Now & Forever (2002, or maybe 2005)

Now and Forever is a romantic drama targeted at young teen and pre-teen girls.

A young white girl and a Native American boy are childhood friends in Saskatoon. She even rescues him from bullies. As they move into adolescence, she keeps him as a friend but can't see him as a love interest, much to his chagrin. She wants to hang out with the cool, rich kids. The coolest guy takes her to bed, then arranges for his pals to gang-rape her, as movie cool guys so often do. Luckily her friend rescues her, thus allowing her to run off to the big city to pursue her acting career, as movie small town girls so often do and presumably because they don't make movies in Saskatoon? (Hey, they made this one, didn't they?) Poor guy. Poor girl. He's obviously the right guy for her, but she still can't cast him as the love interest.

Following the trail of movie inevitability, she contracts a dread disease and returns to Saskatoon, but this time neither her Cree friend nor his father, who is the eternally sage aphorism-spouting movie chief, can save her. And yet, somehow, the film tricks up a happy ending.  Can you guess how? No matter how outrageous your guess, you'll probably underestimate the implausibility of it all. And I'm not exaggerating.

The script is weighted down by sentimentality, phony-baloney respect for Native American mysticism, and a "sixth sense" type ending, but even if it had played it straight it would have been no better than a bottom-dwelling after-school special. Some of the words used by critics to describe it include: "schmaltz," "hokey," "saccharine,"  "candy-colored,"  "cliché,"  and "hokum."

I was saddened to see that the director of this film is Bob Clark.  He made Porky's in 1982, which is one of the most popular comedies of all time, the third highest-grossing film of 1982, and is still the highest grossing Canadian film of all time. He followed that up in 1983 with A Christmas Story, which is well up there in the IMDb Top 250, and is usually considered to be the best Christmas movie of all time.

1982-1983 must seem like a long time ago to Clark. In those days he was used to reading his reviews and seeing words like "best" amd "highest." He has now made a 180 degree turn. His 2004 release was Superbabies 2, which is now the worst movie of all time at IMDb, and his 2005 effort was Now & Forever. Actually, I guess that isn't quite fair. Now & Forever was actually lensed in 2002, but the producers didn't really know how to market it, and couldn't strike a distribution deal. It sat around for three years before it received a perfunctory micro-mini-distro in the summer of 2005 and a DVD release in November of 2005.

I am guessing that it would be considered a watchable film by young women. Although I don't have sufficient evidence to make that determination (only nine votes from the 18-29 group at IMDb, and none from the younger group), the chart is quite persuasive so far:

That 9.8 is based on only nine votes, but it is such a high score that one tends to feel it may be indicative of a genuine trend, but if you are over 30 and/or lacking a minimum of one vagina, I think I can safely advise that you are likely to hate it.