Posts tagged Nicholas Sparks
“Safe Haven” Might Have Started with Gimmicky Ending First
Feb 24th
“Gimmicky Ending First”
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
Safe Haven is from a Nicholas Sparks novel, and for those of you out there who are familiar with his novels and the movies made from his novels, I need to say nothing more.
However, for those of you out there who aren’t familiar with them, here goes.
The movie begins with a young woman played by Julianne Hough running through the rain in Boston and getting onto a bus.
The bus makes a rest stop at a small fishing village in North Carolina, but the woman doesn’t get back onto the bus.
She gets a job as a waitress at Ivan’s Fish Shack, and she finds a place to stay, a small cabin isolated in the woods that needs quite a bit of fixing up.
One day a young woman named Jo stops by and says that she also lives in the woods, because she is rustically inclined.
Then we see a policeman back in Boston going through the police work as he tries to track the first young woman down, who is named Katie.
Meanwhile, Katie buys some yellow paint to paint her kitchen floor in the general store, where she meets Alex, a young widower with two children, who is played by Josh Duhamel.
Katie and Alex begin to develop a romantic relationship, and Katie tells him, “I was just looking for a change, and I’ve always wanted to live in a small town.”
In the meantime, you might think that the movie contains a lot of unnecessary scenes, but we also get some flashbacks that begin to explain the situation that caused Katie to run away in the rain in Boston, which point to her as having been responsible for having done something awful.
Of course, there are also scenes that are not too subtle of Katie and Alex falling in love, but she keeps whatever it was she did back in Boston a secret from him.
And then as the audience learns the secret through flashbacks and scenes of the policeman tracking Katie down, you might even begin to think that the backstory is completely gratuitous to the love story going on between Katie and Alex.
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.
Safe Haven ends, however, as if the writer thought up a gimmicky ending first and then wrote the story second.
I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”
Safe Haven – Movie Trailer
Feb 17th
An affirming and suspenseful story about a young woman’s struggle to love again, Safe Haven is based on the novel from Nicholas Sparks, the best-selling author behind the hit films The Notebook and Dear John. When a mysterious young woman arrives in a small North Carolina town, her reluctance to join the tight knit community raises questions about her past. Slowly, she begins putting down roots, and gains the courage to start a relationship with Alex, a widowed store owner with two young children. But dark secrets intrude on her new life with such terror that she is forced to rediscover the meaning of sacrifice and rely on the power of love in this deeply moving romantic thriller.
“Nights in Rodanthe” What’s the Point?
Oct 2nd
What’s the Point?
“Hotshots” looks at a movie!
NIGHTS 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.”
