What’s the Point?

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Nights in Rodanthe - Movie PosterNIGHTS IN RODANTHE is the latest film to be made from a novel by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks, and if the films are true to his novels, then I would have to say that Sparks has a problem with endings.

The film doesn’t have a problem with casting, as once again Richard Gere is teamed with Diane Lane in a love story.

However, you have heard of a “meet cute”? Their characters “meet long.”

Rodanthe is a little village on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the film begins with Adrienne Willis getting ready to leave her home and go to Rodanthe for a weekend in order to take care of her best friend’s home, which is a bed-and-breakfast smack-dab on the beach.

But when her estranged husband arrives to pick up their two teenage children, he surprises and shocks Adrienne by saying, “I want to come home.”

Meanwhile, we see Dr. Paul Flanner finish selling his house in Raleigh and traveling to Rodanthe for the weekend, and we see how just getting there is an adventure.

Paul checks in, saying he might stay as long as four nights, and because he is the only guest, he takes his food from the dining room into the kitchen to eat with Adrienne, saying that he doesn’t want to eat alone.

Well, we can all see where this is heading, can’t we? And when a storm hits and they secure the house against it together, they are drawn toward each other even more.

Now, there is a back story for Paul, and he is in Rodanthe for more than just a weekend vacation, but this serves only to slow down the inevitable ending, right?

Wrong! The back story creates the ending, which is completely unexpected and not true to everything that comes before it. It is not so much a cheap ending as it is a “cheat” ending.

The film is manipulative, because it wants to create a specified feeling in the audience, but it goes on much too long and has that cheat ending.

In fact, you could even say that it is too schmaltzy and has an unsatisfactory ending, but all in all, we have to ask ourselves, what is the point of movies and stories like this?

NIGHTS IN RODANTHE left me asking “What’s the point?”

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”