Forever Mine is a British–Canadian romantic drama film written and directed by Paul Schrader and starring Joseph Fiennes, Gretchen Mol and Ray Liotta.
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I hate to insert the overused phrase "just sayin Creepy Stalker Coach did make the story more interesting, but - I felt like this was sort of used as a reason to justify why Angel was borderline possessive. Because after all, if your girl is in danger, then you have a reason to be upset, right? I should have paid more attention to the tile of the book. You have permission to smack me. The title is Forever Mine. Yes, I stupidly walked into this one. I loved all of the side characters.
Regardless of my feelings about this book, I will be reading the rest of the series because all of the additional characters out-shined the main characters. I'm excited to read about Sofia and Alex the most. This series can only go up from here. This is an early writing from the author and I have read other books by her that were good. I'm going to cut some slack here and not keep any harsh feelings toward Forever Mine because many authors take a book or two to get into a groove.
I know that this author can write a fun story with lovable characters. Noah was a great read.
Forevermine Films | A husband and wife videography team
Reyes' style is easy to fall in to. She is capable of writing an exciting and sweet romance. Honestly, this is not the worst effort I've seen for a first book. There are no real big complaints from me. I actually liked the read fine View all 12 comments. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I end up with a lot of free Kindle books. The Moreno Brothers series ended up falling in my lap and the first in the series ended up being yet another book to throw on the "It could have been good, but Forever Mine begins just like any other YA fiction story.
After her mother is sentenced to three years in prison for embezzlement, year-old Sarah is sent from her home in Arizona to southern California to live with her aunt, uncle and cousin. On the first day of her senior year in a n I end up with a lot of free Kindle books. On the first day of her senior year in a new school, she catches the eye of Angel Moreno, football god and general high school rock star. Angel's never had a girlfriend of course not , but Sarah's captivating eyes snare him and he just has to get to know her better. The two meet shortly thereafter at a party and thoroughly cheesy, gag-inducing romance ensues.
That's where the story begins to come together. Or fall apart, depending on your outlook. What I liked about this book: There is a catch that I will get into later, but Ms. Reyes definitely put more thought and effort into her character than some authors bother to. It wasn't so short that I felt like I hadn't really read much at all and, while it did teeter on the edge of being a bit too long, it ended quickly enough for my taste.
Now let's talk about the problems with this story warning: The most glaring problem is the characters themselves.
Forever Mine
While they were detailed and well-written in that regard, I just couldn't bring myself to like any of them. With perhaps the exception of Sarah's best friend Sydney, I found them all to be pathologically dysfunctional and irritating. We'll start with Sarah. Sarah is a weak, naive mental midget. Seriously, the girl is just plain dumb.
She nearly gets herself raped hanging around with a teacher who literally everyone including Sydney has warned her about. Reyes briefly alludes to the fact that Sarah feels the way she does about her pervy-but-caring coach, Rudy because she never had a strong father figure in her life, but this issue is never explored further. While it could have served as an eye-opener or warning to other girls about the effect the absence of a father can have on a young girl, the entire incident was treated as nothing more than a setup for Angel to flex his super Latino muscles and rescue poor wittle Sarah from Coach Pedo.
Aside from being completely stupid, Sarah is also dishonest. She spends three months hiding from Angel the fact that her best friend in Arizona is a guy. Well, we return now to that whole "weak" thing I mentioned earlier. The girl has no backbone. She knows Angel won't like the fact that her best friend is a guy believe me, I'll delve into that topic shortly , so instead of risking upsetting him, she just chickens out and continues letting Angel believe Sydney is a girl.
Her cousin, Valerie, is continually nagging Sarah to tell him because she knows the longer the charade goes on, the worse the fallout is going to be, but does Sarah buck up and do it? It's been a while since I've felt this venomous toward a female protagonist. Where do I begin? Angel is a misogynistic, insecure egomaniac who needs serious therapy and an anger management class. At 17, he's shaping up to become what my younger brother refers to as a "Stair Pusher" translation: He loses his temper more often than is healthy for anyone, often over completely inconsequential things.
If Sarah pays any attention to anything with a penis aside from him, his family, and his friends , he becomes instantly enraged, asks her what the hell she thinks she's doing, and physically threatens the male. Reading Angel's reactions to other males was like watching a psychotic peacock on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The fact that some females find this kind of behavior endearing makes me a little nauseous, and while I'm sure some would defend Angel's actions by claiming he's just "overly protective", that excuse flies out the window when you consider Angel's reaction to Sydney.
He is, of course, insanely territorial and angry. At first, he flat-out refuses to accept Sarah and Sydney's friendship even after he discovers Sarah isn't "in love" with Sydney. When he meets Syndey on somewhat positive terms toward the end of the book, I kept waiting for him to cock his leg and piss on Sydney's shoes. This is yet another YA "romance" that is shoving in young girls' faces the idea that a controlling, abusive relationship is somehow ideal.
But he's just so dreamy. By distancing herself from her best friend of eight years to appease lover boy. But it's OK because Sydney has a new girlfriend and she too is uneasy about the close friendship of Sydney and Sarah. Reyes knows a lot of very insecure people. The peripheral characters consist of cousin Valerie, Angel's brother Alex Valerie and Alex start up their own romance , older brother Sal Moreno, a younger Moreno sister who is treated even worse than the Moreno boys' girlfriends, and Angel's two best friends, Romero and Eric.
Eric is conducting a secret relationship with younger sister, Sofia which nearly gets him killed by Alex. I've read the second installment of this series, Always Been Mine and am working on the attached Novella, Sweet Sofie , and my reviews of those books will go into more detail regarding the bizarre, abusive treatment of Sofia. This book just went completely off the rails and over the top It glorifies abusive relationships and is sexist on a level not many books can reach. Mostly because the sexism is subtle. I'll never understand how female authors manage to craft fictional girls who are so completely repulsive as to make it impossible for anyone with even half a brain to sympathize with them or their plight.
Sarah brought all of her problems on herself, first by choosing to date an overbearing, irrational, violent douchebag, and then by deciding that dishonesty was just plain easier than telling the truth. A weak plot, sloppy writing grammatical errors galore , loathsome characters, and disgusting behavior come together to make Forever Mine a thoroughly disturbing, infuriating read. View all 6 comments.
Such a beautiful cover. Too bad the story isn't as beautiful. I'm not even halfway done and already I can tell where the story is going. Sorry, but withholding information about a male best friend from a boyfriend is not enough to hold this story together. Getting jealous about past relationships that had nothing to do with you in the first place isn't enough to hold this story together. Getting jealous over every little thing and detail about someone's life whom you've barely known is childish, Such a beautiful cover.
Getting jealous over every little thing and detail about someone's life whom you've barely known is childish, especially when the teens in this story are old enough to know better.
- The Wisdom of Repugnance.
- Hawke.
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All we have here is a good-looking girl and a good-looking guy who are too insecure. Maybe that's enough for young high schoolers but, for me, it's pretty stupid. For someone who cares about Sydney the way that Sarah is claiming, there shouldn't have even been a secret to hide. Sydney's always been there for her when she needed him, and still is, so what's the problem?
If he's that important to her as she says he is then Angel should be the one who has to accept that, not the one who's providing the ultimatum. Then she's the one who keeps saying she's leaving, so why is she letting Angel have so much power over her life? Looks, although important, should not be the only basis to the actual story. Secondly, where's the so-called spark? I don't feel it between these two because of all the problems that shouldn't be problems getting in the way. That would be fine if they were sophomores. I've never known any seniors who've acted like this.
You'd think that Angel would be ready and willing to abuse Sarah if he didn't get his way. It's petulant and childish, another thing that doesn't even bring enough support to the actual story Now I have to finish this just to see if Forever Mine can be salvaged. If these imaginary issues are the plot, then this is a big FAIL already. I'd take Beautiful Disaster over this any day. Even playing that route is ridiculous. Thirdly, too may of them are in each other's relationships. Valerie giving Sarah advice about keeping a guy when she's fooling around with who knows who?
Then when she gets a Moreno, she's hooking up with Romero? I get that she's trying to protect her feelings, but who is she to say who Angel is when she didn't even know the Moreno brothers knew her all that well? Then, what's with the wording? When you're telling us something that happened, there's no need to put it in dialogue when you've already said it happened.
She didn't know if she could keep it secret any longer. I don't know how long I can hold this secret. You've already told us this. Unless you're planning to change something about what you've already told us, there's no need to repeat it! This story, as a whole so far, is full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and the holes are just forming.
And let's not even talk about the terrible grammar and lack of punctuation when needed. I'm a bit past the half point in the story and I'm still not satisfied. What if they said Sydney was dead? Would the alias still be important to her? I'm sorry, but I might have to discontinue this story and give it a big fat F. I may need time to finish this one, even though I know where it is going.
Hell, it took me 3 days to even get this far. Now I'm just suffering through the rest. I need a break. Or I may not finish this one at all. I'm done with it. I can't say I enjoyed it, either. This story just couldn't hold my attention the way I wanted it to and I knew exactly how it would go down. I won't be reading anything by this author anymore; of that I'm positively sure. It gets an F. View all 5 comments. This is probably one of the cutest books I've read in a long time.
I truly fell in love with Reyes' characters I would love a Moreno man of my own. Like I said before, the author really makes y This is probably one of the cutest books I've read in a long time. Like I said before, the author really makes you believe you are right there with them throughout the story. Luckly though, this is not the majority of the book nor does it take the majority of the book for them to figure out what morons they were.
Overall, I would rate this book a 4. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a fun, nostalgic, sweet book. One of my favorite bks turns out to be a dud on audio. The voice the narrator uses for the guys in the story makes them sound like cartoon character meatheads. And she uses the same dumb voice for all the guys Moreno's, Eric, Romero. Skip the audio version and read the bk.
Such a diappointing shame. Elizabeth Reyes knocked me out with this one. The Moreno family is a hot, intense, passionate, fiery, interesting bunch. The banter between the brothers and their friend is hilarious. By bk 2 of this series the group are all in their early to mid twenties and any YA label can be left far behind.
The story makes the reader feel involved, the dialog is real and the characters make you care. This series is a keeper View all 17 comments. From the reviews I read on amazon I thought this sounded like a sweet YA romance. Makes me so sad: If I could I would! What is he going to New York to do, dressed as a drug dealer? Why would anybody cast Joseph Fiennes for a part that required acting? Sure, Fiennes is perfectly skilled at looking soulful, but anything beyond that -- accent, characterization, etc -- is out of his range.
We cut quickly from the plane to "14 years earlier" where we see Fiennes again, now much younger. We know he's younger because he isn't scarred and he doesn't have a goatee. He also isn't speaking with a thick Cuban accent anymore. He has a strange accent that waffles between British, "American," and "Latino. His friend Javier is trying to convince him that he should enter the drug game to make some real money. But Alan has clearly seen DePalma's Scarface, Blow, and a number of other drug movies and he has more legitimate dreams, starting, apparently, with bedding the wife Gretchen Mol of a New York businessman Ray Liotta.
Alan and the wife, Ella, begin perhaps the most public affair in cinema history.
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They make out down the beach from her husband, they get all kissy at local bars, and then have emotional conversations outside her hotel room. And the husband doesn't find out. But then it's time for the couple leave, but soulful Fiennes cannot let Ella go. We're not really sure why, though. As a character, she's a total cypher. Schrader gives her one or two expositional confessional moments, but that's about it.
So of course the relationship is at least temporarily doomed.
Forever Mine Lyrics
But in Schrader's universe we knew that before Alan and Ella even kissed, because we know that she's Catholic and that guilt and morality will quickly come into play. As with several other Schrader works, religious fervor is the central plot device, which leads to Alan's deformity, Ella's regret, and the film's film act. Beyond the Catholicism, though, there's not much at stake in Forever Mine.
The two leads have minimal chemistry and the film is plagued by constant continuity errors and cliched plotting. I was troubled by the fact that the 14 years between the flashback and the framing device had done nothing to age any of characters. And I was perplexed by the fact that even though Alan's friend Javier starts out as the the man with the connections, he ends up as a glorified servant. I didn't understand why Schrader couldn't be bothered to develop either Ella's character or that of her husband.
And I was just annoyed by Fiennes's inconsistantcy as an actor. Schrader seems to be having fun with his own background and the backgrounds of his actors. There appear to be obvious references to Goodfellas and Taxi Driver, while Fiennes's persona has a strange similarity to Robert DeNiro. And all of the elements seemed to have been in place for a fine film.
This was Schrader's follow-up to the minor masterpiece Affliction and Fiennes's follow-up to Shakespeare in Love. It was also Mol's first starring role after Vanity Fair jumped the gun and made her an "It" Girl shortly before the release of several small parts. But really nothing comes together. Schrader plots an affair without any twists or originality beside the Catholic guilt that have always fueled his violent Graham Greene-esque visions.
The political context that justifies the period setting is hardly worth the effort. The drug subplot goes nowhere. And when Ella sits reading Madame Bovary to a group of senior citizens, the symbolism is just infantile. Alan reminisces an affair he had 14 years earlier while working as a cabana boy at an unnamed opulent beach hotel , where he falls in love with Ella Brice Mol , the beautiful wife of business mogul Mark Brice Liotta.
At first resistant, Ella reciprocates his love, and things seem to go well for some time but eventually Mark finds out after Ella confesses her affair at church. After framing him of drug possession and getting him incarcerated, Mark offers Alan a chance for freedom by simply dropping the affair and never looking for Ella again. Despite this, Alan is undeterred and even mails letters to Ella, including one with a fingerprint in his blood. Mark decides to have Alan shot and buried alive in a construction site.
Though disfigured, Alan survives and goes to Javier's to convalescence and plan his revenge. He murders a Cuban eminent criminal attorney with underworld connections, named Manuel Esquema, whose identity he assumes. Now as Esquema, Alan arrives in Miami to meet with Brice who is in legal troubles. Brice later arranges a meeting over dinner at his place, to which Esquema eagerly goes.