"How do you want me to look at you?"Director Lasse Hallstrom has certainly found his Hollywood niche, and Dear John does nothing to deviate from it, and the movie is mostly inoffensive and harmless. As expected from Hallstrom, it is polished, emotionally restrained and touches on issues (autism, war, terminal disease) without ever addressing them enough to have any real impact - even the 9/11 card is unforced but rather casually played. As leads, Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum are more convincing in the first half of the movie - Seyfried's smile can light up the whole world, and Tatum just about copes with this dramatically limited role. The film is doggedly unsurprising to the end in every respect, and it is thankfully nowhere near as ghastly the same author's The Notebook. Even when a succession of life-bombs explode the couple's romantic trajectory, and a faint glimmer of hope for the male population having some emotional self-awareness is shown in the penultimate scene, you just know how it will all end, i.e. without a shred of realism.
No comments:
Post a Comment