Charlie St. Cloud is blessed: Not only does he have a fantastic name (just screaming for a Hollywood treatment, in fact), he's also young, incredibly cute, and has just got a ticket to Stanford via a boating scholarship. For all that, he's humble and sincere, hailing from a working-class background and double-shift-pulling parents.
Then, abruptly, Charlie's life literally swerves out of lane when a car accident (he was driving) kills his 11-year old brother Sam but leaves Charlie miraculously intact. What now for the golden boy?
Thus begins the movie "Charlie St. Cloud" (released in Japan as "Kimi ga Kureta Mirai"), based on Ben Sherwood's novel "The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud" and starring Zac Efron. As the title suggests, the story is pretty obsessively focused on Charlie, so much that it practically invites you to live through him — his perfectly toned physique, his clear-eyed vision, the untainted purity of his heart and other indicative traits that show Sherwood is either really good at this game or harbors a massive crush on his own creation. Probably a bit of both.