So, last Friday afternoon, I went to see The Longest Ride.

If you read a column I wrote for 1808 Greensboro magazine last month (thank you editor Tina Firesheets for permission to post that piece in its entirety below), you’ll know it was not a foregone conclusion that I would see this particular movie.

After I submitted the column, I started thinking about an exam question I planned to pose to students in my Media Theory and Criticism class at Wake Forest (an exam they are taking right this moment, in fact, with our computer keyboards all clicking frantically together in the classroom.)

The question is about intertextuality – the “leaky boundaries,” as John Fiske puts it, among texts.

Let me explain.

I see not only media and print stories as “texts” but also any story that informs our sense of our lived experiences. Our life stories are texts, and they are shaped by the other texts we encounter. Advertisements are texts. Conversations are texts.

Even (phone) texts can be (story) texts because those little screens on our phones sometimes tell stories, and taken all together, stories are important (I would say essential) because they help us figure out who we are and what it means to be human.

Before I went to see The Longest Ride, I knew that portions of it were shot at Wake Forest. I knew that a comedy troupe on campus, The Lilting Banshees, had performed a skit with the movie as a reference point. I knew it would be sappy because it is based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. I knew that Clint Eastwood’s son played the male lead. And, so on…

Watching the film, I saw even more connections.

There were other locations and references that resonated with me.

I couldn’t help but see that the movie’s subplot involving another couple who fell in love in the 1940s had at least some glancing similarities to a couple of collectors, Ira and Ruth Julian, whose art-packed home I had an opportunity to visit many years ago.

I didn’t expect that particular connection to emerge, but it became part of the larger narrative unfolding inside my head as I watched the movie and and likely made things that would have otherwise seemed totally implausible seem possible, even if remotely so.

This film is geared for a certain audience and designed to elicit predictable responses about love and fate in ways that used to annoy me a lot.

Maybe I’m not as cynical as I used to be, or maybe this film is a little bit better than some of the others I’ve seen.

Most likely, a bit of both.

While I do think many of the assumptions and tropes that define the romance genre are limiting, if not downright dangerous (one of the reasons I remain so enamored with the film Don Jon in its smart critique of the dehumanizing elements of both romance genre films and porn), this film offers an interesting element to consider.

Maybe you can “have it all” if you are willing to adjust what that term means.

Of course, this being a Nicholas Sparks story, having it all can turn out to be more than you ever imagined, but thinking about the proposition the other way works, too.

Maybe having it all isn’t so much about realizing some outlandish fantasy as it is about paying attention, remaining open to possibility and mystery, and choosing to take some risks when it seems worth it.

Bottom line on the movie: it’s not great art (I knew that going in), it wasn’t terrible (which I sort of expected it to be), and I didn’t hate it (which I considered a strong possibility before seeing it).

Here’s the column I submitted to Tina Firesheets in its entirety:

More Than Just Another “Chick Flick”

Mary M. Dalton

The term “chick flick” makes me cringe. It is often uttered as an insult.

The gendered nature of the dismissal bothers me even though romantic comedies/dramas are not my favorite genre because they are typically so unrealistic and predictable.

And, some would say the sappiest and most formulaic of all theatrically-released romance films are based on novels by North Carolina author Nicholas Sparks.

His latest film, The Longest Ride, is described this way: “The lives of a young couple intertwine with a much older man as he reflects back on a lost love while he’s trapped in an automobile crash.”

If you’ve seen the preview trailers, you know the young college student (Charlotte native Britt Robertson) and champion bull rider (Scott Eastwood, son of Clint) are impossibly attractive, and Alan Alda looks a lot older in the movie than he does in M*A*S*H reruns.

What would you say if I told you that there are two reasons beyond a good cry and the triumph of romantic fantasy for those of us who live in the Triad to go out and see The Longest Ride when the movie opens on April 10?

Four locations used in The Longest Ride are local: the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Wake Forest University, a beautiful farm in Surry County, and a privately-owned lake.

It’s always fun to see familiar landmarks in movies and think about how different they appear on the screen than in real life, and showing off the natural beauty of our region reminds us how lucky we are to live here in the Triad.

Movies like this one are also good for the local economy. Rebecca Clark, Executive Director of the Piedmont Triad Film Commission, says hundreds of extras and some professional bull riders were hired to work on the film.

The production company filmed locally for about 15-days and generated 3800 hotel nights in the Triad, which is an impressive figure. The rest of the film was shot on the coast in and around Wilmington.

According to Clark, whose job is to recruit production to the Triad to boost the local economy, Sparks always tries to get films adapted from his books shot in North Carolina but often has little say about where a movie is made.

The Longest Ride is set in the coastal area and foothills of North Carolina, but even so there was competition from other states and even other areas of North Carolina to land this film.

“The location manager reached out to me early in the scouting process to see if we had any horse farms with barns in the area,” says Clark.

“One of the most requested locations our office is asked about are farmhouses, and I had scouted many of them for the Matt Weiner film Are You Here and the Hallmark films The Shunning and The Confession I was well prepared for this request and sent many pictures of farms all across the Piedmont Triad region.”

Think you might have the perfect location for an upcoming movie or commercial shoot? You can add your location into the database maintained by the Piedmont Triad Film Commission at http://www.piedmontfilm.com.

Who knows? The next Nicholas Sparks movie might take place right outside your back door?