27 Dresses: 41% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Ugly Truth: 13% on Rotten Tomatoes. Killers: 11% on Rotten Tomatoes. One for the Money: 2% on Rotten Tomatoes.
As time has proved, critics aren’t the biggest fans of Katherine Heigl. Audiences are a slightly different story: while Heigl’s post-Knocked Up career looked promising with big box office winners like 27 Dresses ($76 million)and Ugly Truth ($88 million). Her most recent outing, 2012’s One for the Money saw a major dip for Heigl, taking in only $26 million. A.O. Scott of The New York Times notes that the film “offers a data point for those studying the cultural decline of cinema.”
The string of disastrous, demographic-constructed vehicles turned Heigl-bashing into the Internet’s national pastime, each bit of casting news, trailer, and major release provoking a barrage of quips aimed at the former Grey’s Anatomy cast member. Late Thursday night, The Hollywood Reporter got the scoop that Heigl’s latest “infraction” against pop culture will team her up with The Sessions writer/director Ben Lewin for an adaptation of A Moment to Remember, a romantic drama based on a Korean film that itself is based on a Japanese TV show. According to the report, the film “centers on a fashion designer who is stricken with a disease that wipes away her memory, forcing her husband to desperately try to give her one last memory of their love.”
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Hear that? That’s the sound of a thousand zingers being deployed to Twitter.
We’ll have to wait to see if Heigl’s A Moment to Remember is a genuine bomb or an underrated gem suffering from prejudgment. But to the naysayers, I say, “bring it on.”
Heigl may not be batting a thousand at the multiplex, but I always look forward to her movies. Yes, even the awful ones. Because if there’s one thing I can count on, it’s the quality of a Katherine Heigl movie trailer. Heigl possess an amazing trait that works wonders in the small doses of her trailers and implodes in the feature length format: she actively appears to not give a s**t.
The passive attitude turns two minute previews into Funny or Die-level spoofs. It helps that the plots are routinely ludicrous; whether she’s wigging out over the discovery that her husband is an assassin or learning how to use a gun in order to nab a criminal who is also the guy who took her virginity, Heigl plays it all with a wink. An incredibly necessary wink.
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In the hands of Lewin, A Moment to Remember could be Heigl’s return to legitimacy. She has real talent — marred by a slate of films that make easy targets for the bloodthirsty Internet — and could find a nurturing collaborator in Lewin.
Or, at the very least, it’ll make a glorious trailer.
27 Dresses
The Ugly Truth
Killers
One for the Money
Follow Matt Patches on Twitter @misterpatches
[Photo Credit: 20th Century Fox]
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