Endless Love (2014)
Directed by Shana Feste
A privileged girl and a charismatic boy's instant desire sparks a love affair made only more reckless by parents trying to keep them apart.
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“Endless Love,” a remake of the 1981 movie starring Brooke Shields, itself an adaptation of the 1979 novel by Scott Spencer, is here to make you fondly reminisce on those first tender days of youthful relationships.
When I was 11 years old, I snuck into Brooke Shields’ R-rated 1981 feature, Endless Love.
"Endless Love" isn't so much a remake of the 1981 Franco Zeffirelli film as it is an extended ad for the idyllic Abercrombie & Fitch lifestyle.
Endless Love is based on a novel, but its story bears little resemblance to either that book or Franco Zefirelli’s 1981 film of the same name.
Widely derided upon release, 1981’s Endless Love nevertheless clicked with audiences, spawned a classic Lionel Richie-Diana Ross duet and gave eye-catching early roles to James Spader and Tom Cruise.
Unlike Franco Zeffirelli’s notoriously over-the-top 1981 filmization of Scott Spencer’s novel, Shana Feste’s “ Endless Love ” seems less a misguided adaptation than a deliberate, flat-out rewrite.
Even in casting former model Gabriella Wilde as Jade, the upper-crust high school senior pining for working-class peer David (Alex Pettyfer), Feste conceivably settled on someone whose tousled blond locks could catch the sun like wheat, and who, after sneaking out to steal first-love's kiss, could flail her alabaster limbs in a way that evokes Dirty Dancing 's swan-like Jennifer Grey.
A misfired attempt by director Franco Zeffirelli to rekindle the adolescent ardor he had captured in his Romeo and Juliet, the earlier film was a bloodless affair starring a nubile Brooke Shields, fresh from playing a 12-year-old prostitute in Pretty Baby, and the previously and thereafter unknown Martin Hewitt.
Fans of the disposable adaptations of Nicholas Sparks’ novels (“The Notebook,” “Safe Haven”) may see this as another movie in the same vein: pretty, empty, love conquers all.
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…she was fresh off "The Blue Lagoon" and (despite winning the 1st Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress for her work in that film) seemed destined for a long Hollywood run.
Franco Zeffirelli’s operatic original is a pretty bad movie, but it did have a clear agenda: To exploit Shields’ notoriety as a teenage hottie, coming on the heels of “The Blue Lagoon.’’
This is the love, or should be, of Antony and Cleopatra, Scarlett and Rhett and the couple in the 1950 film noir “Gun Crazy” who look at each other like “wild animals.”
It's a glossier rendition of 1989's "Say Anything" and 2013's " The Spectacular Now ," but the two leads and astute supporting players are too likable to dismiss.
They’re valets at a local country club in the heart of Georgia, so of course they get into the sorts of easy shenanigans perfected by “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” “Endless Love” does well initially to reasonably avoid pointless melodrama, choosing a lighthearted and earnest vibe instead; this makes the first half of the film relatively watchable.
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The film version in 1981, directed by Franco Zeffirelli (“Romeo and Juliet”), made a star out of Brooke Shields.
See? That's the kind of nutty, hormone-inspired decision-making that made the characters from the original movie so realistic and interesting, especially as directed by Franco Zeffirelli, who previously updated William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" with loads of romantic obsession for a grateful Baby boomer generation.
Zeffirelli played down, but certainly did not entirely eradicate, the boy’s dark side in favor of presenting the tale as a doomed “Romeo and Juliet”-style romance.
In this new "Endless Love" -- directed by "Country Strong" filmmaker Shana Feste -- obsession gives way to shallower "Lady and the Tramp" class conflict with Gabriella Wilde as Jade and Alex Pettyfer as David.