Forever Mine
Filmed at Don Cesar Hotel in St Pete Beach Florida.,Alan works at the Don Cesar hotel which is prominently shown in the film and he has a figure of the hotel with its name on it in his room at McCleans in NY. The water by the hotel is called the ocean by many people and Ray Liotta is seen taking a boat to Bimini. This leaves the impression that the hotel is near Miami in Key Biscayne, but in reality it is near Tampa on the Gulf of Mexico (not the Atlantic Ocean) and a day trip to Bimini from there is out of the question.,Manuel Esquema: Everything has a purpose. Everybody has a purpose. It is my purpose to be with Ella. Nothing can change that; not you, not the police, not the courts. It's just a fact. Like... like plants turning to the Sun, or death, or taxes.
Mark Brice: What is this gibberish? Are you crazy? Nobody talks like this. Make sense!
Manuel Esquema: People are afraid to say what they feel. Ella is afraid.
Mark Brice: I'm not afraid to say what I feel. There's two types of people in this world; assholes and pricks. You're an asshole. And I'm a prick. Do the math. Ella's mine.,[prologue] "It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art". - Walter Pater.,References Taxi Driver (1976),Forever Mine
Written by Angelo Badalamenti, Julia Taylor-Stanley and James Shearman
Performed by Shana
Published by Anlon Music Co.
Warner Chappell and A&E Copyright
Arranged by James Shearman and Nick Raine
Produced by Julia Taylor-Stanley,We all know that Paul Schrader is a sober son of the Dutch

Reformation Church. Still, I'd love to have a taste of the

crack he was smoking when he wrote this flaming lulu, a

painfully sincere and heartfelt tribute to undying love that

suggests Stanley Kubrick singing "Love Theme from Mahogany" a cappella.

Apparently an attempt to capture the spirit of Scott Spencer's novel "Endless Love" (so famously lost by Franco Zeffirelli), FOREVER MINE posits Joseph Fiennes

(he of the smoldering, gotta-have-you eyebrows) as a Miami cabana boy who messes with the wrong guy's wife--Gretchen Mol as the secretarial cutie who married

gnarly Mr. Big (Ray Liotta). Before you can say AGAINST

ALL ODDS, Mr. Big is coming down hard on Cabana Boy--only, in Schrader's world, this means more mutilations, burials alive, disguises, funny accents, and

villainous moustache-twirlings than in the entirety of

Shakespeare's CYMBELINE.

Schrader claimed he wanted to go back to the nineteenth

century. And indeed, the over-the-top melodrama suggests

a desperate attempt to flee fin-de-siecle irony. But it's

always a train wreck when cerebral directors try to let go of

their book-learning and Open Themselves to Feeling. FOREVER MINE suggests a cable-movie version of Robert Bresson's two wackadoody salutes to cute young boys, FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER and THE DEVIL PROBABLY; Fiennes greets Mol in a seedy motel room on which he has spray painted the words, "GIVE ALL TO LOVE." (That was the tagline of the movie's abortive theatrical run.) Like Kubrick in EYES WIDE SHUT, Schrader

tries to peel off his layers of coldness and ratiocination--but

any movie that opens with a quote from Walter Pater suggests that the filmmaker is more suited to analyzing

melodrama than expressing it.

For all the tropical gloss put on it by the great cinematographer John Bailey, FOREVER MINE has a giggle-inducing quality that's unique even to bad Schrader

movies. (In one scene, Fiennes leaves an ambivalent Mol

in her hotel room. As he walks away, he bumps his head

into a palm frond, stops, and seems to look back at the

palm frond. Fade to black. Does Schrader equate Douglas

Sirk with Ed Wood?) Now that he's expressed his inner lovesick sap, maybe Schrader can go back to who he really

is--a cold, alienated, God-haunted, overeducated freak

from Michigan who's also the greatest living writer of

movies.,