Book and Movie Review: Dear John

Dear John

Director: Lasse Hallstrom
Stars: John Tyree: Channing Tatum
           Savannah Lynn Curtis: Amanda Seyfried

Movie Ratings:
★ ★

Author: Nicholas Sparks
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing; Mti edition (December 1, 2009)

Book Ratings:
★ ★

My thoughts:

This is about finding and losing true love. Everyone who has read Mr. Sparks books knew too well that he writes romantic books ending with tragedies. I gave it a chance because it was John's P.O.V. and while I enjoyed some parts of the book, I can't really say it's a good one.

As for the movie, there are books that are not meant to be adapted in the big screen, and this one falls into that category. It was really hard to see the characters in Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried now that I've read the book. When they got separated, it became a boring one for me. They said in the reviews that this was another The Notebook and I expected a lot in this movie. I guess doing a movie for a long distance relationship was not a good idea. It was hard to feel the connection when they were just writing to each other. The one thing that made me almost cry was the scene when John got Savannah's letter breaking up with him. Everything in the movie was very predictable and so I think I'm giving it only a 2-star. 

Anyway, this is the alternate ending I got from Youtube.




About the book:

"An angry rebel, John dropped out of school and enlisted in the Army, not knowing what else to do with his life--until he meets the girl of his dreams, Savannah. Their mutual attraction quickly grows into the kind of love that leaves Savannah waiting for John to finish his tour of duty, and John wanting to settle down with the woman who has captured his heart. But 9/11 changes everything. John feels it is his duty to re-enlist. And sadly, the long separation finds Savannah falling in love with someone else. "Dear John," the letter read...and with those two words, a heart was broken and two lives were changed forever. Returning home, John must come to grips with the fact that Savannah, now married, is still his true love—and face the hardest decision of his life." http://www.nicholassparks.com/

About the author:

Nicholas Charles Sparks was born in Omaha, Nebraska on December 31, 1965.

After breaking the Notre Dame school record as part of a relay team in 1985 as a freshman (a record which still stands), he was injured and spent the summer recovering. During that summer, he wrote his first novel, though it was never published. He majored in Business Finance and graduated with high honors in 1988.

He and his wife Catherine, who met on spring break in 1988, were married in July, 1989. While living in Sacramento, he wrote his second novel that same year, though again, it wasn't published. He worked a variety of jobs over the next three years, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone, and started his own small manufacturing business which struggled from the beginning. In 1990, he collaborated on a book with Billy Mills, the Olympic Gold Medalist and it was published by Feather Publishing before later being picked up by Random House. (It was recently re-issued by Hay House Books.) Though it received scant publicity, sales topped 50,000 copies in the first year of release.

He began selling pharmaceuticals and moved from Sacramento, California to North Carolina in 1992. In 1994, at the age of 28, he wrote The Notebook over a period of six months. In October, 1995, rights to The Notebook were sold to Warner Books. It was published in October, 1996, and he followed that with Message in a Bottle (1998), A Walk to Remember (1999), The Rescue (2000), A Bend in the Road (2001), and Nights in Rodanthe (2002), The Guardian (2003), The Wedding (2003), Three Weeks with my Brother (2004), True Believer (2005) and At First Sight (2005) all with Warner Books. All were domestic and international best sellers and were translated into more than 35 languages. The movie version of Message in a Bottle was released in 1999, A Walk to Remember was released in 2002, and The Notebook was released in 2004. The average domestic box office gross per film was $56 million -- with another $100 million in DVD sales -- making the novels by Nicholas Sparks one of the most successful franchises in Hollywood. - Amazon