SANTA MONICA, California, April 5, (AP): The romantic melodrama machine that is Nicholas Sparks keeps running at full capacity.
The prolific author, whose weepy love stories include the Hollywood hits “The Notebook” and “Dear John,” returned to the big screen with “The Last Song,” which he wrote specifically for Miley Cyrus.
It was not just a case of writing an original movie script for Cyrus. Although the screenplay did come first, Sparks developed the story with the same detail he applies to his books. Working backward, once the script was done, Sparks sat down to write the novel.
Having already written the movie version, Sparks thought the novel would be a breeze. No such luck.
“After I wrote the screenplay, I thought, oh great, this is it. I’m going to do a novelization. Nope. That novel was so challenging to write on a number of levels that had nothing to do with the screenplay,” Sparks said in an interview.
“You want to make it is its own unique work, because primarily, I am a novelist. I wanted a really good novel.”
Sparks, 44, finished the book as production was ready to start on the movie last year. The novel was published a few months later.
Spending
“The Last Song” casts “Hannah Montana” star Cyrus as a sullen teen reluctantly spending a summer with her estranged father (Greg Kinnear), a pianist and composer who hopes his gifted daughter will resume her own studies at the keyboard.
Sparks let Cyrus choose her character’s name, and he wove in a few other themes and attributes in which she was interested. Cyrus never was looking over Sparks’ shoulder as he wrote, though.
“I let him do his thing. I wouldn’t want someone to do that to me when I’m song writing. It’s very difficult when something’s not finished, and people are giving you advice,” Cyrus said. “At the end, I was definitely thrilled. If there was anything, I would have told him, but there was nothing wrong.”
As usual for Sparks’ stories, romance and tragedy mix throughout “The Last Song.” Sparks has endured his own misfortunes: his mother died in a horseback-riding accident, his father in a car crash and his sister died of cancer.
The beefy former college track star looks more the sort to turn to action thrillers than love stories. Yet since “The Notebook” came out in 1996, Sparks has owned the teary romance genre.
Story
“The Notebook” “was a story I thought I could write, and I had some success. So I’ve literally kept doing that over and over, and I found that it is a genre that is immensely difficult,” Sparks said. “It’s really hard to make a career out of it. And why is that? Because you read these novels with a different goal than you read other novels.
“You read thrillers because you know kind of what to expect. You know that in the end, the bad guy’s going to get caught. You read me because you don’t know what to expect. Is it going to be happy? Do they get together? Do they not? Does someone die? Does Richard Gere drive off a cliff in South America? You don’t know, and so you read for a surprise. And to be honest, the more books you write, the harder it is to surprise people.”
He has managed to hold Hollywood’s interest. Along with “The Last Song,” “The Notebook” and “Dear John,” Sparks’ books “Message in a Bottle” and “A Walk to Remember” have been adapted into movies, while “The Lucky One” also is headed to the big screen.
Meanwhile, Sparks began his latest novel Feb 17 and needs to finish it by May so his publisher can have it out this fall.
Does he like that sort of pressure?
“No, I do not,” Sparks said. “I’m not a happy person working under it, but I work well under it.”
Review
Have you heard the one about the two photogenic kids who meet cute in a Southern beach town, overcome differences in class and temperament and fall madly in love only to find that, in this cruel, cruel world, tragedy finds a way of trumping hormones?
Dear God, it is “Dear John,” right? Yes. But it also is also “The Last Song,” the second Nicholas Sparks movie to hit theaters in the past two months, a development only moonstruck teen girls and the facial tissue industry will welcome.
Sparks wrote “The Last Song” at the behest of Miley Cyrus, the Disney Channel star who will soon end her run on the “Hannah Montana” TV series and wants to expand her brand into movies.
For “The Last Song,” that means ditching Hannah’s pop star wig in favor of a nose stud and confining her singing to a scene where her character warbles along to Maroon 5 on the radio.
“Wow. You can really sing,” Cyrus’ character is told.
Those who would agree with that statement will find little wrong with “The Last Song,” though Cyrus herself has admitted she probably will be hiring an acting coach after watching the movie.
At present, the 17-year-old Cyrus has an undeniable presence, but her dramatic abilities largely consist of two moves: scrunching up her face and staring wistfully into the distance.
Cyrus is doing a little of both when we first meet her character Ronnie, a sullen teenager seething at the idea of spending the summer at her father’s beachfront Georgia home. Apparently, Ronnie is some kind of musical genius, but has not touched the piano since her parents’ divorce several years ago.
While dad (Greg Kinnear) busies himself bonding with Ronnie’s adorable little brother (Bobby Coleman), Ronnie fends off the wholesome advances of Will (Liam Hemsworth), the local hunk/mechanic/aquarium volunteer/volleyball stud.
Both men soon melt Ronnie’s cold, cold heart, and when a bunch of turtle eggs that Ronnie and Will have tended end up hatching and all those baby turtles paddle off into the foamy Atlantic, you think, maybe, just maybe things are going to be OK for these two crazy kids.
But since “The Last Song” is another leg on the never-ending Nicholas Sparks Death Tour, you always sense The Reaper’s bony hand circling over the proceedings, waiting to randomly pick off another victim. Sure enough, it is not long before someone is mentioning “medicine” and insisting, “I’m fine.”
Proximity
The movie’s proximity to “Dear John” makes Sparks’ use of tragedy as a device all the more risible, and director Julie Ann Robinson shamelessly milks the situation to such a degree that she probably would have the Transformers’ army of Decepticon robots bawling their sensors out.
Kinnear lends the movie a dignity it does not deserve and stands as the only cast member whose dramatic moments are not propped up by soaring musical cues.
The barrage of songs does come in handy, spelling out every beat of emotion contained in the story. So when Ronnie drives away at the end and the music rises and a singer (it’s Miley!) tells us that “there is no guarantee that this life is easy,” we know she speaks truth, if only because death never takes a holiday in Sparks Country.
“The Last Song,” released by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, is rated PG for thematic material, some violence, sensuality and mild language. Running time: 101 minutes. Two stars out of four.