2025 Movie #9 | Memory Lane / De Teruggreis (2024)

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So I went to the Oostende Film Festival from Monday to Tuesday along with a friend to go see 5 movies. I mostly went for the trip itself and less for the actual movies as there is just too much drama generally in the movie selection of these festivals. Out of the 5 movies I only fully watched 3 of them with 2 where I kind of fell asleep and didn't see the movie to make a review on it. The first one we saw was a dutch movie called Memory Lane which is actually a better title than what it's called in Dutch which is De Terugreis.It's a comedy Drama which tends to be a genre that I generally enjoy a lot and mainly just hoped for an ok movie without having high expectations or knowing anything about it.

Memory Lane (6.8/10)

Spoiler-Free Movie Plot:

"A bitter-aged man reluctantly drives to Spain to pay a last visit to a dying friend, along with his wife who's suffering from dementia. But as their journey unfolds, he slowly starts to soften up and rediscovers the meaning of love.."

So the movie allready played ar 14:15 and mostly elderly people were in the audience which I would say is the main target for this movie as it's most relatable to them. This also was quite clear in the reactions of the crowd as they all found many parts of it funny while to me all these jokes were just really poor and extremely predictable where you could see it coming from miles ahead. 2 of the instances that come to mind are the couple seeing a cop car with a sirene behind them thinking it was them they were after just too see them pass. Another one was where a younghster came up to their car with the main character giving off to them as if they were scum just to end with the younghster saying he forgot his wallet. In the entire movie there was just 1 joke that made me laugh while there was no reaction from all the others.

In essence it's a road movie and the first 2/3 of it was just very straightforward and rather weak making me wonder if something would come that made this movie better which actually happened at the right time and that really lifted up my overall appreciation and score of it a lot.

Overall I would say that this movie is mainly for an older target audience and the much better last part of the film only partially makes up for the rather uninspired first part.I'm still glad that I watched it though and I score it a 6.8/10 mostly based on the comparison with the other movies I watched so far.

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