Movie Review: Remember Yesterday

Remember Yesterday is a low-budget film that aims for a twist on a classic formula
by Jeremy Fogelman

Cast: Jana Allen, Marley Aliah, Ron Fallica, Jerry Winsett, Jenique Bennett, Cooper Herrett, Jakob Gruntfest
Rating: ★★

You don’t come across the super-low-budget film that often in the mainstream with all sorts of promotion -- even in the indie film arena, you’re likely to see movies in the hundreds of thousands or a million dollars at least. Making movies is an expensive endeavor, after all, although it’s cheaper now with digital moviemaking. For this movie, longtime character actor and first time director/writer J. R. Rodriguez scraped together $50,000, partially through a crowdfunding campaign, and a lot of friends he’s made along the way. It’s hard to make small budgets seem like big budgets, and this one always feels like a small world.

Remember Yesterday comes from writer/director J. R. Rodriguez and takes place in Wilmington, North Carolina, a well known place for film and television production because of how it looks like any suburban town (it was used for such things as Dawson’s Creek all the way to last year’s Scream so it’s still quite popular in that way). All that aside though, you’d think it was a dying community where barely anybody wants to film anymore from how this movie contextualizes it -- although I understand the limitations based on the scope of their budget.

We follow Jenny (Jana Allen, another character actor who starred in Creepshow just like J. R. Rodriguez) -- she’s that typical sort of character, she runs a small town cafe and has been recently divorced (and the husband is unimportant, we only see him in unflattering moments as an abusive drunken sort, also a typical sort of archetype). And even more typically, she always dreamed of being a big star, more than just on the Wilmington, N.C. stage, even though she killed it when she was younger.

She has a lot of friends in the community, played by many local character actors in varying degrees of that spectrum of “quirky but fun” to “quirky but cringey”. Her life gets upended when her childhood romance John (Adrian Monte, who actually was in an episode of Dawson’s Creek 20 years ago) is now a big time director or something (sadly the movie doesn’t have the budget to really show this off).

© Gravitas Ventures

John is in time to scout for locations, and where better than his hometown where nobody films anymore (I only say this because the film says this to create a bit more drama)? He is helped by his team of two character actors who have some nebulous role on his movie, but the specifics aren’t particularly important.

Instead the important part is how these two will get involved in a classic three act romance structure complete with the exact beats you would expect to see. Will Jenny end up performing in the local show, impressing everyone and be on her path to stardom, and will she and John against all (few) odds end up together? The film isn’t remotely trying to pretend this isn’t that sort of movie, it’s focused on being a sweet ode to that small town romance and that the rest is unnecessary artifice.

Jana Allen in the lead has a sort of warm, engaging presence, but the script doesn’t really give her much to get into for the most part -- it’s a flatly written character, as are most of the characters and the story overall. Some of the actors in the ensemble manage to raise the energy level in that fun way, but some aren’t really engaging with the material in a way that’s as interesting to watch. Still, it’s nice to see a vision come together, especially for such a micro budget movie -- I always admire the attempt, even if it didn’t completely come together for me.

Remember Yesterday has a run time of 1 hour 17 minutes, is not rated, and is available on various streaming services.