Nights in Rodanthe (2008)

Memorable, crazy movie

I'll tell you why so serious

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Adrienne Willis' (Diane Lane)life is one big muddled mess. She's staying in a isolated coastal village called Rodanthe located in North Carolina. She is temporarily watching over the inn that is owned by her friend Jean (Viola Davis). Through all the calmness, she's indecisive as to weather she wants to return home to her philandering husband Jack (Christopher Meloni) and a daughter who hates her, or make Rodanthe her permanent home. Her outlook on life changes once she gets acquainted by a surgeon named Dr. Paul Flanner (Richerd Gere) who's in the midst of trying to reunite with his distant son, Mark (James Franco) as he checks into the inn for the weekend. In the Hollywood machine, it seems that the age demographics that get sadly neglected are the thirty up moviegoers. At first glance, I thought that "Nights in Rodanthe" will be refreshing romantic drama that will appease to the adults who are roughly around my age group. It looked like it could have starred Bette Davis or Joan Crawford as they smoke like a chimney while engaging in a conversation saturated with cynical jokes with their lovers as we watch as their hearts are crumbling before our very eyes. Unfortunately, this film has more cheese to it than a small pizza. It's just one of those lagging dramas that might appeal to some, but not to others. This film brings back Diane Lane and Richard Gere together again since their last film "Unfaithful". We see Adrienne taking a sabbatical from her womanizing husband and her two children and watches over her friend's motel located in the isolated village of Rodanthe in North Carolina for the weekend. The only patron staying there is a surgeon who's also in need of a hiatus but doesn't want to be alienated from anyone else. We get the idea that a big storm is drawing near because the weather reporter repeatedly warns and an old fisherman also warns us while Adrienne is shopping for groceries. But instead of doing the logical thing when a hurricane is on the horizon like go to a nearby resort for safety precautions, Adrienne and Paul decide to stay on the island and the hotel gets wrecked from its foundations. While this is happening, they get intoxicated, hurl things, exchanged small- talk and get further acquainted and then once the storm bears closer, they eventually they wind up in bed with each other.So the next, day as the bright sun is shining upon them, Adrienne wants Paul come to terms as to explain why he's staying in this hotel. Paul tells her he trying to face his demons before going on a voyage to Ecuador to be reunited with his distant son Mark (cameo from James Franco).I have no personal ill-feelings for Diane Lane. She is a very talented actress and she has a very pretty face for someone her age. For a lady at 50 years old, she has really aged gracefully and her performance in the movie is the only really good thing about this movie. It's the stuffy direction by George C. Wolfe and the badly written script from Anne Peacock and John Romano based on an adaptation from Nicholas Sparks' novel is what ruined this movie. It's all formulaic, predictable with not really much going for it. To me, it's mundane, featherweight melodrama saturated with tiresome clichés and pointless drivel that makes you stare at your watch counting the minutes to when it's going to be over. It's quite shameful that we members of the 35 up club are given this material where the romantic leads are in the middle-aged club. Does Hollywood thin that middle-age people are boring and pry upon boring things? That's very insulting.One more quip I have about "Nights in Rodanthe". The poster of the man caressing Diane is clearly not Richard Gere. Whoever he is, is not very convincing. How gullible does the Hollywood industry think we are? Don't insult our intelligence.

Ugh... Obviously a 10 year old has written the whole screen play. The plot, the situations in the movie are very unrealistic and so childish. The lines are pathetic as hell.Adrienne(Ms lane) gets mad at her husband while having a phone call with him. She hangs up the phone and walk to the living room in RAGE and then she plays a song and DANCE for it???... What the hell.. WHO DOES THAT?Trust me that was not the worst one... The whole movie is filled with awkward moments like that.No chemistry between them.. what-so-ever..The whole story of the movie is way too shallow...

There's something about movies with bratty teenagers that will always ruin a film for me. Without the teenagers, this movie reminded me so much of a cross between "How Stella Got Her Groove Back" and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (the latter more than the first). But the bratty daughter who was super disrespectful to her mother over a divorce reminded me too much of "The Descendants," another movie with kids that need to be disciplined and talk to their parents any kind of way. Without the brat, I may have enjoyed this movie more. I watched the movie because I love Richard Gere, but what's interesting is I never believed the chemistry between him and Diane Lane's character (Adrienne Willis) when he was a stranger at a North Carolina inn. I wasn't even interested in the widowed husband. But once they separated and started writing, the plot picked up tremendously. Problem is that was almost the end of the movie. The last 20 minutes or so are five stars. The rest? Nothing to brag about.

"Nights in Rodanthe" pretty much sticks faithfully to the outlined pattern in all of Nicholas Sparks' material... Every work of his to have been adapted for the screen so far seems to involve at least one character central to the plot who is dead, dying, deteriorating or in peril of death... It seems like a cheap way of inducing emotion to attempt to make the audience (I hate to be sexist, but let's face it, mostly women... ) cry buckets in some kind of communal catharsis until he's pumped out some more characters who will slot into the same formula...The crime of it here is that both Gere and Lane actually managed to rise above the predictability of the genre and make these people interesting characters, but it's a wasted effort, because the author is only interested in having them be ciphers to provoke universal drama... Touching on death as a subject is okay, but consistently resorting to killing or wrecking your principal players as a climax is uninspired, in the extreme.If you're looking for a weepy to bring tears on cue, without making you feel like you've been on a journey that has an ounce of flexibility to it, this is the one - but shouldn't art have a kind of vitality to it; an internal emotion driving things that doesn't feel like a mere process? I despair at 'Pavlov's Dog Syndrome'... That is for things without nuance, and I happen to be someone who believes that movies shouldn't belong in that category anymore... Have we come no further since the inception of the medium?