Nights in Rodanthe.
Nights in Rodanthe (2008) 
USA
97mins
Director: George C. Wolfe
Writer: Nicholas Sparks (novel)
Ann Peacock
John Romano
Why not? Why not give the last two posts of the month to Diane Lane? She deserves them.
Oh, Nights in Rodanthe. Such an elegant title isn’t it? Once again I was forced to watch this on a flight on a shitty airline that still hasn’t caught on to the idea of having TV screens installed in the backs of every seat so that you can choose which films you watch as you fly. (Incidentally, that airline was Lufthansa and I truly don’t recommend it.) No, they do it the old fashioned way where they show you one film every six fucking hours, on a faded and blurry screen that you can barely see at the fucking front of the plane. And what better film to drop on a flight full of bored, entertainment deprived travellers than fucking Nights in Rodanthe? Awesome.
In this smoldering heap, Diane Lane surprised everyone by playing – you guessed it – a divorcee. Richard Gere is in this fucker too and he plays a doctor who is tormented by the death of a patient. They both end up meeting up at a sea front getaway. Gere plays hard to get, but it isn’t long before they both get liquored up and Lane’s got her Kung-Fu grip going all over Gere’s sausage. Then they struggle with their relationship for reasons that don’t matter and which do nothing more than extend the running time of the film. There are also some wild horses that are supposed to run across the beach from time to time. I didn’t care about these horses when Diane Lane’s character tells Richard Gere’s character about them at the beginning of the film, and I especially didn’t care about them when they actually materialize at the end of the film.
Come to think of it, I didn’t care about anything in this film. It’s also pretty fucking depressing to consider that if my flight would have plunged into the Atlantic Ocean whilst I was watching this, it would have been the last film that I’d ever seen. Now that’s a truly horrible thought.
I think I just ruined my day.
Under the Tuscan Sun.
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003) 
USA/Italy
113mins
Director: Audrey Wells
Writer: Frances Mayes (book)
Audrey Wells (screen story and screenplay)
This movie would have been great if they could have gotten rid of the director, the cast, the screenwriter and pretty much everyone except the DP. This is because the locations were the only thing that kept me interested in this thing past the 15 minute mark. I would gladly have taken 113 minutes of silent footage of Southern Italy over 113 minutes of what I got, which was Diane Lane wandering around Italy, sad, then happy, then sad, then happy again.
The truth is, I don’t even know where to begin with this. Through a series of incidents that I more or less glazed over in which Diane Lane’s character finds out that her husband is banging some hot young college slut, Diane Lane’s character is then faced with a life of poverty, which involves having to sell her house to her cheating husband or else she’ll have to pay alimony. Why does she have to pay and give up her house if it was her husband who was the one that was cheating, you ask? No idea.
Did I say that she faced a life of poverty? Well yeah, technically it is a life of poverty. That is, if you define poverty as the ability to purchase, remodel and live in a three-hundred year old Italian villa without ever having to work again.
But hey, details, schmetails. The rest of the film plays out like one big Massengill commercial set in Italy, complete with Diane Lane being showered in rose petals (in slow motion), snuggling in bed with a dark and handsome Italian and drinking wine amongst the flowers.
There are flaccid attempts at injecting metaphors and references to Italian film that would be completely lost on the middle American neglected housewife set whom this film is targeted at.
There is also Sandra Oh, playing a pregnant lesbian who travels to Italy in order to have her baby there. The baby is born and who fucking cares. This film has all the twists and turns, ups and downs and surprises of making a sandwich. Not a lunch sandwich either – a drunken, home from the bar at 5am sandwich where you pile whatever is at hand on and soak it all down with bar-b-que sauce and mayonnaise.
I'll Tell You What Sucks. 