Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Crapshoot 2015: Mad Love


The ladies didn't exactly have it much better than the men.




Whatever cynicism that I may spout off in the desire to produce a satisfactory critique dressed in the skin of an entertaining examination of media, I take pride in personally being a romantic.

The notion may seem childish to some but I fully believe in people being drawn together by a primarily emotional connection that transcends our baser instincts. Just because purity in this world is a rarity doesn't mean it's nonexistent, nor is it an excuse to give up searching for it. Romance is hard to find and even harder to hold on to but worth fighting for. That's what makes the treatment of romantic dramas as low standard dumping ground for audiences both highly impressionable and less discerning so painful for me to watch.

On the surface, “Endless Love” is a straight forward, shallow, predictable and borderline unrelatable load of dreck with plenty to dislike. Unfortunately, you don’t have to dig particularly deep to see how disturbingly detestable the film really is.

Rich but shy high school graduate Jade invites David, who’s been crushing on her from afar for years, to a dud of a post-grad party that only picks up once he uses his social connections to give the gathering a jolt of life, catching Jade’s eye in the process. Unfortunately, her father doesn't approve of his graduated 18 year old adult daughter’s relationship with a hardworking, intelligent, polite, middle class young man, forcing her to refuse her once in a lifetime internship and highly prestigious college in order to spend her Summer with David after meeting him, getting to know him for about 3 days and having sex with him within a week because, of course, every relationship worth throwing the future away for makes itself known within a week and a half.

“Endless Love” feels like some sort of giant misguided interpretation of a scenario that is downright disturbing with any sort of logic applied to it.

Jade’s stupidity in throwing away her potential to spend 3 months with a man with a troubled past that she’s known for less than 2 weeks is continuously and sincerely cheered on with no criticism or irony whatsoever. This would be bad enough but on top of that, not only do Alex Pettyfer and Gabriella Wilde have little chemistry with one another, but their characters lack even a hint of common ground that would barely make even a friendship, much less a romance, believable.

Her antagonistic father, played by a laughably one-note psychotic Bruce Greenwood whose talents are wasted, fairs no better as the logic that he brings to the situation is completely diffused by his insane obsession with tearing down somebody that isn't quite the source of his family problems.
And all of this ignoring the fact that the main characters are 2 LEGAL AND CONSENTING ADULTS, which undercuts the already immensely backward stupidity of the entire film, because he should be powerless.

This kind of logic saturates the film with what could almost have been an excellent satire on its genre. Sadly however, “Endless Love’s” straight laced execution of its mangled understanding of reality slowly whittles away what little fun one could have with poking fun at it once you really breakdown how little complexity there is to anything going on. That it was apparently an adaptation of a novel that deconstructed all of the notions of love at first sight being everlasting doesn't exactly earn it points either.




The best thing that I can say about “Endless Love” is that it has left severely conflicted. As dangerous as the ideas of childishly throwing life aside for brief hormonally driven affairs in a brief period of time that the movie so desperately pushes are, at least it did give me something to think about.

Disgustingly offensive? Sure but does that make it worse than the vapidly boring “The Best of Me?”
Before exploring that question, let me make it very clear that I have no personal quarrel with Nicholas Sparks’ or his works, literary or cinematic.

They’re not deep, they’re rarely believable, and more often than not, they’re bad in varying ways. However, even at they’re laziest. I’ve never quite found them to be offensive in the slightest. They’re Michael Bay movies for the opposite demographic.

“The Best of Me” may be the tipping point of that stance of enforced neutrality.

Even if you haven’t seen the films, the formula has become infamous at this point; 2 pretty white people meet under contrived coincidence, stick together despite constantly hanging around one another for few discernible reasons, undergo a conflict that brings up the fallout of bizarre tragic circumstances of their past and overcome their overly dramatic problems to hook up with each other. The formula arguably lends itself to lazy filmmaking but “The Best of Me” is quite possibly the laziest of the lot.

Like “Endless Love,” the film is peppered with a plethora of poorly directed scenes that could easily be twisted into a satire of its genre and its author. From the weird continuity of the film that somehow turns a teenage Luke Bracey into an adult James Marsden, to the antagonists being composed of the most hilariously cartoonish redneck stereotypes I've seen in years, there are highlights that almost generated hard laughs from me.

Unlike “Endless Love” however, the bad moments are fluffed up with content that’s just plain boring.
In typically bad Romance fashion, the leads are lacking in any sort of chemistry or personality and wasting the potential of its leading actors. The Sparks formula has gotten so predictable that the fun has been sucked out of even ironic enjoyment of the films, making a straight forward hour and a half long experience feel twice as long.

Only in the film’s final 25 minutes, does it cross over into any vaguely surprising territory just to become so stupid through the use of 2 twists that completely torpedoed all of the credit that I desperately tried to give it by meeting it half way.

I honestly can’t decide on whether its shoddiness puts it lower. “The Best of Me’s” provides a weird poster child for the need to evolve formulas, as the layout for a passable product as there yet through sheer laziness, it somehow fails to even be competent.

No comments:

Post a Comment