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"  This Valentine&amp;#039;s Day, hundreds of thousands of couples who need time to digest prix-fixe dinners before having sex will head to their local cineplexes and be greeted by a familiar sight: a large poster of a man and a woman, eyelids lowered and hands gently gripping each other, outdoors and ever-so-slightly obscured by a sun flare. It is an advertisement for the film Safe Haven, starring pert ing\u00E9nue Julianne Hough and milquetoast husband-of-Fergie Josh Duhamel. At the top of the paper, in print slightly smaller than the stars&amp;#039; names and slightly more prominent than the tagline (&amp;quot;You know it when you find it&amp;quot;) a line of text reads, &amp;quot;From the author of The Notebook &amp;amp;amp; the director of Dear John.&amp;quot; Yes, Safe Haven is another entry in the Nicholas Sparks assembly line, a collection of books-cum-films about damaged, primarily blonde, women and the men who might just love them too much for their own good. Over the last fourteen years, eight movies have been adapted from Sparks&amp;#039;s novels. They&amp;#039;re similar in the way Kevin Spacey&amp;#039;s performances resemble each other, with the familiar affectations and that certain essence de Spacey. There are differences \u2014 he has an antebellum accent here, a limp or no fingerprints there \u2014 but he&amp;#039;s always going to deliver his lines in a droll deadpan and stare at his costars like they&amp;#039;re morons because he&amp;#039;s the smartest one in the room. Perhaps the closest pop-culture parallel to the Sparks canon is NBC&amp;#039;s The Biggest Loser. The show, for all of its seasonal tweaks (this iteration, the show&amp;#039;s fourteenth, focuses on childhood obesity and features three tween chunksters who sound bizarrely similar to their older counterparts in their motivational speaking-ready earnestness) is basically always the same: Eighteen-odd contestants come to the Ranch and are screamed at by Bob, Jillian, or Dolvett. They sweat. They vomit. They fall off their treadmills. They yell, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t do it!&amp;quot; and their trainer makes them leave the gym and gets to the root of their childhood issue in three tearful minutes (they never felt like they were good enough!), and then, goddammit, they CAN do it. They get weighed in unflattering sports bras and shorts, their doughy stomachs bulging over the spandex waistbands purposefully too tight and too short to restrain them. Then one day, when they&amp;#039;ve earned the respect of the audience and Alison Sweeney, they get weighed in body-conscious workout clothes over slimming girdle-type garments. They get makeovers. They meet luminaries like Michelle Obama and Chargers tight end Antonio Gates. They triumph every time. As you might remember from freshman English, every dramatic story is just a variation on the hero&amp;#039;s journey. But Sparks and the producers of The Biggest Loser have succeeded in creating a kind of hyper-specific narrative type in which the hero is a 350-pound cop from Ohio or Ryan Gosling in a soaking wet button-down, making love to Rachel McAdams on the floor of a house he renovated with his own hands. Yes, we&amp;#039;ve seen self-improvement reality shows and love-overcoming-the-odds movies before, but ever with such thoughtfully broadcasted, nuanced signifiers for the audience&amp;#039;s emotional reaction? The Biggest Loser created a new sub-genre \u2014 the pathos-driven weight-loss reality show \u2014 but I would argue that Sparks has also invented a type of novel-to-big screen tortured love story that&amp;#039;s uniquely Sparksian, as easily recognizable as Michael Bay&amp;#039;s films but whose iterations are even less distiguishable from one another. When Josh Duhamel puts himself in danger to protect Julianne Hough or Jillian asks Gina why she doesn&amp;#039;t think she deserves to love herself, we know how we&amp;#039;re supposed to feel as readily as if we were an in-studio audience being told to laugh or applaud by a brightly lit sign, and damned if we don&amp;#039;t react as if we came up with the emotional response ourselves. The Biggest Loser teamand Nicholas Sparks are geniuses. They&amp;#039;ve tapped into the American psyche with an endlessly replicable and highly manipulative product, and in doing so, created something new. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a19132/nicholas-sparks-safe-haven-biggest-loser/>