MOVIES
Endless love reaches gender midpointBY GARRETT HILL ON FEBRUARY 21, 2014
When it comes to movies I tend to lean much more toward the action oriented and mind blowing creations that emerge every so often like “Inception”, but I was tasked to take on a very different kind of film for this review: the classic chick flick.
Just last weekend I went to see “Endless Love” on its second night of release, and I was quite honestly impressed. The simplified story is this: two teenagers graduate high school and find themselves falling for each other. The guy, David, is from a simple background with a father who is a mechanic while the girl, Jade, is from a family of cardiologists who are rolling in money. Jade’s cold doctor dad, Hue, thinks that David isn’t good enough for his daughter; he tries keeping them apart; and things get spicy. The writers did a great job of providing a balance between the emotional, sappy material one would expect to see in a chick flick with scenes of reckless antics and aggression between the key characters that make the movie appealing to both genders. There are two separate scenes in which David punches people who really deserve it and they both made me feel a level of satisfaction that I rarely get when watching a romantic movie. There were many moments throughout the film that offered some sort of lesson, and most of them were valuable to some degree. My favorite of these was right after Hue learns that David does not plan to go to college. He makes a scolding comment under his breath and David responds that he doesn’t need much to be happy, and begins naming things. His list includes a bed, milk in the fridge, and a good girl to come home to. Things like this give “Endless Love” merit in my eyes, but there is still plenty that makes this movie unrealistic. My main problems don’t really involve the romance, as there was an adequate amount of love filled montages and such but I did not feel smothered by it. Perhaps my biggest problem with the movie stems from the hilariously illogical time line that David and Jade’s relationship operates on. They really talk for the first time after graduation, and Jade is planning to leave on a medical internship in two weeks. By the time her father mentions the internship is a week away the couple had already kissed in a closet during a party, gotten steamy in the library at her mansion (we’re talking a home run here), and even spent a short scene staring into each others eyes while they are in a bathtub. Doesn’t it take a little longer than a week to go from a first conversation to “Hey, let’s take a bath together”? I can’t go into too much detail without spoiling the story but there are multiple instances throughout the movie where I was saying “No one would ever do this... Who just does that... That’s clearly a poor decision.” All that being said I think the movie was worth seeing and had elements that make it one of the better choices for a chick flick. So guys don’t be afraid if a girl tries to drag you to see “Endless Love”, it could be much worse. HTML Comment Box is loading comments...
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