En nombre del amor

In a small coastal town, the veterinarian Travis Shaw (Benjamin Walker) works with his father Shep (Tom Wilkinson) and is very close to his beloved sister Steph (Maggie Grace). Travis is very successful with the women and dates Monica (Alexandra Daddario) every now and then. When the resident Gabby Holland (Teresa Palmer) moves to the next door house, she initially believes he is a pretentious man. But when her boyfriend Ryan MacCarthy (Tom Welling), who is fellow doctor in the same hospital where she works, needs to travel to another city, Gabby and Travis have a relationship and fall in love with each other. Out of the blue, Ryan returns and proposes to marry her. Now Gabby has to make a choice between her two loves.

"The Choice" is enjoyable love story with nice characters divided in two parts, beginning with a witty romance and ending with a heartbreaking drama. Teresa Palmer is the greatest attraction and never disappoints. The fat Tom Welling surprises those that followed the "Smalville" series. The unknown Benjamin Walker has a good performance and his declaration of his love to Gabby's family is the best part of this film. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "A Escolha" ("The Choice")

I usually don't write reviews, but this movie was fantastic. The movie pulled at your heart throughout the entire movie. Its funny, sexy, and sad with a case of real life thrown in for good measure. The characters are fantastic, and the setting on the coast if beautiful. Did you ever have that real love in your live, and you could feel it slipping away, well this is the movie for you. What did you do to get it back, or to try and get it back? Did you walk away and say it wasn't meant to be, or did you fight for it? Did you give it your all? Well, take a watch of this one, and see what happens. You will be glad you went for a spin. Be prepared for a roller coaster for ups and downs on the emotional scale. In the end, can you make The Choice?

"Every path you take leads to another choice. Some choices change everything." Travis (Walker) is a confirmed bachelor who loves being single and doing what he wants. When his new neighbor Gabby (Palmer) shows up at his house everything in him changes. Now Travis will stop at nothing to be with her. After all his pursuits he finally wins her over, but when the unthinkable happens Travis must once again make a choice that will affect both of their lives forever. Going in to this I was not excited at all. I know 99% of women love the Nicholas Sparks movies, but for me they are just too ridiculous. In the Notebook the main guy builds the woman he is obsessed with a house. In The Lucky One within a week of meeting the girl he fixes her car, boat and teaches her son to play baseball. It is hard for me to get past the perfect man image that is portrayed and they really lose me. Again, being a guy I am not the target audience for these movies. All that said this was, to me, the best of all the movies made from his books. The characters were actually real and believable. There were no over the top scenes and I was actually into this movie more than I expected. Without ruining anything, the ending did get over the top cheesy for me and lost me a little, but since this is a chick flick that is to be expected. Overall, it could have been because of my expectations but this was not a bad movie at all and is a date night movie women will love and men will be able to watch without too much pain. I surprisingly, extremely surprisingly, give this an A-.

I'll save you some time. The lead female protagonist has zero redeeming qualities (no reflection on the actor - she did a great job of portraying a dreadful character). She is an objectively terrible person and I kept looking for a reason the male lead was into her apart from the fact that she's pretty. She cheats, leads people on, verbally abuses people, doesn't own up when she's in the wrong, rebukes, and criticizes, and we're supposed to be rooting for this girl? Seriously, why does the male lead like her so much? If a character is going to be that flawed, she has to be likable to redeem herself to the viewer. In a cliché Hollywood trope, the screenwriter was in far too much of a hurry to fling the two characters together to actually make the woman likable. (And yes, I have read the book. She has redeeming qualities in the book.)

In the opening scenes of this film we see Travis (Walker) mulling over an unknown choice he has to make, en route to hospital, flowers in hand. Most of the film depicts the events leading up to this point.

Now, I stumbled on this film by idly setting it to record on a PVR (without knowing the slightest thing about it) and then watching it later on. To be honest when I usually do this, it is about 50:50 whether I bother to watch it at all; quite a few films get deleted without ever being seen all the way through; this percentage goes right up if it is what might be termed a 'chick flick' of merely average quality. However in this case, right from the start, I thought this was a well-crafted film, beautifully photographed and with a good soundtrack. I won't say I was hooked but I was sufficiently intrigued to watch it all the way through and to my surprise I was rather moved by it.

So my advice is that you should start watching this film with no prior knowledge and no expectations whatsoever; however if you are reading this it may already be too late, you may have already been told the main plot points, that the movie is terribly formulaic, yada yada yada. Too bad; watching a film is all about suspension of disbelief; this film is no different to most in that respect, and I'd argue that this one is best approached with almost no prior knowledge or expectations of any kind.

Maybe one or two expectations are OK; that of the North Carolina coastline being beautifully photographed as a backdrop to this film, and a nice soundtrack, not too much in your face. All movies paint a certain, usually somewhat unrealistic, view of reality, and this film is no exception; for example I don't think the coastline is ever filmed at low tide, when it is somewhat less, er, photogenic. The whole film is arguably similarly rendered, which hardly unusual and is the storyteller's prerogative, even though some folk might object to it.

Maybe if you are a chap who wants a movie to settle down and watch one evening in the company of a significant other, this would be a good choice; with too much prior knowledge (and a cynical head on) it would be easy to dismiss it as formulaic and schmaltzy, but if you are in the right mood this is a heartwarming, life-affirming story, nicely told. If I'd read half the reviews on here beforehand I probably wouldn't have bothered to watch this film at all, but I didn't and I judged it on its own merits, and to my great surprise it gets seven out of ten from me.