bad girl porn

Rating: 4/10 (15 June 2010)

I am a male, but I do like some romantic comedies. Before I saw it, all I really knew about this movie was that it was a romance and it had Amanda Seyfried in it. Yes, Miss Seyfried is beautiful. Also. Mr. Tatum provides plenty of eye candy for the women(and men of a different sexual persuasion, I suppose). Seyfried's acting is OK, but Tatum's is fairly terrible. His wooden performance and his looks would make him perfect to be a third love interest for Bella Swan in the Twilight movies.
Like Twilight, this movie is pure girl porn! I felt like I needed a brown paper bag just to take it from the Red Box. The movie starts off as a fairly sweet love story:soldier on leave meets college student on spring break(one that apparently lasts two or three weeks,oddly), they fall in love over the next few weeks, they have to go their separate ways but agree to write each other letters(only snail mail, no email and very little cell phone interaction; This is all justified by just saying that he's in some far off desolate places for the military where they don't have email, etc),etc. He's only supposed to be away for a year, but then Sept. 11 happens and he re-enlists for two more years at least. She oppose this, but he does it anyway. This is perhaps a mistake in terms of their relationship, but it is understandable.
As he stays overseas at war, her letters start coming less frequently. Finally, she sends him a stereotpyical "dear john" letter(what else, give this movie's title?) where she tells him that she is now engaged to another man. Up to this point, everything seems sad but believable. It makes sense that she would move on and marry someone else with him gone for so long, but the reason eventually given just seems ridiculous to me. Her proverbial "dear john" letter, causes him to burn all his other letters from her, and he stays overseas in the military for a few more years.
He is finally brought up by his father's impending death. The subplot with his father is actually one of the better parts of the movie, the constant reference to coins is annoying(though necessary, I suppose, given his father's apparent autism and his obsession with coins). Anyway, he stops by the ranch owned by Seyfried's character. He finds he there, and they talk.
Here is where the story jumped the shark for me. We find out that he man she married is actually her much older family friend- a single dad whose son also has autism. The man got cancer, and somehow Seyfried's character got so entangled in the lives of him and his son that she actually married. From the dialogue, it doesn't seem like she really ever loves him like a husband. In fact, she seems to still love Tatum's character like that the whole time. But she says that she "had no choice". Really? Certainly, there are other things she could have done to help a much older man with cancer whose son has autism. Did she really have to marry him even if she didn't love him like that? Did they ever actually engage in marital relations, or was this just a scheme to get her guardianship of the boy when his dad dies? Aren't there easier ways to do that? And surely her family could have helped give him financial support during his cancer without her marrying him. He was an old family friend. Maybe the book explains the situation better, but it just seemed kinda ludicrous to me.
Then there's the end. Tatum's character and her husband get an "anonymous" donation(three guesses as to who the donor is!) that allows him to get an experimental treatment. From what I gather on the internet, the book ends with her husband living for a while longer and her not seeing Tatum's character again. That is also the alternate ending of the movie. But the more "happy" ending use in the movie is that the "miracle drug" only gives her huband a few more months(some miracle). He dies, then Tatum and Seyfried are free to get back together. We see them meeting again at the end of the movie. Which ending is better? The alternate ending seems more true to the spirit of the story. The actual movie ending seems like a typical cheap movie sellout. It doesn't really matter to me though. The story seemed somewhat implausible to me anyway. Also, the dialogie is not very good. The part at the beginning about Tatum's character being a "coin in the army" is just laughable. If this is what a typical Nicholas Sparks book/movie is like, I should probably skip the rest of them.