I bought ROW YOUR BOAT on DVD at my local Just-A-Buck dollar store almost a year ago and it sat on the shelf unplayed till this past weekend. I had picked it up mainly for my wife, who still carries the torch from her teenage crush on Jon Bon Jovi. I had never seen Jon in an acting role before, but I'll admit that I was pleasantly surprised by his abilities. (However, I have always HATED his fluff-rock band, and I suppose I always will!) Jon stars here as an ex-con who's determined to walk the straight and narrow path after his parole. When we first meet "Jamie" (Jon), he's spending his nights at flophouse hotels or on the streets of Manhattan and trying to avoid the temptation to go back to work for his brother (a genuinely slimy William Forsythe), a small time hoodlum who was the cause of Jon's imprisonment in the first place. Jamie takes a low paying job as an "enumerator" for the US Census Division, which leads to many funny scenes as he trots around bad New York neighborhoods trying to count the various occupants. His census job brings him into contact with a lovely but unhappy Chinese woman (Bai Ling), who is basically a "trophy wife" for a much older Chinese businessman. He offers to give her English lessons and they begin a wobbly but romantic relationship, while his brother's "business" begins to tempt him back into the fold. I'm not going to proclaim this is a great movie but I did enjoy its combination of romantic comedy and crime drama, and the ending is not the one that I'd expected/hoped for. Add in some cool shot-on-location scenes from the gritty side of New York City and you have a cool little film that was definitely worth the dollar I paid for it, which is not something I can say about most of the other "Dollar Store DVDs" in my collection.
Review of Row Your Boat
