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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nAuthor Colleen Hoover is apparently dominant in the genre of tearjerkers. She\u2019s best known for \u201cIt Ends With Us,\u201d about the upsetting subject of domestic violence. Now comes \u201cReminders of Him,\u201d which features both a death and a torn-apart family. It wants to inspire tears of sadness and sympathy, but the best it can manage is to bore me to tears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The story follows Kenna (Maika Monroe), fresh out of prison after serving a seven-year sentence for vehicular manslaughter. She returns to her small Wyoming hometown, where the first thing she does is rip out the cross along the side of the road that memorializes her former lover Scotty (Rudy Pankow), the passenger she killed in a car crash while intoxicated. It\u2019s not malicious, she does it to honor Scotty, as \u201che hated memorials,\u201d though she doesn\u2019t seem to consider that memorials aren\u2019t \u201cfor\u201d the deceased, they\u2019re for people in mourning. Then again, she\u2019s not one to always use great judgement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kenna\u2019s life is a mess. She can\u2019t get a job because of her criminal record, she can only stay in a lousy apartment by agreeing to take in one of the building owner\u2019s cats, and she has no legal right to see Diem (Zoe Kosovic), the six-year-old daughter she had with Scotty, probably conceived minutes before the fatal crash. She had to give birth in prison and never even got to hold her baby before she was whisked away to live with Scotty\u2019s parents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford). She\u2019s looking for a way to become part of Diem\u2019s life, but all of her ideas involve acting like a crazy stalker, which isn\u2019t going to endear her to the child\u2019s grandparents, who already hate her for what she did to their son.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kenna\u2019s search for a job leads her to a bar owned by failed football player Ledger (Tyriq Withers). The two flirt and he instantly develops feelings for her. Things get complicated when it is revealed that he was Scotty\u2019s best friend growing up and is now heavily involved in raising Diem. They get even more complicated when he learns that she is Scotty\u2019s lover\/killer and Diem\u2019s stalker\/mother. He demands that she leave town, or at least not insert herself into Diem\u2019s life, but she has no intention of obeying. Besides, he doesn\u2019t really mean that he wants her to leave town, he\u2019s too smitten with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kenna and Ledger form an uneasy business relationship that turns into a friendship that threatens to turn romantic. Can he learn to love the woman who took his best friend away from him? And how will this affect the close-as-family relationship he has with Diem and her grandparents? No doubt it will involve lying and eventually exposure, but will forgiveness be around the corner?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The film feels inexplicably stuffed with dragged-out scenes and unnecessary details. Kenna\u2019s first job as a grocery bagger doesn\u2019t really go anywhere, nor does Ledger not making much progress on a house he\u2019s building far outside of town. And we don\u2019t need a lengthy flashback to the night of the accident, everything has been sufficiently described in other parts of the movie. My theory is that a tight, early draft of the script came in at only sixty minutes and the studio insisted that it be stretched out to ninety, but then someone overcorrected until it was this nearly-two-hour snoozefest. Either that or the Hoover novel itself is over-bloated, in which case the movie should have done more to tighten things up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not mad at \u201cReminders of Him\u201d for being incompetent, just nonplussed that it\u2019s so unexciting. Other than being too long and dull, it\u2019s not even bad in an interesting way. By the end of the year, I\u2019ll probably forget the very title of \u201cthat weepy mother-that-can\u2019t-see-her-daughter movie.\u201d And then I\u2019ll need a reminder of \u201cReminders of Him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Grade: C-<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cReminders of Him\u201d is rated PG-13 for sexual content, strong language, drug content, some violent content, and brief partial nudity. Its running time is 114 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Bob Garver Author Colleen Hoover is apparently dominant in the genre of tearjerkers. She\u2019s best known for \u201cIt Ends With Us,\u201d about the upsetting subject of domestic violence.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"13","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","inline_featured_image":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"wpai_generated_summary":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":true,"token":"eyJpbWciOiJodHRwczpcL1wvaTAud3AuY29tXC9sYWtlbGFuZGdhemV0dGUuaW5mb1wvbmV3c1wvd3AtY29udGVudFwvdXBsb2Fkc1wvMjAyNlwvMDNcL3VubmFtZWQtNy53ZWJwP2ZpdD0xMzglMkMyMTgmc3NsPTEiLCJ0eHQiOiJNb3ZpZSBSZXZpZXcgJiM4MjExOyBSZW1pbmRlcnMgb2YgSGltIiwidGVtcGxhdGUiOiJoaWdod2F5IiwiZm9udCI6IiIsImJsb2dfaWQiOjE2MzA0MDY2MX0.8-DO2Ew-sJFYcAhjI6O1wjy3mhGeHl3JuDCLhTzm5lYMQ"},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[14079],"class_list":["post-63765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review-reminders-of-him"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63767,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63765\/revisions\/63767"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lakelandgazette.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}