“Dear John,” the latest attempt to bring his warm, earnest, therapeutic sensibility to the screen, falls in the upper middle range of Sparks film adaptations. He is a master of the feel-good weepie, a form of mass-market deep-tissue massage. Sparks’s novels, of which there are now 15, impossible, star-crossed loves, often shadowed by illness and death, have an odd way of producing happy, or at least blissfully cathartic, endings. His universe is a place where comfort and pain are hard to tell apart because they both elicit tears. Sparks, a fixture of the best-seller lists, has patented a melodramatic formula that carefully blends soft-focus spiritual inspiration, desperate longing and a strikingly benign view of death. Why else would you read a book by or, in keeping with our purposes here, see a movie based on a book by Nicholas Sparks?
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