“Remember Me” is a mess of a movie, but its flaws are those of a cast and crew trying to do too much, rather than taking the easy way out with cliches and familiar plot devices.

The romantic drama has a twist ending that feels cheap and exploitative. And some of the actors — notably Chris Cooper — get lost in the ambitious but undisciplined storytelling.

Still, I would rather sit through a dozen noble failures like this than the latest idiot comedy or sentimental pap.

Robert Pattinson, in his first role since the “Twilight” movies made him a phenom, plays Tyler Hawkins, the scion of a well-to-do family who’s slumming it in the poorer boroughs of New York City. He’s seriously estranged from his business magnate father (Pierce Brosnan, proving once again that one of the few things he can’t do is a convincing American accent).

He attends college, but not officially, only auditing some classes, and spends most of his time working part time at a book store, or hanging out in a coffee shop writing in a journal that he shows to no one. He’s coasting through life, undecided about just about everything.

It’s the sort of role that seems designed to promote Pattinson’s mojo as a heartthrob rather than build a discernible, believable character. He twitches a lot and clenches his jaw and doesn’t look people in the eye, except for the one person in the world he truly cares about, his little sister, Caroline. Tyler is the classic sensitive/broken soul who needs a romance to assemble the disparate pieces of his lackadaisical life.

That would be a role for Ally, played by Emilie de Ravin (an Aussie whose American accent is also strained). She’s the daughter of a tough cop (Cooper) and a mother who was gunned down when she was 11. (Mom is played by Martha Plimpton, who I can’t even remember the last time I saw her onscreen, and it makes me happy seeing her.)

Ally’s dad compensates for his wife’s murder by keeping a sharp eye on his daughter. Needless to say, he doesn’t much care for the unambitious Tyler or his horndog roommate Aidan (Tate Ellington). In fact, the two meet the cop before Ally, when they try to break up a street fight. Tyler mouths off to him and so he throws them in jail. Aidan spots Ally with her father, and suggests as a joke that Tyler flirt with Ally using his gift with “that freaky poetic crap” that the gals love.

So he does, but then they fall for each other for real. Friction with the two fathers exacerbates their relationship on either end, which is further strained by other family problems for Tyler.

The screenplay by rookie Will Fetters meanders and loses its way, more interested in individual scenes than any kind of narrative arc. Some of its eddies are interesting enough in their own right, while other times we wish the film would hurry up. I kept waiting for things to happen — such as the two a-hole fathers meeting — that never did, and some of the places the story did go were baffling and boring.

For instance, there’s a whole long sequence about Tyler sister Caroline getting hazed by some school mates at a sleepover party. Kids can be nasty to each other, and I don’t want to minimize the effects of bullying. But the way the entire Hawkins clan goes into crisis mode over some pretty mild behavior seemed way overblown. Tyler’s super-busy father, who doesn’t even bother to acknowledge his son’s 22nd birthday, stops everything he’s doing to rush over. It just felt contrived and wrong to me.

The title comes from Tyler’s brother Michael, who killed himself six years earlier. Tyler has Michael’s name tattooed over his heart, and gets all cold and moody whenever anyone brings the subject up. The movie doesn’t really do anything with this information other than use it whenever an angsty moment is required.

The Ally/Tyler romance didn’t really do anything for me. We believe that they’re a couple because the movie tells us so, not because they seem fated to be together. I also didn’t like how they treated the character of Ally’s father. He’s all rage without any paternal warmth. We never spend any time with him, so we don’t understand what makes him tick. All we see is him doing bad things, so eventually we just figure he’s a bad guy.

(I will say that if I were Tyler, after the same police detective beat me up twice, I’d be thinking about a conversation with his lieutenant.)

Director Allen Coulter is a TV veteran who made the excellent “Holllywoodland” a few years back, and he seems to have a nice touch with actors but not with the mechanics of storytelling. I really liked the performance he got out of Ruby Jerins as little Caroline — she seemed to hold all the hope and fears of a lonely, gifted child in her every glance.

I won’t say anything about the strange, shameful ending, other than the film’s timeline should have tipped me off.

It doesn’t work, other than as a purely manipulative trick. For some reason, I want to believe the people behind this movie are better than that, so I’ll write it off as a profoundly misguided mistake rather than a cynical ploy.

2.5 stars

Heroes of the Zeroes is Nick Rogers’ daily, alphabetical look back at the 365 best films of 2000-2009.

“Control”
Rated R
2007

Anton Corbijn delayed his leap into feature films longer than most of his music-video contemporaries. But 2007’s black-and-white “Control,” his passion project about Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, captured the tragedy of a self-loathing songwriter whose melancholy musical poetry would inspire a generation only after it drove him under.

Corbijn’s turned his former photographer’s eye on capturing expressions and mannerisms that scream volumes about a moment and a man.

“Existence, what does it matter? I exist the best way I can. The present is well out of hand.” Those lyrics to “Heart and Soul” open the film, but Sam Riley’s straightforward portrayal of Curtis pulls at neither of those. (Also, with his co-stars, Riley conjures up some of the most seamless onscreen-rock covers since “The Doors.”) This pull into an artistic abyss unfolds with an addictively narcotic crawl.

Song lyrics from “Digital,” “Transmission,” “Insight,” “Twenty-Four Hours,” “She’s Lost Control” and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” portray Curtis’s emotional convulsions — self-cornered into a loveless marriage and absentee paternalism. (It’s here that “Control” claustrophobically looks closer at brief bits of “24-Hour Party People.”)

The way Curtis blocked his onstage movement mirrored isolationism in his home life. He clasped the microphone stand like a drowning man would a life preserver, but he couldn’t stay afloat in dreary waters of his own creation. (Samantha Morton excels as his wife, Deborah). Not for nothing did the last shot resemble the billowing smoke of a pyre — the last vestiges of a style and a soul.

“Green Zone” could have been a perfectly serviceable military action-thriller, except it tries to frame the entire U.S. invasion of Iraq in cops-and-robbers terms.

Matt Damon plays Roy Miller, a heroic, no-nonsense Army chief warrant officer whose tendency to toss the rulebook isn’t all that different from Dirty Harry. He even carries a bigger gun, although at least when he perforates bad guys he doesn’t toss off gravelly one-liners right before pulling the trigger.

Set in the weeks after the spring 2003 invasion, Miller is presented as the do-gooder who uncovers all sorts of nasty intrigue and secret deals between the bad guys and supposed good guys. Instead of drug dealers colluding with city councilmen or some such, it’s Baathist generals and Pentagon paper-pushers cooking up evidence on weapons of mass destruction.

I don’t mind filmmakers using the historical record as a backdrop to spin bullet-filled stories. But the filmmakers muster a generous helping of self-righteous outrage, as if we’re supposed to get mad all over again at Dubya et al based on this new made-up yarn.

It ends up playing like a bunch of Hollywood liberals — but I repeat myself — ganging up to re-spin the previous administration’s colossal screw-ups, but with the benefit of hindsight. So Miller ends up shouting at some soulless government honcho, “It always matters why we go to war! How will we get anyone to trust us again?!?”

My objection here is not with the argument, but how it’s presented. By depicting the whole WMD excuse as a fabrication of a few people, it actually lets many in power, and the many more who enabled them, off the hook.

“Green Zone” is directed by Paul Greengrass, who previously worked with Damon on the latter (and lesser) two Jason Bourne movies. He’s tackled historical material before with “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93,” though in both those movies he eschewed a political prism to focus on the human tragedy.

The screenplay is by Brian Helgeland (“Mystic River”), inspired by a book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran that took a critical look at the U.S. handling of Iraq following the invasion, but had little to do with WMDs.

Paul Gleeson plays a CIA agent who agrees with Miller’s assessment that the WMD intelligence is bunk. They team up to track down Saddam’s chief weapons officer, Al Rawi (Igal Naor), to learn why they can’t find any weapons.

Meanwhile, a Pentagon true believer (Greg Kinnear) would rather the Iraqi general not talk, and sends a special forces commander (Jason Isaacs) to shadow Miller.

Miller is helped by a helpful local (Khalid Abdalla) of questionable motives. Amy Ryan plays a Judith Miller-type journalist who wrote a lot of WMD stories that were spoon-fed to her, and now wants the straight dope.

The bulk of the movie is taken up by a lot of chases through darkly-lit alleys shot in an extremely grainy way to make it seem gritty. With all the jumpy editing, the audience will have trouble keeping track of who is after who, and why, and where they’re going.

At one point two different sets of Army soldiers get into a fistfight over some intel. In the Dirty Harry parallel universe, it’s the equivalent of straight cops and dirty cops having a dust-up in the locker room. “Green Zone” relishes such clichés and simplification.

2.5 Yaps

Movies You Aught Not Watch is Nick Rogers’ weekly, alphabetical look back at the 52 worst films of 2000-2009.

“Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas”
Rated PG
2000

Kids and parents worldwide clearly have missed what modern filmmakers see in Dr. Seuss’s work — the seeds to turn storytelling patience into manic, pushy movies like “The Cat in the Hat” and 2000’s “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” What’s next — the Lorax onscreen knocking people out with Truffula Tree trunks?

Ron Howard’s “Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas” loudly, aggressively defiles Seuss’s source — crudely, cynically mining that material to feed a misery machine. This film has the gall to spit in the audience’s gaping mouths with a joke about children desensitized by movies.

An unforgivable transgression from the usually reliable Howard, “Grinch” had the visual polish of a Menards tree aisle and resembled not a cheerful Christmas, but rather what the bloodcurdling onset of a mescaline bender might feel like.

It also marked the nadir of Jim Carrey’s wild-gesticulation performances. His voice sounded like a Sean Connery-aping brogue you’d hear from a frat brother after a few pitchers, and it seemed a cruel joke to give romantic stirrings to an anatomically neutered character.

That’s one of many kid-inappropriate steps in Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman’s script, rife with gags about infidelity, bastard children and, possibly, a key party in Whoville (a city populated by impatient, self-absorbed competitive asses).

A Navy SEAL taught Carrey torture-resistance techniques to take his mind off entrapment in the suit. If only that kind of emotional valet had been provided for anyone in the audience with an age, or IQ, over 5.

Heroes of the Zeroes is Nick Rogers’ daily, alphabetical look back at the 365 best films of 2000-2009.

“Constantine”
Rated R
2005

It’s no coincidence that the poster for “Constantine” so closely resembled “Chinatown” — faces in billowing smoke, the downturned silhouette of each movie’s star, a sickly color scheme.

Though paranormal investigator John Constantine hardly joined the league of extraordinary gumshoes like Jake Gittes, 2005’s “Constantine” was, at heart, a gritty film-noir detective story in spite of its DC comic-book origins.

Prerequisite gawking visuals were an afterthought, really, and the only sign “Constantine” ever was a comic was its otherworldly plotline — Constantine (Keanu Reeves) running afoul of a plot by hellish demons to overrun Earth using an ancient spear.

Place director Francis Lawrence in the company of Spike Jonze and Tarsem Singh as music-video directors delivering whoppers for their first forays into film. Mainly a mystery as moody as its protagonist, “Constantine” leaps from questions of spirituality to demonic beat-downs to fatalist humor with the compelling churn of a hard-boiled B-movie ride. (A small knock: Evil beastie deaths tend to have a been-there, done-“Blade” touch.)

Still unfairly badgered by many for “wooden” acting, Reeves gives this INS agent for the spectral set legitimate faith-based conflicts and a tragic backstory. Plus, he kills with the classic quip, “God’s just a kid with an ant farm. He’s not planning anything.”

The labyrinthine intersection of doublecrosses is somewhat unimaginative (think “Dogma”), but what detective story lacks predictable elements? Taking the case of emulating the gumshoe epics before it invigorates “Constantine” far beyond a comic-book film.

In this week’s show, Joe and Chris ruminate and pontificate about the Oscar winners and losers, the show itself and all things Academy Awards.

Heroes of the Zeroes is Nick Rogers’ daily, alphabetical look back at the 365 best films of 2000-2009.

“The Constant Gardener”
Rated R
2005

Rapturous urgency drove this immensely satisfying 2005 thriller-romance contrasting a too-silent marriage against a too-silent global problem.

Ralph Fiennes is Justin, a diplomat investigating not only the death of his wife (Rachel Weisz, in an Oscar-winning performance) but also a global pharmacological conspiracy that appears to prove hazardous to his health.

Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”) turns his frenetic camera’s raw observance on Kenya, brought to life with a color palette on steroids. The dynamic sound design beefs up everything from sickening morgue-lighting hums to thundering, chugging trains.

Yet this isn’t another case of Hollywood safely kissing boo-boos from far away. It’s a high-pressure squirt of peroxide on a fresh, open wound. Handheld street-level cameras shove effects of poverty and sickness in the viewer’s face, suggesting new blood drips just as old lashes scar over.

Fiennes and Weisz deliver two of their careers’ finest performances, and Jeffrey Caine’s cleverly fragmented adaptation of John Le Carre’s novel toys with perceptions — some right, most wrong, all masterfully played.

Meirelles also nails the 1970s style of cinematic paranoia from the notion that Justin could suffer a sudden snatch-and-grab disappearance. Pulse-quickening claustrophobia sets in during a close-quarters hotel-room attack, during an SUV chase in the desert and a nomadic tribe’s raid on a remote outpost.

“The Constant Gardener” requires a degree of patience, but it’s handsomely rewarded with a resolutely satisfying conclusion. After all, in the world’s largest, most dangerous gardens, diplomacy isn’t always so easily cultivated.

Lately it seems major films are being pushed onto video in a slipshod manner. Extras are skimpy and unenlightening, as if the studio couldn’t be bothered to take the time or spend the money.

(Yeah, I’m talking to you, “Where the Wild Things Are.”)

So it’s refreshing to see Best Picture Oscar nominee “Precious” given a top-notch release. It’s got a solid commentary track and host of probing featurettes totaling nearly an hour. About the only knock is the lack of a digital copy.

Extras are identical for DVD and Blu-ray versions. In the commentary, director Lee Daniels talks openly about his own troubled youth and how it inspired him during the shooting.

Author Sapphire speaks about her experiences as an inner-city teacher, and how she was reluctant to let Hollywood film her book. She relented after seeing Daniels’ “Monsters Ball.”

The casting of novice Gabourey Sidibe is covered in detail, including footage from her audition. Sidibe is nothing like her character — she’s smart, outgoing and “talks like a white girl,” Daniels says.

Daniels talks about de-glamorizing his cast, making nearly everyone work without makeup — he even reveals he caught Mariah Carey trying to sneak in some blush between takes.

Oprah and Tyler Perry talk about their roles in “presenting” the film. Artistically, they had nothing to do with it. But after seeing it, they felt compelled to lend their names to get the Sundance favorite a major release.

Set in Harlem 1987, it’s the first-person story of Claireece “Precious” Jones, an obese, illiterate 16-year-old who’s pregnant with her second child. She’s the victim of her mother, a serial abuser, played with terrifying rage by Mo’Nique, and was raped repeatedly by her father.

She’s like a thousand others girls that people pass on the streets every day without seeing. Her entire life has taught her to feel worthless, like “ugly black grease.”

But Precious is given a second chance when she’s sent to an alternative school, where she finds a teacher and fellow female students who help her, for the first time in her life, to feel empowered. The vibrant fantasies that ping around her head start to translate into the journals she keeps for class.

“Precious” is a hard movie to watch. The brutality it depicts, of both a physical and psychological nature, are vile. The only thing worse would be failing to see it.

Movie: 4.5 Yaps
Extras: 4.5 Yaps

I will give the movie this: the initial premise of Planet 51 is clever. The story is about an American astronaut who lands on a planet 20 billion miles away and is treated as a typical alien invader. This is also the extent of the cleverness of the movie.

The film is never offensive, but is incredibly boring and underdeveloped. It makes sense that Planet 51 ought to be thematically similar, but it’s almost unnerving how it is exactly the same as Earth. The only differences are they have green skin, antennae, and floating cars. Animation provides the opportunity to create a whole new magical world. If a character travels to a new planet, majority of the film should be parading the new creative differences on that planet. Instead the planet looks like America did during the 1950s. They do everything the same including speaking English.

The movie also suffers from the syndrome of too many themes. In this movie I think it wants us to be ourselves and be more than ourselves and to embrace the unknown and to be tolerant and to hate NASA. It’s very complex. This comes from Chuck the astronaut (voiced incompetently by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) befriending a young native named Lem. He has a crush on Neera but is too shy. He also wants to become an astronomer one day. Justin Long does a solid job about making Lem likable, but he’s too dull to root for. He complains that once Chuck arrives he just “wants his life to go back to normal.” His life really isn’t that different with Chuck. I think he’s just complaining because that’s what other people do in his situations.

Also Chuck shouldn’t be helped. He only has 73 hours to return to his ship. It’s unclear why he only had a weekend to investigate a planet, but I digress. The problem is that he’s way too obnoxious. He’s constantly showing off how awesome he is. He’s screaming various pop culture references that don’t make any sense like telling a group of elderly aliens to find him on Facebook. Meh. The movie goes to great lengths to show how incompetent he is and constantly suggests that astronauts are untrained button pushers. I’m pretty sure if they send you up in space, you are a heavily educated scientist but I could be wrong. His robot sidekick is amusing though. Sure it is an accidental rip-off of WALL-E and sounds like the Pixar lamp, but the idea of a NASA probe only being interested in rocks is amusing.

The film moves in a predictable pace and it is hard to decipher if kids will even like this. They’re not going to understand the numerous Star Wars jokes and the homages to 1950s B-movies. There are no joke set-pieces to really get behind or even fun action scenes. The movie is instantly forgettable, like a reverse Polaroid.

The extras reflect this. There are a few featurettes where key voice actors talk about the plot. There is an ironic feature called “The World of Planet 51” where they just move the camera around various animated locations. There isn’t anyone talking about how they designed these places or what were the creative decisions. It is just a quasi-tour juxtaposed with a song. At least that was better than the irritating game.

Movie: 1 Yap

Extras: 2 Yaps

“Hachi: A Dog’s Tale” is something of a cautionary tale. Not the movie itself, which is a capable tear-jerker, but how the film’s release was handled.

The drama starring Richard Gere, Joan Allen and Jason Alexander made the circuit of the film festivals, including headlining the Heartland Film Festival here in Indianapolis last fall. It had a name director,Lasse Hallström, and seemed to have all the tools for a decent mid-level theatrical run.

But the film never got a theater run. Dates in December were pushed back to January, and the next thing I heard it was scheduled for video release on March 9.

It’s strange, and depressing, how worthy movies with name stars and filmmakers can get shunted aside to video, while a whole lot of drek makes it to theaters.

“Hachi” is an Americanized version of a Japanese story about an Akita dog who shows the greatest loyalty imaginable. After Parker (Gere), a middle-aged music professor, stumbles across the tiny pup lost at his train station, he takes him home for safekeeping and — of course — ends up bonding with him.

Parker’s reluctant wife, wonderfully played by the great Joan Allen, eventually succumbs to the dog’s charms.

But this is but the beginning of the story. Parker dies suddenly, and Hachi, who had been making the daily trek to meet his master at the train station where they met, keeps doing so. The years roll by, and every day the faithful canine goes to meet the human he loves, who will never come.

It’s a touching, true story based on a dog in Tokyo in the 1920s, where a statue was eventually erected to celebrate the bond between man and dog.

Hallström constructs an unabashed tear-jerker, but the film is skillful enough in playing with our emotions that we begin to forget about the manipulation.

Perhaps reflecting the film’s underwhelming arrival, video extras are exceedingly thin. They’re limited to a single item: An 18-minute making-of documentary that tends to fall into the familiar pattern where everyone involved with the project talks about how great everyone else is.

Once, just once, I’d like to see cast and crew talk honestly about the unavoidable conflicts and flare-ups that occur in any collaborative creative process.

Movie: 4 Yaps
Extras: 2 Yaps