From Gus Vant Sant's Restless Today in cinemas there's Restless, the newest movie for people (like me) who live to cry shocking amounts over utterly predictable, if undeniably “sad,” circumstances. It's directed by Gus Van Sant, but I wouldn't call it a Gus Van Sant film: there's not a lot of homoeroticism or super-grainy sunlight or long, stumbling shots leading to bleak minor epiphanies. The screenplay, by Jason Lew, is really the thing here; it feels like a tweenhood favourite novel translated into popular melodrama. I told him that first part at a TIFF party and he said it was the greatest compliment, and then he talked to me really thoughtfully about Raymond Carver (swoooon, no?), all of which makes me wish I could like this movie a great deal more, or that I had seen it when I was younger, which is the same thing. Because I have seen it. So many times. Haven't you? I mean, I'm only mid-twenties and watch maybe slightly more movies, of slightly higher critical quality, than the average person. Yet I've watched: Love Story, Harold and Maude, Here on Earth, Autumn in New York, Sweet November, A Walk to Remember, Love and Other Drugs. And, with Harold and Maude being by miles the most exceptional, they are all, at their young and dying hearts, the same. Of course it's difficult to make an original film about death, it being the ultimate clich, so I'm not here to complain. Instead let me share with you, in point form, everything I have learned about young death from the movies—so you don't have to watch them. 1. Be a girl. Why? Um hi, it's called the weaker sex. Statistics aside, it makes perfect sense that in every film about a beautiful young couple in which one half won't make it to the credits, that half will be female*. Boys don't die because the world needs men. Girls, meanwhile, are obviously never going to be more loved than when they're pretty, thin, more or less virginal, and basically unchallenging. [*There is apparently a film called Dying Young starring Julia Roberts and some guy in which it's the some guy who dies, but conveniently, I haven't seen it.] 2. Be good. I don't know why; ask the Bible, or Billy Joel. What's important is that the general audience will cry far more seriously if they just can't figure out why such a blessed sweet porcelain-faced angel was taken from this earth. Then again, if you're that good, you don't want to make people cry; how lucky you never live to deal with these essential life conundrums! Also, God doesn't want any tramps in heaven, probably. 3. Get cancer, because everyone is afraid of cancer and you don't have to do anything bad (see #2) to get it. Just don't have the kind of cancer that makes you lose hair, swell up everywhere, vomit constantly, or look in any way “gross.” It is permissible to look pale, tragic, and somewhat thinner, but only to emphasize your extraordinary bone structure, the eventual six-feet-under disintegration of which is the real tragedy here. 4. Fall in love with a boy who is nothing like you and knows nothing about you, including the fact that you're like six months from quitting time, even if you live in a very small town and/or you'd think he might notice the constant faraway light in your eyes. The boy should be really good-looking, but not very good, because a) that's your job, and b) if you were put on this planet for one thing, it's to spend your final days teaching some lost-boy asshole what love means instead of, I don't know, going to chemotherapy. 5. Memorize some drippy poetry, or prose about nature, so that whenever it's recited people will remember to cry. 6. Learn how to be an artist from the movie Rent, or at least practice an artistic personality full of unforgettable quirks. With your dubious painting or filmmaking or collaging skills and penchant for breaking into song and/or dance apropos of basically nothing, you, the dying person, will teach people how to live. (Don't worry. No one will stop to think that living lessons from the dying girl are like yoga classes with Stephen Hawking, at all.) 7. When you're basically sleeping on death's door, while still possessed of star-white teeth and hair that shines like a thousand suns orbiting the planet Pantene, nobly push away the boy. He now loves you more than he's ever loved anyone, which isn't saying a lot, but NEVER MIND, and that's why you can't see him anymore. Because he, the non-dying one, might suffer. In his brief absence (you will relent, of course), do not let yourself cry. 8. And then when it really comes down to it, choose an excellent and beautiful song, a song that everyone loves, like by Cat Stevens and Nico, to ruin for everybody forever. The End! __ Sarah Nicole Prickett is the Toronto Standard Style Critic.