"Message In A Bot-...er, uh, Blog"...

This past Saturday morning, when I should have been doing other things, I was scrolling through the cable menu and happened upon the late 1990's movie "Message In A Bottle", starring Kevin Costner, Robin Wright Penn, and Paul Newman.

I'd never seen it...from the info screen it seemed like a good ol' love story of one sort or another, big names, and touted as being about a story of a lost love from the Outer Banks of North Carolina...

Fair enough, I thought. I like watching NC-based flicks to see if there are any other characters or movie extras from the region that I may have worked with before...I myself had nothing to do with the project, but anyone living near where film was made is usually proud to be associated with it. Usually.

And so the movie plotted along. Chicago journalist finding a heart-wrenching love letter in a washed up bottle on a beach, spurring her to find the author of the letter...which she does in Coastal North Carolina...the luck of it all.

They are of comparable ages. Both become smitten with one another. Little quirks start popping out of the story line, and good ol' Paul Newman is there to toe the line with his 'son' Costner...lots of little skeletons in the closet that good stories make use of as they need to...

And just as things were kinda sorta heating up between the two salty dog love birds, knots began to fray...

Guess I'd better not discuss how it all came together in the end. As far as love stories go, it sucked eggs, for me....

And the point of all this? I realize that "Hollywood" has to change things up as they convert a written story to film. I understand that there is no one best location to film in...heck, "Cold Mountain", NY Times bestseller of a true NC mountain, most of it was filmed in the Transylvania region of Romania...still burns my butt, but it happens a lot.

And so even this movie was to prove no exception, of setting something in North Carolina but using scenes that were, oh, mere hundreds of miles away. Near the end, especially, when Costner was heading out on his ill-fated trip...they began cutting and pasting in even more stormy coastal scenes...from MAINE!

In college I was well-schooled in geomorphology of the U.S., and let's just say that outside of man-made jetties like those around Oregon Inlet, THERE AIN'T NO STINKIN' NATURAL ROCKY COASTLINE FORMATIONS IN THE CAROLINAS!!!!! I had not seen the movie and had no idea what was coming...I saw the shots with lighthouses and hills made of stone, and waves rolling against patterned rock formations...and I could only shake my head, wondering what viewers were buying the rockiness of coastal New England being passed off as coastal North Carolina. Submerged glaciated terrain is what the gorgeous Maine coastline is all about...around some of the dock scenes, look for lobster pots. Ah, nothing like fresh cold-water NC lobsters dipped in drawn butter...that's right, nothing like it.

It was simply SO far from the truth I was laughing when I should have been on the edge of my seat given the ominous music. Hollywood, give me a great movie, twist things around if you want...but don't ask me to overlook ill-chosen scene selection that destroys your game of smoke and mirrors. We just aren't that stupid. OK, maybe some of us are. If you wait through all the movie credits you will see toward the end that, sure enough, there was a film crew that worked scenes from Maine.

Sadly, so many buy Hollywood as "real", which includes all the unsavory violence, guns, crimes splattered across the silver screens...only the foolish among us think such media has no impact on our young people, especially. And little did you know the negative impact a simple, beautiful rocky shoreline would have on this ol' itinerant weatherman...