For some reason I thought there had been more Nicholas Sparks adaptations since 2004’s The Notebook. However, there have only been three — Nights in Rodanthe with Richard Gere and Diane Lane, Dear John with Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried and The Last Song with lovebirds Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth. Before that there was A Message in a Bottle with Kevin Costner, Robin Wright and Paul Newman and A Walk to Remember with Mandy Moore.
Come to think of it, tonight, when I see The Lucky One, it won’t only be my first Sparks adaptation since The Notebook, it will be my second Sparks adaptation altogether.
The only reason I mention this is because I had such a strong, negative reaction to The Notebook it has taken me this long to gather my composure to the point I felt I could give another Sparks adaptation a shot. That film drained me to such an extent I look at similarly themed films and the way they’re marketed makes me think they’re Sparks adaptations. Films such as Charlie St. Cloud and The Vow I could have sworn were based on a Sparks novel based on appearances. Before writing this post if you had asked I would have assumed The Vow was one for sure. Even One Day felt like a Sparks adaptation, particularly in the way it ended.
This isn’t USA Today in which he claimed he had no contemporaries and his work stands above the likes of Shakespeare and Jane Austen and while addressing Hemingway he says, “A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Good stuff. That’s what I write.” He then referred to Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” calling it, “Horrible… This is probably the most pulpy, overwrought, melodramatic cowboy vs. Indians story ever written.”
To be fair, I’ve never read a Sparks novel so I can only judge based on the one film I’ve seen and the plots for the others, but his work doesn’t improve in my eyes when he tells USA Today, “There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.” Maybe he’s right. After all, it’s not as if Charlie St. Cloud or One Day were based on novels…
So why go see The Lucky One with such an obviously negative bias when it comes to Sparks’s sappy, overbearing, melodramatic work? For starters, I like to review two movies a week if at all possible and with this and a screening of Think Like a Man on Wednesday it’s going to be one of the more interesting weeks of reviews for myself, though I can pretty much guarantee Think Like a Man is going to be a little closer to my tastes, even if it is just another generic, ensemble rom-com… Kevin Hart sort of won me over at the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game this year.
And who knows, maybe The Lucky One will surprise me. The plot, however, doesn’t exactly give me much hope as it appears to be just as unbelievable as every other Sparks story:
U.S. Marine Sergeant Logan Thibault (Zac Efron) returns from his third tour of duty in Iraq, with the one thing he credits with keeping him alive-a photograph he found of a woman he doesn’t even know. Learning her name is Beth (Taylor Schilling) and where she lives, he shows up at her door, and ends up taking a job at her family-run local kennel. Despite her initial mistrust and the complications in her life, a romance develops between them, giving Logan hope that Beth could be much more than his good luck charm.
Despite the story, the importance is in the believability of the situation. The adaptation was written by Will Fetters (Remember Me) and the film is directed by Scott Hicks (Shine) and it comes down to whether or not they’ll present a story I’m able to accept, or if all nuance will be sucked out of Beth and Logan’s implausible encounter that it depends purely on the audience’s belief in the one true love. It’s easier to believe in true love if you believe in the characters more than longing glances, beautiful cinematography (such as the shot at the lede of this post) and raucous sex, all things The Notebook had in spades, but that was about it.
I found it interesting going back and reading my review of The Notebook from 2004. I was extremely green when it came to film reviewing back then and didn’t give many examples as to why the film didn’t work for me. It has been so long since I’ve seen it, all I can remember is how it made me feel, which was worn out. It tried so hard to be romantic, painting a picture of the most impossible love under the most extraordinary circumstances none of it felt real as much as it felt pained in its efforts to tug at your emotions through kisses in the rain and kitchen counter sex.
A good comparison would be to call it the romance equivalent to an action movie such as last weekend’s The Raid: Redemption. All action, no story, which is why I had a hard time giving even The Notebook a bad review. It does what it does and does it well, both Lockout and The Notebook got a “C-” from me, a fair grade on both counts as far as I’m concerned. Both have poorly executed stories and one simply has a lot of killing and the other a lot of kissing.
I am firmly willing to admit my bias before going in to The Lucky One, but I felt revealing it here would make watching it and writing my review a bit more interesting. My review of The Notebook came when I had only been attempting to review movies for a year and a lot has changed in terms of the way I view movies and appreciate them. Maybe eight years is enough time for me to return to the stories of Nicholas Sparks. As much as I doubt it, I’m going to give it a shot.
If you’re interested, here’s trailer for The Lucky One followed by a “How to Write a Nicholas Sparks Movie” infographic Cracked.com did back in 2010 at the same time Sparks came out with those quotes in USA Today. The last bit about the poster makes me laugh, just click here to see what I’m talking about.
