Posts Tagged ‘Nicholas Sparks’

RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR FEBRUARY 5 WITH BEVERLY THOMSON.

Screen Shot 2016-02-09 at 12.45.13 PMRichard and “Canada AM” host Beverly Thomson review the screwball comedy of “Hail, Caesar!,” the thrills of “Mojave,” the tearjerking of “The Choice” and the heartwarming of “The Lady in the Van.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

THE CHOICE: 1 HEART-SHAPED STAR. “as affecting as a Canadian Tire commercial.”

Screen Shot 2016-02-01 at 3.14.42 PMTravis Parker (Benjamin Walker), the male lead of the new Nicholas Sparks tearjerker “The Choice,” only has one deck chair outside his North Carolina

Home. “A man with only one chair outside his house,” we’re told, “wants to be alone,” but does he really? This is a King of Romance® Nicholas Sparks, the man with a romantic plan so the whole movie is basically a countdown to Travis and his beautiful new neighbour, medical student Gabby (Teresa Palmer) have movie sex and experience a trademarked Sparksian tragedy.

Travis is a good ol’ boy who’s used to getting what he wants from women without ever falling in love. A combination of good looks and Southern charm—although some might call it Southern smarm—means that he is rarely without company. His on-and-off girlfriend Monica (Alexandra Daddario) boomerangs in-and-out of his life but mostly he goes it alone… that is until Gabby moves in next door. She’s cramming for her medical boards while working at the local hospital side-by-side her fiancée Ryan (Tom Welling) and future father-in-law (Brett Rice). She calls Travis a walking cautionary tale and has no interest but he is smitten and everyone around them thinks they have great chemistry.

“Are you two..?” asks Travis’s father Dr. Shep (Tom Wilkinson).

“Hell no!” drawls Travis.

“Gross!” spits Gabby.

Their lips say no, but their eyes say yes. When will they kiss? When will they walk in the rain? When will the inevitable tragedy that strengthens their love happen?

“The Choice” is all about decisions, the little determinations you make along the way that may have long-term effects on your life. I’m here to help you decide if buying a ticket for “The Choice” will have any effect, good or bad, on you.

If you know Nicholas Sparks movies like “The Notebook,” “The Last Song” or “Dear John,” you already know what to expect. There will be “witty” repartee that, I guess, is what passes for foreplay in the Sparks universe. The story will be tinged with tragedy and the main couple will hate one another at first. Someone will offer up old timey romantic advice like, “If you see a man sleeping on the cold floor there must be a beautiful woman nearby” and at some point something vaguely supernatural will happen. It’s a formula geared to make you well up and this movie has every Sparksism in spades. In truth, however, it is about as affecting as a Canadian Tire commercial.

If you enjoy being manipulated and cry easily you make (or may not) enjoy the movie. That choice is yours.

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY APRIL 10, 2015.

Screen Shot 2015-04-10 at 2.20.43 PMRichard’s CP24 reviews for “The Longest Ride,” “Danny Collins,” “The Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Cut Bank.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S “CANADA AM” REVIEWS FOR APRIL 10 WITH MARCI IEN.

Screen Shot 2015-04-10 at 10.16.36 AMRichard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “The Longest Ride,” “Danny Collins,” “The Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Cut Bank.”

Watch the whole thing HERE!

METRO CANADA: Nicholas Sparks, cashing in on our lust for love

Screen Shot 2015-04-09 at 12.13.16 PMBy Richard Crouse – Metro In Focus

Novelist Nicholas Sparks is the current king of romance writers. His flowery prose even gives Harlequin a run for their money in the three-hanky tearjerker department. Who else could write a line like, “Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it,” with a straight face?

He is to romance writing what Buckley’s cough syrup is to a tickly throat. They both get the job done, but leave a sickly sweet aftertaste.

His best-known novel adaptation is The Notebook, a cross-generational love story that spent over a year as a New York Times hardcover top seller. Inspired by the story of his wife’s grandparent’s sixty-year marriage, the novel became a 2004 movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The tale of love and Alzheimer’s is emotionally manipulative—writer Gary Panton called this passionate weepie “mushier than a mushed-up bowl of mushy peas that’s just been mushed in an industrial-strength mushifier”—but opening weekend it surfed a wave of tears to the box office top five.

Sparks, a former pharmaceutical salesman writes tales of love and loss, of mighty obstacles overcome and lip-locks galore, which he defines as “dramatic epic love stories” along the lines of “Eric Segal’s Love Story or The Bridges of Madison County… But you can even go all the way back. You had Hemingway write A Farewell to Arms, the movies of the forties—Casablanca, From Here to Eternity—Shakespeare, and that’s the genre I work in.”

He caught some flack for comparing himself to Shakespeare—one writer said, “If Sparks is like Shakespeare, then a housepainter is like Picasso.”—but the fact remains that his unconventional love stories, his parcels of passion, have made his name synonymous with the romance genre.

This weekend prepare for another flurry of Sparkisms—tearstained romantic letters, lines like, “Love requires sacrifice but it’s worth it,” and passionate make-out sessions—as The Longest Ride hits the big screen.

This time around “Two stories separated by time, connected by fate,” get Sparksified as the lives of a young couple, played by Scott “Clint’s son” Eastwood and Britt Robertson and older love birds Alan Alda and Oona Chaplin, interlace. “I wish I could tell you it’s all happily ever after,” says Alda’s character, “not everybody gets that.”

Expect unexpected poignancy.

Critics haven’t always warmed to Sparks’s stories on film—Safe Haven with Julianne Hough as “a young woman’s struggle to love again” has a paltry 12% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes while The Best of Me starring Michelle Monaghan and James Marsden as high school sweethearts reunited after two decades sits at a miserable 8% rating—but audiences can’t seem to get enough of his weepy tales of unrequited love, lost love, mature love and love in a time of trouble. Ten of his books have already been adapted for the movies, with one more, The Choice, scheduled for 2016.

His style of romance has caught on, but don’t call him a romance writer. “I write dramatic fiction. If you go into a further subgenre, it would be a love story, but it has its roots in the Greek tragedies. This genre evolved through Shakespeare. He did Romeo and Juliet. Hemingway did A Farewell to Arms. I do this currently today.”

THE LONGEST RIDE: 2 STARS. “mess with the bull and you will get the horn.”

Screen Shot 2015-04-09 at 12.11.58 PMThe flowery prose of Nicholas Sparks has singlehandedly kept Kleenex in business since “The Notebook” made the former pharmaceutical salesman the King of the Weepie. The latest big-screen Sparksisms—tearstained romantic letters, lines like, “Love requires sacrifice… always,” and passionate make-out sessions—come in the form of “The Longest Ride,” an intergenerational romance starring Clint-spawn Scott Eastwood, Britt Robertson, Oona Chaplin and Alan Alda.

This time around Sparks tells of “Two stories separated by time, connected by fate.”

The first couple is twenty-something sorority sister Sophia Danko (Robertson) an art major—“I love art,” she gushes, “I love everything about it.”—lured to the rodeo by her housemate with the promise of “the hottest guys you’ve ever seen.” There she lays eyes on a cowboy named Luke (Eastwood)—aren’t all cowboys named Luke?—a bull rider trying to make a comeback after almost being killed the last time he competed. They lock eyes and you know it won’t be long before they’re line dancing off to happily-ever-after land. “Before I met you the closest I got to cattle was steak,” she coos.

Fate brings them in contact with ninety-year-old widower Ira Levinson (Alda). Driving home from a date the newly besotted couple spots a nasty car crash on a remote road. They rescue Ira, but the accident has left him near death. The only thing that keeps him going is the urging of his late wife Ruth (Chaplin).

That’s right, dead Ruth gets Sparksified, brought back to life as an ephemeral spirit through the reading of old letters (and sepia toned flashbacks) that recount their life and the ups and downs of marriage.

Brought together by circumstance, the couple’s lives mix and match, as the stories—one existing in memory, the other at the rodeo—converge and they learn about sacrifice, bull ridin’ and the power of love to overcome the challenges life throws in the way of romance.

“The Longest Ride” made me cry, but not in the way Nicholas Sparks intended.

The movie takes place in a world where ranch hands and Warhols co-exist and couples are expected to walk off into the sunset hand in hand. In other words it’s Über Harlequin; an alternate universe romance where two tangentially related stories can be fused together by tears and warm group hugs.

There are parallels between the tales—both men are North Carolina “country bumpkins” who fall for women from out of state, both couples take pictures in photo booths, both have “I don’t know how to make this work” moments and Sophia is about to go to New York to intern at a gallery while Ira left town to go to war—but mostly the stories are tied together by an abundance of Sparksian clichés. There’s the “elevated kiss”—most famously used in “The Notebook” when Ryan Gosling hoisted Rachel McAdams over his head and locked lips—which is overused here as are the obligatory “lake scene,” longing glances and reliance on epistolary to tell the story.

Ira’s letters to Ruth make up the backbone of the romance, but they don’t exactly make sense. To push the story forward they are written in a weird stilted way—“I took over my dad’s booming business while you taught at school”—that appears to be telling Ruth a story she was already familiar with, you know, having lived it and all. It’s a strange way to provide exposition and makes the movie narration heavy.

Stranger still are some of director George Tillman Jr.’s choices. The cross cutting between love making and a bull riding lesson may be the least subtle thing ever and couldn’t feel any less romantic. Add to that one of the worst war scenes in recent memory, close-ups of rage-a-holic bulls and you walk away not feeling filled with romance, but as though you have messed with the bull and gotten the horn.

 

THE LAST SONG: 2 STARS

the_last_song02“The Last Song” has all the trademarks of a Nicholas Sparks romance. There’s a love story between rich and poor, disease, divorce, unopened letters and a character who’s just “trying to feel something again.” And it has Miley Cyrus sans her blonde Hannah Montana wig. This time out she’s an angry musical prodigy spending a summer vacation with her father, a man she barely knows.

Cyrus is Ronnie Miller, a troubled teen—“Her grades are in the toilet and she doesn’t have a friend without a pierced something,” says her mother—sent to stay with her estranged father for the summer in a small Southern beach town. She’s angry at her dad, and despite being a gifted pianist and a earning a scholarship to Julliard, she hasn’t played the piano for ages. She mopes around the small town until she meets Will, a chiseled volleyball player who helps her rescue a nest of sea turtle eggs. (I’m not kidding.) Through wildlife and mud fights they form an on-again-off-again relationship despite their differences. Enter into the mix a terminal illness, a burned church and a jealous ex and you have a story worthy of the Nicholas Sparks Story Generator™.

“The Last Song” features Miley Cyrus in the kind of role Kristen Stewart excels in. The brooding, moody teenager act that Stewart has down pat doesn’t come as easily to Cyrus who pitches her performance somewhere between an episode of “Hannah Montana” and a TV disease-of-the-week movie. Given the pre-hype for the film I assumed this would be her adult debut, but given the tone of her performance the transition from child star to grown-up actress continues at a glacial pace. She has several emotional scenes here, and sheds a tear or two, but mostly her performance relies on tricks learned on the Disney stage—eye rolling, running her hands through her hair and flashing her toothy smile. She has a movie star’s charisma and warmth, but not the acting chops.

Greg Kinnear is there for support, but even he looks mildly bewildered at the Sparkisms in the script. It’s a mixed bag of every romance cliché known to man, except, the Fabulous Gay Confidant™. In his / her place is the wise little brother played by Bobby Coleman.

But, having said all that, a movie like “The Last Song” isn’t about the plot or the acting or the clichés. It’s like an Elvis movie. It’s about the phenomenon that is Miley. Disney is very carefully easing her from TV star to movie star, and if the projects don’t exactly radiate an adult sensibility, who cares? They are counting on the long term success. There is plenty of time for her to mature along with her fans, who, I’m sure, Disney hopes are in the Miley game for the long term.

Making silver screen Sparks By Richard Crouse METRO CANADA April 18, 2012

2004-the-notebook-003The word romance conjures up different ideas for different people. Some folks, when they muse about love, create pictures of Fabio locked in an embrace with a raven-haired beauty in their mind’s eye. Others imagine John Cusack, boom-box raised above his head, lurking outside his beloved’s bedroom window.

When Nicholas Sparks thinks about amour, however, I imagine dollar signs come to mind. He is the premier romance writer of his generation, single handedly giving Harlequin a run in the tearjerker department. Who else could write a line like, “Love is like the wind, you can’t see it but you can feel it,” with a straight face?

The flowery pen behind novels and screenplays like The Notebook, Dear John and Nights in Rodanthe returns with this weekend’s parcel of passion, The Lucky One, a story of good luck charms and true love.

He writes tales of love and loss, of mighty obstacles overcome and lip-locks galore, which he defines as “dramatic epic love stories” along the lines of “Eric Segal’s Love Story or The Bridges of Madison County… But you can even go all the way back. You had Hemingway write A Farewell to Arms, the movies of the forties—Casablanca, From Here to Eternity—Shakespeare, and that’s the genre I work in.”

He caught some flack for comparing himself to Shakespeare—one writer said, “If Sparks is like Shakespeare, then a housepainter is like Picasso.”—but the fact remains that his unconventional love stories have made his name synonymous with the romance genre.

Sitting at the top of the list is The Notebook, which made stars of Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gostling. Marie Claire magazine says, “this movie is packed with heart-flutteringly incredible loves scenes… that it’s impossible to choose just one,” but Noah and Alley’s boat ride on the lake surrounded by swans is generally considered to be the most memorable moment in a movie that is essentially just one long love scene.

Peter Travers called Message in a Bottle “a hazard to all those allergic to ponderous chick flicks,” but the movie features great romantic chemistry between Kevin Costner, Robin Wright Penn and a scene stealing performance from Paul Newman.

Even Miley Cyrus has been Sparksified.  She chose the author to pen The Last Song, her fist post Hannah Montana movie, because she was a huge fan of his other weepie A Walk to Remember.

Nicholas Sparks reigns supreme for Hollywood tear-jerkers In Focus by Richard Crouse FOR METRO CANADA February 05, 2010

5263f00f32c9856a28189863a711d35eae32381cf16da6000fab4340There are two kinds of romance movies. There’s the standard rom com—unlikely couple meets, overcomes obstacle, gets together, breaks up, realizes they are perfect for one another, gets back together, roll credits—and then there’s the tearful romance that doesn’t work out happily-ever-after. Of the latter category author Nicholas Sparks is the undisputed king of the three-hanky drama.

The former pharmaceutical salesman has wracked up an impressive, if tearstained, list of 14 best sellers including The Lucky One and Dear John, which comes to the big screen this weekend starring the sad-eyed Amanda Seyfried.

His best known work is The Notebook, a cross-generational love story that spent over a year as a New York Times hardcover top seller. Inspired by the story of his wife’s grandparents sixty year marriage, the novel became a 2004 movie starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The tale of love and Alzheimer’s is emotionally manipulative—writer Gary Panton called this passionate tearjerker “mushier than a mushed-up bowl of mushy peas that’s just been mushed in an industrial-strength mushifier”—but opening weekend  it surfed a wave of tears to the box office top five.

Less seen was Nights in Rodanthe, a gusher about a doctor who courts an unhappily married woman. Summed up as “the cinematic equivalent of a Harlequin novel with a pack of tissues shoved into the back cover,” the movie reunited Diane Lane and Richard Gere after joint appearances in The Cotton Club and Unfaithful.

Critics haven’t warmed to Sparks’s stories on film— A Walk to Remember only has a 27% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes—but audiences can’t seem to get enough of his weepy tales of unrequited love, lost love, mature love and love in a time of trouble. Four of his books have already been adapted for the movies, two more are being released this year and there is one each scheduled for 2011 and 2012.

How hot he is in Hollywood? Disney hired him to write The Last Song screenplay for their biggest star Miley Cyrus.

His style of romance has caught on, but don’t call him a romance writer. “I write dramatic fiction. If you go into a further subgenre, it would be a love story, but it has its roots in the Greek tragedies. This genre evolved through Shakespeare. He did Romeo and Juliet. Hemingway did A Farewell to Arms. I do this currently today.”