Damn it all, Nicholas Sparks! I told myself if I cried at your eighteen-hanky tearjerk bonanza I would shoot myself in the face. Well consider me dead, mkah? The lesson I learned the hard way is that you don't go into a movie like Nights in Rodanthe expecting it to be anything other than what it is -- a sappy, sad-sack chick-flick that'll have you weeping by the time the credits roll. Writer Nicholas Sparks might very well be the master of this particular strain of movie, something I dubbed the SPOILER ALERT "bone-n-croak" because there's a love story, the requisite "romantic" love scene involving a painfully slow disrobing sequence and some sort of tragic(-ish) death. If you've seen of Sparks' other works (A Walk to [sob!] Remember, The Notebook), you know exactly what I'm talking about.

Tags: A Walk to Remember, Christopher Meloni, Diane Lane, James Franco, Nicholas Sparks, Nights in Rodanthe, review, Richard Gere, The Notebook