droll Ellington and Jerins, best known for her role on “Nurse Jackie.”


Occasionally you come across an actor who so arrests your attention that you can’t help but bellow their name to anyone who will listen. Jerins is such an actor. The young girl is one to watch, the sort of stop-you-in-your-tracks talent that comes along only once in a great while.


What are we to make of the film’s conclusion? To elucidate what I mean would spoil the plot. Tonally, the film ends in manner similar to a movie released several weeks ago. In my review for that film, my disgust resembled hot magma. Yet “Remember Me’s” dénouement did not extract the same volcanic response in me. One filmed seemed to delight in tragedy while the other used it to make a larger point. Throughout “Remember Me,” Tyler reads from a book of Greek myths, exultantly heroic stories to be sure, but also filled with the sort of withering calamity that should give us a clue to this film’s poignant DNA.

“Remember Me” is a different sort of thing altogether.
I think it’s very good, beautifully shot and with the young Rob Pattinson working very hard, giving of himself. He has his head on his shoulders, so, really, hats off to him. I want the best for the lad, ’cause I’m really fond of him. He’s a lovely lad. Has a huge following, and hopefully he’ll stick to his guns and not get overwhelmed by it all.

Like Pattinson’s “Twilight,” you know a bit about franchises, no?
There are worse things [laughs]. I have nothing but gratitude for the time time spent as Bond and the life it gave me as an actor. And yet, in the realm of things, it’s just another character on the landscape of a career. Albeit a huge, iconic, symbolic character. You know going in you’re going to have the devil to pay to get you out and try and create a career that still has resonance.

Thank you to wintersmistake from Rob’s IMDB message board!

Thank you to teamedward_1901 from the pattinsonlife LJ community!

At 23, Robert Pattinson’s chosen career is simmering along quite nicely, thank you, with the handsome London actor pulling in an estimated $20 million, give or take a few bucks, last year.


Having kicked into high gear playing Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) before the hugely successful Twilight series, “R-Patz” (or sometimes even “Spunk Ransom”), as he is known, is the cause of instant hysteria among young women around the world and much innuendo in the gossip pages.


But he is in a relationship with his beautiful Twilight co-star, 19-year-old Kristen Stewart, and both are so in demand that you wouldn’t think they would have time to read anything salacious about themselves.


They don’t, but Pattinson gets reminded of it constantly, nevertheless.


“I still get my mum (Clare) calling me up every single day and questioning me about the gossip stuff,” he says with a slight shake of his head and a smile.


“I don’t like people I know reading that stuff about me because it kind of distorts everything. You’re inevitably going to find something bad eventually and I don’t want to be having to do PR to my family.”


Other than that, Pattinson’s sudden surge of fame through his vampire character, Edward Cullen, in the Twilight movie franchise has not overwhelmed him.


“My family has dealt with it really well,” he says. “I mean, they’re pretty untouched by it. My sisters (Victoria and chart-topping singer-songwriter Lizzy) are fine. They occasionally get their Facebook (pages) hacked into and stuff, but that’s the only downside.


“I’ve just been working in England and it’s the polar opposite to working in America. There’s no-one around the set and it is wholly different working there, so I’ve been getting to know what a normal life is like again.


“People are very different about it in London. If they do recognise me they’re embarrassed to say something and you can go into so many areas where people have no idea who you are.


“In London the other night I went out to have dinner in some pub somewhere and the barmaid had this whole conversation saying, ‘You look just like that guy from Twilight’. I was astonished because every time she came up she was like, ‘You literally could be his brother’ and she never put two and two together.”


But while Pattinson relishes his relative anonymity in England – in the US and elsewhere he inevitably draws a crowd – he sometimes struggles with whether or not he should just sweep fame up in his arms and embrace it.


“I’m wondering whether I’m holding on to something I should be letting go of by not changing anything,” he says.


“But, you know, I don’t particularly feel any different and I think because I’ve gone from job to job to job it means you stay in this sort of netherworld, so I feel relatively untouched.


“It’s kind of like accepting that you’re famous or just staying blind to it. I’m sort of wondering whether that’s the right way to go about things and whether it stops you growing as a person if you do that, but I don’t really know yet.”


He had one brief lesson in handling fame from Pierce Brosnan, who plays his father in the new film Remember Me, when the two went out to dinner together in New York.


“Some people were looking over,” Pattinson says. “They didn’t know who I was but they knew him, obviously. He went up to them and introduced himself and asked how their evening was going.


“At the time I was thinking like, ‘What are you doing?’ but it worked fantastically because no-one treated him like he was a sideshow attraction any more and I’m sure those people went home and said what a nice guy he was.


“I don’t really have the confidence to do that yet, but it works better than my method, which is just hiding under the table or leaving immediately if anyone looks around.”


Pattinson’s box office appeal has reached such a high point now that he is a producer on Remember Me, with input to deliberations on matters such as casting with fellow producer Nick Osborne and director Alan Coulter, who is mainly known for TV (The Sopranos, Sex and the City) but also did the movie Hollywoodland (2006), starring Ben Affleck.


“But I’m such a novice at all this,” Pattinson says. “At the end of the day it’s the director’s decision about casting.”


Apart from Brosnan, the movie stars Academy Award winner Chris Cooper (Adaptation, 2002), Oscar nominee Lena Olin (Enemies: A Love Story, 1989) and Australian Emilie de Raven, one of the stars of the TV series Lost.


“I read with a bunch of girls and I watched all the tapes – which is unheard of, normally, for an actor to watch the audition tapes – and that was interesting and a kind of incredible thing to be allowed to do,” Pattinson says.


“Emilie was the best out of all of them and Alan thought she was way, way best before I had even met her, so that was lucky.


“She was great to work with. She is not ‘actressy’ at all, totally unpretentious, and she’s got a lot of spunk and fire in her.”


Set in New York, Remember Me stars Pattinson as Tyler, a rebellious young man who, since the suicide of his older brother, has had a troubled relationship with his father.


Soon after taking a beating at the hands of a police officer (Cooper), Tyler meets college student Ally (de Ravin), who he later discovers is the police officer’s daughter.


Tyler and Ally, however, become soul-mates and are happy, but then their relationship is suddenly threatened.


“As soon as I read the script I just sort of related to it in a fundamental way, right from the beginning,” Pattinson says.


“I don’t know why. But I just felt very connected to it the first time I read it and as all the rewrites happened and everything about it changed, I still always felt like everything about it was very true.


“It seemed like it was written for a reason.”


Maybe just to make Robert Pattinson even more famous.

Source

The following scan can be found in The Advertiser Thursday, Febuary 25,2010 –  the hit liftout, page 03.

In case you can’t read the scan, the article says,

Robert Pattinson’s Aussie co-Star in the drama Movie Remember Me, Emilie de Ravin, had just four days to adopt the accent of a working class girl from New York’s Queens.

“We went to Queen’s for a little bit and tried to pick up something,” says Pattinson.

“It’s nothing like her Australian accent. Her Australian accent, I can’t even describe it, it’s just raucous…it’s the most Australian out of every-one I’ve met.”

The Movie tells the story of two lovers whose newfound relationship is threatened as they try to cope with family tragedies. Melbourne actress de Ravi,28,a star of hit TV series Lost,was cast in Remember Me because of the instant chemistry with Pattinson.

“I read with a tonne of girls for the part and watch loads of auditon tapes. She was the last person who came in,” Pattinson says.
“It’s so funny, the script is written for a Spanish girl from the Bronx, and she’s the total opposite of it. Bust she did have it, as soon as she walked into the room.

“She was just really spunky and she had a real hard-core attitude about her.” Pattinson has another Australian link through Kristen Stewart,19,who plays his girlfriend Bella in Twilight and is rumoured to be his off-screen sweetheart.

“I talk to her mum about Australia. Her mum’s really,really into Australia,” Pattinson says.

Written by David Murray

Thank you to jess_not_ie from the pattinsonlife LJ community!

Pattinson is superb as Dali, never letting eccentricity become caricature.

6. “Remember Me” (March 12): In this new romantic drama, Robert Pattinson plays Tyler, a young New Yorker whose brother’s suicide has led to a strained relationship with his father (Pierce Brosnan) and a life of not caring. Soon after Tyler unexpectedly falls in love with Ally (Emilie de Ravin), their relationship is tested as they are forced to deal with hidden secrets and tragedy. As much as people may hate to admit it, this being the vampire Edward Cullen and all, Pattinson actually looks like he has some potential in this film.

8. “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” (2009) DVD: You’ve seen him on the big screen (twice), in countless interviews and on your bedroom door every morning when you wake up, but soon you will finally be able to see the pasty Robert Pattinson in DVD form! Coming out March 20, this release promises to dazzle like the skin of a vampire in sunlight.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson took London this week, but they seemed to be moving in opposite directions, stylewise at least. It’s time for a State of the “Twilight” Stars Address.


R-Patz
Pattinson, too, was at the BAFTAs, but sported matted-down hair — more trampled-on than his traditionally toussled locks — that did not prove to be a fan favorite. Ninety percent of poll voters on People.com gave the new(-ish) look a thumbs-down. Still, Pattinson and Stewart reportedly mingled at BAFTAs after-parties, so it seems that while Pattinson’s hair was flat, his charm remained, er, puffy.

They’ve monopolized magazine covers and encouraged moviegoers around the world to spend more than $1 billion at the box office. Surely, the three young stars of the Twilight franchise —Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner and Kristen Stewart— have earned a break in between big-screen installments of their supernatural saga.


Not if they desire careers that require more than just being a brooding vampire, a hard-bodied werewolf and the sulky girl who loves them. When it comes to life after multi-part blockbusters such as the Star Wars trilogies, opportunity often awaits. But so does type-casting, poor decision-making and outright rejection. Only a chosen few rise to Harrison Ford heights.


That might explain why each of the Twilight trio has at least one film coming long before the third outing based on Stephenie Meyer’s literary phenom, Eclipse, arrives June 30.


Not exactly newcomers


Lautner, 18, got a head start in the romantic comedy Valentine’s Day, which has collected $87.4 million in 10 days. Fellow heartthrob Pattinson, 23, stars as a James Dean for the Twitter generation in the romantic drama Remember Me, opening March 12.


Meanwhile, Stewart, 19, leaves behind all traces of chaste heroine Bella Swan as she dons black leather as Joan Jett in the rock ‘n’ roll bioThe Runaways, due March 19 — but not until she joins William Hurt on a road trip in The Yellow Handkerchief this Friday.


It’s not as if all three don’t have a résumé of sorts. Stewart is the most experienced, playing Jodie Foster’s daughter in the 2002 thriller Panic Room and appearing in Into the Wild in 2007. Lautner starred in 2005’s Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D, and Pattinson was in 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.


But Twilight’s cultural stronghold tends to overwhelm any other credits. “Being associated with one thing for so long can be detrimental,” says Paul Dergarabedian, box-office tracker for Hollywood.com. Also, the massive popularity of such works as The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter books can undercut the importance of the actors.


Developing an identity beyond the Twilight zone will depend on the future projects the actors pick and the company they keep. “Look at Anna Kendrick,” Dergarabedian says, referring to the actress who plays Stewart’s friend in the Twilight films. “She earned instant credibility after working with George Clooney and director Jason Reitman in Up in the Air. Now she’s Oscar-nominated.”


It helps that older male filmmakers tend to be clueless about Twilight mania. Valentine’s Day’s Garry Marshall had never heard of Lautner or werewolf Jacob when the studio suggested the ab-crunched lad for his ensemble cast. “I’m about 107,” says the director, 75. “I don’t know who is popping.”


Lautner’s schedule was free only after shooting began, so Marshall quickly checked out the trailer for last fall’s New Moon. “I saw he could jump around and that his shirt was never on, which we turned into a joke. Who could guess he was a fine actor?”


Marshall soon realized the benefits of squeezing in a Twilight lead among the more established performers, who include Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Garner, Jessica Biel, Jessica Alba, Ashton Kutcher, Bradley Cooper and both McDreamy (Patrick Dempsey) and McSteamy (Eric Dane) from TV’s Grey’s Anatomy. For one thing, the brief real-life relationship that developed between the two Taylors — Lautner and Swift — grabbed gossip headlines and produced pre-opening buzz.


Plus, “he gets the biggest yell-out during the opening titles,” says Marshall, who wisely padded Lautner’s part after noticing his flair for comedy — as well as after hearing the screams of the hundred or so fans on the film’s high school set. “He’s a sweet kid, unspoiled by Hollywood so far.”


Pattison was ‘limited’


Remember Me director Allen Coulter is relieved that he had little awareness of Edward Cullen, Pattinson’s bloodsucking alter ego, when he signed up the British actor. Instead, he was impressed by how bright Pattinson is and his instinctive understanding of the role.


“If I had seen Twilight,” he says, “I might not have hired him. He is so limited by the kinds of traits he has to express. It’s not that psychologically complex.”


Not only does Remember Me offer Pattinson a chance to play a mere mortal with a keener sense of irony and humor than his oft-tortured Twilight hero (“He shows his playful side,” Coulter says), he also gets to hold his own with such adult actors as Pierce Brosnan as his distant father and Chris Cooper as a hard-nosed cop who misjudges him.


Considering the New York-based drama centers on a touching love story between Pattinson’s emotionally adrift young man and a fellow college student (Emilie de Ravin of Lost), Coulter isn’t adverse to capitalizing on his star’s status as a messy-haired, swoony-eyed sex symbol. “I hope the rabid interest in Rob as a personality helps the box office. It would be foolish to say otherwise.” And, unlike the Twilight films, in which Bella and Edward’s passion remains unconsummated because of his vampire issues, Pattinson is free to engage in PG-13 boudoir action.


Stewart, who was hired for The Runaways the day after the first Twilight movie opened in 2008, immersed herself into her musical persona, from cutting her own hair into a ’70s shag to assuming the perfect guitar-slinging slouch.


Flora Sigismondi, director of The Runaways, sensed Stewart was eager for an R-rated change of pace, even if it left younger Twilight worshipers behind. “Bella forces her to be more in her head and introspective,” she says. “Joan is far more physical, and Kristen invested that energy in her acting. This is punk rock and primal.”


Sigismondi adds, “She walked differently, acted differently. Her body changed. It was, ‘Where is Kristen?’ ”


The director was taken aback when Twilight frenzy intruded upon her shoot in Los Angeles. “The paparazzi would follow Kristen into the production office and shoot her when she was just entering doors or exiting cars,” she says of the actress, who has been linked off-screen to Pattinson. “It was overwhelming. But she was cool about it. She’s got a handle on how to live her own life.”


More on the horizon


No rest for the Twilight threesome yet. They all have other projects lined up in various stages of development — each hinting at the types of roles they see themselves doing post-Twilight.


If Bella idolizers think Stewart as an f-bomb-spewing lesbian rocker is a mind-blower, wait until they catch her pole-dancing hooker who is “adopted” by grieving couple James Gandolfini and Melissa Leo in Welcome to the Rileys, which was just picked up for distribution and is expected to open in the fall.


Pattinson will try his hand at being a Parisian social climber who uses sex to get ahead in Bel Ami, which is filming now and co-stars Uma Thurman, Christina Ricci and Kristin Scott Thomas. He is also in talks to join Reese Witherspoon and Sean Penn in Water for Elephants, based on the novel about a Depression-era circus.


Lautner is tied to not one but two potential franchises based on action heroes, extreme-sports enthusiast Max Steel and Stretch Armstrong, based on the stretchy boy toy from the ’70s.


Marshall, for one, thinks the kid is moving in the right direction. “He has the presence and the firm jaw to lead an action film,” he says. “He can say, ‘Yo, secure the perimeter.’ I didn’t whisper ‘Chekov’ in his ear. I said, ‘You can go run and save people.’ “

Fans of the Sunday Times interviewer Camilla Long were treated to apparently real-time updates of her interview with Twilight star Robert Pattinson, thanks to the wonder of Twitter. To say she is a convert to his charms doesn’t quite do her justice. “I am interviewing him and am basically beside myself and was not knowingly a fan before,” she tweeted her Sunday Times colleague India Knight. “Robert Pattinson just kissed me. Actually did … Clean smell, delicious beard … not a fan before, am definitely now …”