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MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE Send This Review to a Friend
Toss it back into the ocean. An insipid saccharine script
ruins what isn't a bad basic story, based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks. A woman
journalist finds a bottle containing a love note and the sentiments are so beautiful that
they inspire her own longings as well as the newspaper feature opportunity that comes
with tracing the writer.
He turns out to be a boat-builder (Kevin Costner) who lives with his father (Paul
Newman) and is still carrying the torch for his dead wife who inspired the missive. But
Robin Wright Penn as the journalist lights another fire in his heart, as he does in hers, and
the emotional conflicts begin. The actors are fine, Caleb Deschanel's photography is as
beautiful as one might expect, but oh that soggy, often stupid dialogue! The romancers at
first seem unbearably silly as they behave like virginal adolescents. I take that back--why
give adolescents a bad name? The misdirection is by Luis Mandoki. A Warner Bros.
Release.
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