FILM REVIEW OF ''THE LONGEST RIDE" (2015)

Movies made from bestsellers by Nicholas Sparks usually require Kleenex galore if you don't want to drown in your own tears. The tenth Sparks' novel to receive the silver screen treatment, "The Longest Ride" (**1/2 OUT OF ****) isn't as hopelessly tragic as some of the author's earlier tearjerkers. Meaning, "The Longest Ride" is nowhere near as heartbreaking as "Message in a Bottle" (1999), "A Walk to Remember" (2002), "The Notebook" (2004), "Nights in Rodanthe" (2008), and "The Best of Me" (2014). Mind you, "The Longest Ride" does have more than enough lachrymose moments. Nevertheless, everything works out well enough for all the protagonists in this sappy soap opera. Each of the four primary characters and most of the supporting players are endearing souls. The villains that lurk on the periphery are far from despicable. More than anything else, they just seem suspicious, but never hateful. Like "The Notebook," "The Longest Ride" intertwines two romantic melodramas occurring in different times at different places to illuminate the message that true love involves sacrifice. "The Longest Ride" emerges as lightweight and frivolous compared with the far more serious "Notebook." "Scream 4" actress Britt Robertson and Clint Eastwood's youngest son Scott Eastwood portray the youthful lovers in the contemporary romance who negotiate an obstacle course of trials and tribulations. She is a second semester college senior studying art from the city with her entire life awaiting her, while he is a hard-luck, rodeo riding cowboy from the country playing wet nurse to snotty bulls and struggling to save the family ranch. In the romance from the past, set during the Second World War, Jack Huston plays the Jewish son of a haberdasher who falls in love with a vibrant refuge from Vienna. Jack's inamorata, Oona Chaplin, and her family have fled from the wicked Nazis and are embarking on a new life. Interestingly enough, "The Longest Ride" marks the first time that Sparks has integrated his predominantly White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant characters with Jewish characters. Despite their ethnic traditions, each couple must triumph over demoralizing medical conditions that threaten to ruin their romance more than parents concerned with class mixing.

You know tragedy is going to strike in "The Longest Ride," but you cannot be certain when it will or who it will affect the worst. The contemporary romance between the cowboy and the city slicker surpasses the experiences of the Jewish couple. Principally Britt Robertson and Scott Eastwood generate greater charisma than Jack Huston and Oona Chaplin. Nevertheless, "Soul Food" director George Tilman Jr., and "Light It Up" scenarist Craig Bolotin neatly connect the older romance with the contemporary one. Sophia Danko (Britt Robertson of "Scream 4") is the kind of college student who would rather study than goof off on campus with her sisters. Now that she's half way through his second senior semester and has earned straight A's, Sophia cuts herself some slack when a sorority sister invites her out to witness a rodeo. Love at first sight aptly describes Sophia's reaction when the bull that rodeo rider Luke Collins (Scott Eastwood of "Fury") straddles sends him sprawling into the dirt at her feet. Luke loses his Stetson, and Sophia retrieves it for him. Luke lets her keep his headgear and ambles away. Later, during the day, Luke and Sophia strike up a conversation and the inevitable date ensues. Basically, she is the sophisticated dame, while he is a rural ranch hand. Nevertheless, opposites attract in the best love stories.

Anyway, as Luke is taking Sophia back to her sorority house after their first date, they notice smashed through a bridge railing. They find an elderly man who plunged off the bridge and slammed into a tree. He lies near death in his wrecked car. Courageously, Luke pulls Ira Levinson (Alan Alda of "The Aviator"), from his automobile. Ira cries out about a box, and Sophia grabs it as Luke is toting Ira away. Since nobody knows Ira at the hospital, Sophia hangs around until he awakens from surgery. Ira, it seems, banged his head up pretty badly in the accident. As a patient, Ira is nothing but cantankerous. He complains that his nurse soaks her hands in ice water. Sophia tells him that she was one of the two good Samaritans who rescued him. Moreover, she persuades grumpy Ira to eat his objectionable hospital fare. If he'll eat his food, she promises to read some of the letters in the box of letters. Sophia knows the letters are love letters because she has perused them. Later, she reads Ira, and we find ourselves swept up in a wistful flashback love affair in the 1940s between a Jewish lad and lady from different backgrounds. As it turns out, love is no different for different people. Everybody encounters variations on the same heartache. The love of Ira's life, Ruth (Oona Chaplin of "Quantum of Solace") dreams of having a large family, but Ira cannot accommodate her owing to a war wound. Like Noah in "The Notebook," Ira tangles with the Nazis in Europe, but he comes home a different man much to Ruth's chagrin. Meantime, Luke and Sophia quarrel after a nasty bull dumps him. Luke's physician warns him his next tumble could be fatal. Sophia begs him to quit bull riding, but Luke refuses out of stubborn pride.

"The Longest Ride" is sure to make Scott Eastwood into a movie star. He looks so much like his father that you cannot believe he is his son. Director George Tillman doesn't overlook an opportunity to photograph every muscular contour of Eastwood's virile physique, and the PG-13 rating prevents him from going all out. Eastwood and co-star Britt Robertson have a shower scene together and do just about everything that is expected of a young romantic couple. Comparatively, Ruth and Ira's romance is restrained. Alan Alda spends most of his time in a hospital bed. Altogether, "The Longest Ride" serves up a lot of hankie with some panky.

FILM REVIEW OF "SORORITY ROW" (2009)

A prank gone wrong in “Whisper” director Stewart Hendler’s “Sorority Row,” an unsavory, sometimes savage, but smirking R-rated remake of the vintage 1983 slasher “The House on Sorority Row,” sets off a succession of sadistic slayings. “Good Luck Chuck” scenarist Josh Stolberg and TV writer Peter Goldfinger have adapted and updated Mark Rosman’s screenplay about blood, gore, and babes and supplemented the savagery with sardonic “Heathers” humor. Not only has Hendler orchestrated the butchery and bitchery with style but he has also conjured up an atmospheric slash-a-thon that delivers several shocks and surprises. These gals and guys aren’t as idiotic as the usual slasher movie victims. Indeed, more than one girl survives.

“Quarantine” lenser Ken Sing enhances the grisly quality of this mass murderer melodrama with his grainy, raw-edged widescreen cinematography and he wobbles his camera to heighten the suspense. At the same time, editor Elliot Greenberg carves up the action with such rhythm that each jolt delivers stop-in-your-tracks impact. You’ll jump at most of these bolts from the black, especially the sound effects of sharp objects either penetrating or caroming off bodies. Little of this would register were it not for superb sound engineering. The ensemble cast that includes Briana Evigan, Leah Pipes, Rumer Willis, and Jamie Chung constitute all the pretty maids in this “Row” that the mysterious slayer sets out to slay. This mass murderer doesn’t discriminate when it comes to killing, even innocent bystanders succumb to the villain’s pimped out four-way tire iron weapon. The worst thing that you can say about “Sorority Row” is that the fire department takes their own sweet time responding to the fiery finale. Of course, if they had arrived earlier, they’d have interfered with the showdown between the killer and victims. Nevertheless, the last quarter hour serves up thrills and chills that pay off with a clever ending that likely may yield a sequel.

The action unfolds at a bacchanal off campus at a sorority house. Five mischievous wenches of the sorority Theta Pi decide to humiliate a guy, Garrett (Matt O’Leary of “Brick”), who has cheated on his girlfriend with the prank to end all pranks. They have supplied Garrett with what he believes are roofies, and he has dosed Megan (Audrina Patridge of “Into the Blue 2”) with them so that she appears to have passed out. She awakens as Garrett is about to take advantage of her and then apparently dies while her devoted sisters gaze on in horror. The queen bee of the bunch, Jessica (Leah Pipes of “Fingerprints”), knows that Megan is playing possum. Jessica, Cassidy (Briana Evigan of “Step Up 2: The Streets”), Claire (Jamie Chung of “Dragonball: Evolution”) and Ellie (Rumer Willis of “Wild Cherry”) pile into a van with Megan’s limp body and a distraught Garrett. They head off to a mine in the middle of nowhere. Once they arrive, Jessica suggests that they hack the body up into pieces so it will be harder for anybody to find. Meanwhile, Megan records the scene with her cell phone. The girls spread out to collect rocks while Garrett empties his stomach on the ground. He musters his nerve and seizes a four-way tire iron from the van. When nobody is watching him, he sinks one end of it into Megan’s chest before anybody can stop him. The horrified girls close ranks in the name of ‘sisterhood and solidarity’ and cover up the crime. Unceremoniously, they dump Megan’s bloody body into an abandoned well.

Eight months later, at a graduation reception at the Theta Pi house, one of the girls in on the conspiracy, Ellie, shrieks when she thinks that she has seen the dead girl Megan walking among them. In fact, Ellie saw Megan’s younger sister Maggie (Caroline D’Amore of “Daydreamer”) who is visiting the sorority. The girls plan to celebrate another bacchanalian revelry that evening once their crusty house mother, Mrs. Crenshaw (Carrie Fisher of the first “Star Wars” trilogy) vacates the premises. Meantime, the mysterious killer dons a “Scream” monk’s robe with hood and wields a four-way tire iron modified with other forms of cutlery. This weapon compares favorably to the weapons that other serial killers in slasher movies have armed themselves with over the years. This cunning individual follows Chugs (Margo Harshman of “Fired Up”) to her shrink’s office where she plans to score prescription drugs after she performs oral sex on the crooked physician. When Chugs isn’t looking, the killer sends his exotic weapon spinning through the air tomahawk style so it lodges in the good doctor’s forehead. The killer sneaks up on Chugs while she is lying on her back with an expensive bottle of liquor in her lips and shoves a bottle down her throat and then shatters it. Another girl has a spear run through her mouth pinning her head to a wall. Yet another dies from a flare gun cartridge that melts in her mouth and turns her face into bubble wrap.

Leah Pipes takes the cake as the nastiest sister of the bunch, while Briana Evigan qualifies as the nicest. She is the one who wanted to call the authorities while the others bundled Megan up in Cassidy’s coat and tossed her in the well. Meanwhile, elderly Carrie Fisher has a couple of scenes as the cantankerous Theta Pi house mother, but she cannot hit the side of barn with a pump action shotgun. The writers throw in a couple of red herrings to keep us guessing about the identity of the killer. The cast is persuasive even when the action is not. There is a whole lot of stabbing going on along with irresponsible drinking and bare breasted babes in a shower scene. In the original “House on Sorority Row,” seven girls covered up the crime while only five try to here. “Sorority Row” is a good slasher movie that is worth watching more than once.