Don't Believe the Hype

As Good As It Gets

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Well if you are watching it with your girlfriend or boyfriend, that heart breaking end will bring you more close and if you are watching it alone, may be it will break you more.

Nicholas Sparks hit paydirt when The Notebook came out. Everything coalesced perfectly with the story and actors who portrayed the characters in the movie. The Notebook elevated Sparks to another level as a writer.Since then, Sparks has tried to recapture the magic of The Notebook by remixing the story and trying to retell it over and over with different twists at the end. That's one reason I've lost respect for Nicholas Sparks as a writer. He's basically rehashing the same ideas in different order.The Best of Me is basically a 90-minute Super Bowl ad for Budweiser. The product placement is so intentionally that it's actually distracting. There must have been 10 different scenes with Bud placed 'just so' in order for the viewing audience to see the label.James Marsden (Dawson) was great in The Notebook, and he's great in this movie. He and Michelle Monaghan are really the only thing that makes this movie bearable. Their character development was solid, but the rest of the characters including Tuck, their elderly BFF who for some reason was friends with both characters, and Monaghan's on-screen husband was weak.As a side note, the younger actor who played Dawson and James Marsden look NOTHING like each other. It was pretty distracting to follow the story with two guys playing the same character who didn't even 'kind of' look the same.We never really know why Dawson's dad is such a jerk. They look nothing like each other, and Dawson's dad looks to be about the same age. They hate each other through forced tension that eventually leads to an unbelievable climax at the end where Dawson gets shot by his dad from about 100 yards away for no good reason. I don't know why any dad would do what is portrayed in this movie.I supposed the need to have something dramatic was the impetus for the scene where Dawson had to die some terrible death, but it just wasn't believable. Perhaps Sparks couldn't gone and pulled some other scene from The Notebook and rehashed that instead.Finally, the lighting and cinematography of this film was off. It was too bright and fuzzy in a number of the scenes that made it look more like a dream sequence than what was supposed to be happening.From here on out, just watch The Notebook instead of Sparks rehashing and remixing The Notebook into something less than spectacular.

Based on one of the Nicholas Sparks book of the same name. The story of a failed high school romance who meet again later in their lives. But the flashback comes right away after the initial segment to reveal theirs young romance and what made them part away. Between the present and the past, it keeps up the momentum and concludes the tale with a twist. Though you would know mile away what's coming.I did not like all the films based on the stories from the original author. But this one looked okay to me, not so good or too bad. All his films are romance theme, but in this film, that part was very weak. I did not expect that, particularly emotionless when compared to his other flicks. Still, the filmmaking was decent, with the good actors. But the casting was confusing at the beginning for having two sets of actors and then soon it cleared out all the doubts.Kind of supernatural theme, but not a fantasy. Feels a bit long, because the story developments were slow and most of the parts are not interesting. This is not a romance film I was looking for, but different where everything was dragged to the final twist, especially since the accident that happened at the opening. I did not watch it till now, because I did not feel I wanted to after watching its trailer. But I knew some day I would see it and that is now. I don't know what you thought of it, but for me it is an average film.6/10

Nicolas Sparks novels have some devout fans but I doubt even the most ardent ones would say this is a successful translation of the story.Dawson Cole (James Marsden) is an offshore oil rig worker. Amanda (Michelle Monaghan) is unhappily married with a young son. In 1992 when both were teenagers from different sides of the social divide both became star crossed lovers. At the time young Dawson who was estranged from his backwoods drug dealing family was kind of adopted by Tuck (Gerald McRaney.) A tragic incident tore the young couple apart. Now 21 years later, Tuck's death means they come together for his funeral and both discover that they still carry a torch for one another.Like The Notebook there are parallel stories in two time streams. Confusion will arise because the younger actors look nothing like the older versions. It is like watching a different film. To yearn for the days when a film such as A League of Their Own went out of its way to cast actors that looked like their younger counterparts.The other confusing aspects is that 1992 in this film seems to look much like 1962. It is like that the film-makers wanted to evoke some other time period or maybe this small town was definitely stuck behind the times with old cars just like Cuba.The film wants to be a slushy romance between two people destined to be with each other. In the intervening two decades they have had problems moving on from their feeling for each other which actually sounds a little creepy.Of course ghosts of the past drum up conflict and as the film neared the end even my wife piped up by saying this would be a really lame film if x,y & z happened as a twist.Well what more could be said than the uninspired and lazy does take place. Sometimes a film deserves the label. Lame.