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Dear John is the fifth of Nicholas Sparks' books to be turned into a movie, which means that even if you haven't read a word of his novels, if you are a regular moviegoer you know what to expect. A wistful love story, tender feelings recorded in letters or notebooks and read aloud and then, just as you're wondering what kind of a gown the prospective bride or promgoer will pick out, someone vital to the story will bonk his head, fall off a boat...
...When Dear John starts, Channing Tatum looks like the likely Ali since he's flat on his back in a soldier's uniform, his blood seeping into a mud puddle. Tatum is John Tyree, a special-forces soldier madly in love with chaste, do-gooder college student Savannah (Amanda Seyfried), whom he met during a two-week leave in the spring of 2001. We go to flashbacks, and as John enfolds Savannah in his big, beautiful arms, with Sept. 11 hovering like a hurricane over the South Carolina beaches, you take bets on whether that mud puddle was in Afghanistan...
...there is something emotionally exhausted about Dear John. The cruel twist of fate is constructed out of nothing, laboriously maneuvered into place and then just left there, an illogical mess dampening all romance. This isn't a love story, it's a misery story that drags on, not to a dramatic conclusion but a tepid moment. Hallstrom and screenwriter Jamie Linden want to be true to Sparks' original sadistic ending, but they also want to leave the happiness door ever so slightly ajar. The result is a sense of "Huh? That's it?" (See the best movies of the decade...
...first half, the love story is pleasantly engaging. Tatum has the body of a football player and the rosebud lips of a perfect new baby; he's tough pretty. As an actor, he has the right air of secrecy to play an intriguing guy with an old knife wound under his eye. In Big Love you think of Seyfried as the smart girl tormented by the polygamy mess her dolt of a father has gotten her mother into, not the pretty girl. But she's seriously glamorized here: with her hair falling in golden waves she's a Breck girl...
Just days ago, the State of the Union address reassured Americans that the President would do what he could to “finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are.” Now, the nation’s top two defense officials have thankfully set in motion a campaign to repeal the infamous “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law, 16 years after its institution. While long overdue, the move to repeal this law?...