For the first 15 minutes or so of the movie, I pretended to not pay attention. Come on, the film starred Miley Cyrus, for God's sake. No self-respecting man would be caught dead watching it, right? But, soon enough, I was hanging on every word.
The plot had everything:
- First, we've got a rebellious teen-age daughter (Ronnie -- short for Veronica), forced to spend the summer after her senior year in high school with her dying father in a remote Georgia beach town.
- To further complicate things, Ronnie's parents are divorced and she's very angry with her father for abandoning her. Remember Richard Gere telling Julia Roberts during the bathtub scene in "Pretty Woman" how all those years of therapy had shown him that he was "very angry" with his father? Well, Ronnie knows exactly how he feels.
- For comic relief (and tears at the end, of course), there's also a cute little brother who's along for the summer.
- And how perfect is it that the little Georgia town is home to an absolute dreamboat of a guy (6' 4", blond hair, chiseled body, beach volleyball player, volunteer at the local aquarium) who is filthy rich and immediately falls for Ronnie?
- In case this all isn't enough, did I mention that the cute guy had an older brother who was killed in a car accident one year earlier when the two of them were playing "Mercy" in the back seat of the car and distracted their mother, who then got in a wreck?
- One more thing -- Ronnie's been accepted to Juilliard but she's refusing to even play the piano as a final act of defiance towards her musician father.