Romance novelist Nicholas Sparks is probably a very nice guy, but frankly, I think his brain is filled with mush. The movies made from his novels are like Tantric sex. They try to prolong the enjoyment, but end up prolonging the agony. About an hour into every film made from one of his books, you get the feeling that it should be drawing to a conclusion. Alas, these movies just keep going on.
"The Notebook," "A Walk To Remember," "Nights In Rodanthe" and "Message In A Bottle" are virtually interchangeable. Romance is promised and interrupted, and is then concluded in a tidy little package.
Perhaps on the page, there's a certain pleasure of the imagination generated when reading Sparks' works. On the screen, there's nothing left to the imagination. The Atlantic Ocean is wet and salty. Can't alter that.
You can see that the protagonists are young and goony and attractive. Alas, they have to talk. These films are filled with words so empty, so utterly vacuous, that you're forgiven for wanting to scream that you give up. Please, you beg, just end the ordeal.
The latest Sparksian ode to coitus interruptus is called "Dear John." The central character is a young man named John who will get an actual dear John letter, one of those painful missives sent by stateside women to a loved one overseas who is serving his country. The heartbreak doesn't quite register, because throughout the movie so many letters are read in so weak a manner that you're forgiven for not paying attention to the one that counts the most.
Channing Tatum is the beefcake who plays John, a working-class stiff and Green Beret with a chip on his shoulder. Amanda Seyfried is Savannah, a doe-eyed girl whose family has money.
They both were obviously hired for their pouty lips and not their protean speaking voices. Neither would be believable as anything other than two young adults working at the local malt shop.
Here's how it plays out. John is a loner surfing off the coast of South Carolina. Savannah drops her purse in the water, and John rescues the drowning purse. As she will tell us often, her life is in there. The two cuties hit it off and fall in love, but John's career as a member of the Special Forces compels him to go to an unnamed place to fight an unnamed enemy. Savannah writes to him and he writes back, ad infinitum. There are a lot of musical lulls during which the sappy letters are poorly read.
Then, 9/11 happens. John, who is just about to be released from the military, decides to stay in the fold. Savannah, who loves horses, also loves a guy dying of cancer. He's played by Henry Thomas. Cue the violins.
She sends John his dear John letter and his heart is broken, although the expression on his face is enigmatic. The character is so stoic, and Tatum is such a lead weight, that it's hard to tell that he's truly sad. We actually do know that he's unhappy because he burns her letters.
OK, are you still with me? Through all of this, we have met John's odd duck of a father. He's a quiet man who only comes to life when he talks about his rare coin collection. He also makes lasagna every Sunday and meat loaf every Saturday. Always. Seems he might be autistic. This is supposed to make the audience feel all warm and runny.
Something happens to the old guy, who is played as well as humanly possible by Richard Jenkins. The talented Jenkins has to mostly act against the not-as-talented beefcake Tatum, and it's not a fair fight.
John has to return home. Gee, do you think he'll visit Savannah? Clearly, director Lasse Hallstrom didn't offer any directing hints to any member of his cast, and Tatum and Seyfried could have used a lot of help.
Jamie Linden wrote the screenplay, which is his second feature. His first was the unmemorable "We Are Marshall," which he produced.
The film -- taking its cues from, I'm assuming, the book -- has some weird moments, as when Savannah throws a grand barbecue for John so that her extended family can meet him. Why weird? The party occurs a few days after the jetliners took down the World Trade Center. See. Strange.
At about 90 minutes in, "Dear John" really feels as if it's over. It isn't. There are some more lethargic conversations between John and Savannah, and a predictable ending that brings you joy, but only because you can go home.
Ah, gay Paree. The city of lights, the city of love, the city of a bald, obese John Travolta hamming it up as if his very life depended on it.
The movie is called "From Paris With Love." Look, I revel in Paris as much as I delight in good espionage thrillers, but this movie is nothing but a pile of hate directed at its audience. It's convoluted beyond all common sense, perhaps even common decency.
What's especially disappointing to me is that it comes from the filmmaking team led by producer-writer-director Luc Beeson, a cinema stylist whose name promises something unique, or at the very least, something glossy and gorgeous at which to look. They don't call them motion pictures for nothing. Visually, Beeson always has delirious ideas that scream to pop out of his head. Without him, you wouldn't have had "Subway," "The Fifth Element," "Taken," "La Femme Nikita," or "The Transporter," an action movie I consider superb.
In the bullet-riddled "From Paris With Love," Travolta is a tightly wound CIA spy who loves guns, but loathes most people, especially women and anyone who isn't white. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is an erudite, buttoned-down, youngish aide to the U.S. ambassador to France. But what he really wants to be is a CIA agent. These two mismatched men are thrown together for the purpose of combating Middle East terrorists and Asian drug lords. It's not a match made in movie heaven. It seems that the people of Paris are in danger. Surprisingly, there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of computer-generated special effects. Unfortunately, they look phony.
Travolta and Rhys-Meyers never develop any chemistry, which hampers the film's believability. Travolta overacts to the point of coming across as completely insane. Rhys-Meyers seems to be in a continual state of distraction. Beeson produced, and wrote the original story. Pierre Morel directed, without much suspense, from a blood-soaked screenplay from Adi Hasak.
There's an inside joke, spoken by Travolta, about a certain special hamburger talked about in "Pulp Fiction." Why Beeson and company wanted to draw attention to a much better movie is anybody's guess.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | February 9, 2010 |