I recall years back reading an article in the Los Angeles Times about red delicious apples.  You couldn’t tell by biting into the bland crunchy fruit you can buy today that at one time, at least 50 years ago, that apple used to live up to its name.  But growers found people’s taste was different, and that the more bland the apple was, the more people would tolerate it.  Besides, the bland apples were easier to ship as I recall.  So, the growers bred the red delicious to be blander and blander until the 90s when they achieved the perfect balance of blandness they had strived for all those years.

That’s when the market hit the apple growers in the chops.  Mackintosh.  Gala.  Fuji.  All these brightly flavorful apples snatched a large marketshare from the king of all apples.  The growers couldn’t go back, not without uprooting all the trees they’ve planted all those decades, and even then, it would take decades to get back to the flavorful apple that once was.  Red delicious still sells, and probably still outsells all the others.  But a lot of people that used to eat red delicious, and a lot of people who may have eaten red delicious, will not touch them anymore.  Why have a bland apple when you can eat something you can actually enjoy?

The same can be said for romance movies.  Gone are the days of Roman Holiday and An American in Paris, or even Shakespeare in Love or The English Patient.  One of the most basic and often complicated parts of our lives has become a spice in our movies, rather than the main course.  And when romance is the gist of the movie nowadays, that movie is invariably bland, dull and dunderheaded.  Combine that with what we curiously call an inspirational film (Why are inspirational films so uninspired?  Field of Dreams or Chariots of Fire are inspired inspirational films.  Nowadays, we wait for Pixar to deliver the goods!) with a romance, and you’ve put the audience pleasantly to sleep.  Bland bland bland bland bland. . . .

SPOILER ALERT!

And I have no problem spoiling the spoiled.

The Last Song is an uninspired inspirational romance that looks at a summer of a whiny brat (Ronnie Miller played by Miley Cyrus) of a couple (Steve and Kim Miller played by Greg Kinnear and Kelly Preston) who underwent a nasty divorce that included someone, presumably Dad, taking a baseball bat to an upright piano.  I wish that is what the screenwriter wanted to do with his computer after writing this pablum, but no.  Ronnie and her brother Jonah (played very well by Bobby Coleman) are made to spend the summer with Dad, and instead of learning how to bat pianos, Jonah learns how to piece together a stained-glass window.  In the meantime, Ronnie, when she wasn’t whining, spends the summer like she admittedly spent the rest of her life after the divorce – fighting with Dad, as well as with her brother, with her boyfriend, with the girlfriend of the anti-social pyro, with the anti-social pyro, with. . .

For almost an entire hour, the movie is what most uninspired inspirational movies are – painfully dull and drawn-out.  For almost another hour, the movie becomes pleasant and, at times barely interesting, but it’s still drawn-out.  For example, how long until the characters figure out who actual torched the historic church?  With a girlfriend named Blaze, an anti-social attitude and a penchant for juggling balls set on fire, why is it not clear to everyone that Marcus set the church on fire and not Steve Miller?  Oh, yeah, Scott (Hallock Beals) was in on it, but come on, who actually did it?  Why is it that when anyone does anything that Ronnie throws a fit and then everyone has to wait for her to come back around?  And how long will it be until we finally come to the song of which the title is all about? 

That last part touches on a major problem with this movie.  Whether it is plain dull or pleasantly dull, the theme of this movie is all over the map.  Is it a movie about maturity?  About romance?  About reconnecting with one’s father?  It could have been all these things together at once, but it turned out instead to shift from one thing to another to another, and it never quite comes into focus.  For crying out loud, at a number of points it looks like the restoration of the burned-out church is going to be the grand symbol of the movie, when all of a sudden in the last 20 or so minutes of this movie Ronnie has to finish her Dad’s last song for him.  What is this movie about?  Why can’t we focus on anything?

We can’t focus on anything because the person we are being led to focus on is Ronnie, and Ronnie isn’t anyone we could like, or even identify with.  We need to get inside Ronnie’s world early on to at least feel sorry for her or see how she’s twisted up inside so she acts out.  But there’s no intimacy with the main character.  So, really, we watch what she does, and that’s about how much we feel about her or the movie.  And what we see is a whiny brat making things way harder for everyone than they really need to be.

It doesn’t help that Miley Cyrus is still learning how to act.  Everyone else in this movie is acting.  Sometimes they do an incredible job, like when Bobby Coleman’s Jonah goes to pieces while piecing together the stained-glass window late at night in vain hope that it will cure his Dad of cancer.  That was a great scene.  It’s funny, though, that when Cyrus shows a glimmer of acting talent, her boyfriend Will (Liam Hemsworth) interrupts her with a kiss.  She’s not the worst I’ve seen (Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Carmen Elektra), but her talent is nowhere close to being on par with ex-Disney stars Hillary Duff or Lindsay Lohan, even though they all share that same a terrible failing in picking good movies in which to star. . . .

Thankfully, there were no flashbacks, no narration, no exposition, no covering up bad direction or bad effects with chops, blurs and darkness.  Both fortunately and unfortunately, there were no sections that were so awful they were unintentionally funny.  With the sole exception of Jonah’s stained-glass window scene, there was no excellence, either.  All the things that could have made this movie flavorful one way or another was drained out to maintain a dullness crescendoing to a dull pleasantness. 

And who wants to watch a dull movie when they can watch How to Train Your Dragon, or Date Night, or even Kick-Ass?  Mind you, there was a lot of dreck released at the same time as The Last Song (Our Family Wedding, Remember Me, She’s Out of My League, The Bounty Hunter, Repo Men, Clash of the Titans 2010, Why Did I Get Married, Too?, The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond, Death at a Funeral 2010, The Back-Up Plan, The Losers, Furry Vengeance, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 and The Human Centipede all within March and April).  Which brings me to my closing point.

With either far better or far worse options to choose from, The Last Song becomes  a truly forgettable movie.

I give this movie a way too generous 4 stars out of 10.

Recommended Razzie noms:

Worst actress: Miley Cyrus (BHB predicted correctly, btw)

Worst screenplay