“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.”
Flagler English professor published in fiction, non-fiction
Feb 18th
Flagler College adjunct professor of English William Pewitt has recently been published in both Global Politics Magazine and the annual literary journal, Paper Nautilus.
Pewitt’s Global Politics Magazine piece, “Good Luck Versus Worse Luck,” focuses on the U.S. economic situation. The article demonstrates how President Obama’s decisions have improved the economic situation and evaluates what could have been if he had not acted in the ways he did.
“I analyze the statistics that prove how his policies saved us from the abysmal circumstances that could have been,” Pewitt said.
His short story, “Music from a Small Planet,” will be published in Paper Nautilus this spring. The story traces one man’s attempt to understand his wife’s empty-nest-syndrome after their daughter leaves for college.
“The man realizes that-due to his own decisions-he’s pushed both women away from him, and perhaps worse, from each other,” Pewitt explained.
Pewitt currently teaches two creative writing classes at Flagler and received his masters of fine arts in fiction writing from the University of Arizona. Pewitt has published roughly a dozen stories and focuses much of his work on themes of familial responsibility.
Source: Flagler College
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.
