Miley Cyrus gets to shed her Hannah Montana alter ego for an insipid summer romance, thick with pop songs and montages, from the sparkless pen of Nicholas Sparks. The central character, a one-time piano prodigy accepted into Juilliard on past performance, though she hasn’t touched a keyboard in years, goes gripingly to Georgia, together with her little brother, to read Tolstoy, to save turtles, and principally to reconnect with her estranged father before (spoiler alert) his surrender to cancer, and, in a meet-cute, she literally bumps into a blond beach volleyballer, spilling her milkshake down her front, who turns out (spoiler alert) to be a plantation-bred blueblood. Along the way, she sulks, she sasses, she flounces off in countless huffs, she cries, she laughs, she kisses, she sings along to the car radio, she tries on girly dresses for a wedding at which we never meet either the bride or the groom, and she plays a piano solo at her father’s funeral so stirringly as to summon up an invisible orchestra in accompaniment. Altogether, she proves herself a perfectly adequate actress for a piece of dreck. As an example for the girls of America, her level, declarative, strong, sour speaking voice is surely preferable to the generational epidemic of wee, high, squeaky, helium-filled voices. Her hunched shoulders, giving her body the appearance of hanging on a coat hook, are another matter. With Liam Hemsworth, Greg Kinnear, Bobby Coleman, and Kelly Preston; directed by Julie Anne Robinson. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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