Endless Love was a 1979 Scott Spencer novel with an ironic title. It featured a young couple in love and in trouble who wound up realizing that love was not always, in fact, endless. Then it was a 1981 movie about obsession and late homework and arson and icky family sex voyeurism. It starred Brooke Shields at the height of her teen fame, when hyper-horny late 70s pop culture and designer jeans marketing campaigns collided with the film industry, and together they all used her as a research subject for an experiment in just how far business could push the public into responding, cash-wise, to images of extremely sexualized underage girls. At the same moment it was a Lionel Richie/Diana Ross love duet that celebrated a kind of love not actually depicted in the film, a song that dwarfed its accompanying movie in popularity. It also dwarfed all other songs that had the misfortune to be on the radio at the same time.
Now it’s a movie again, one seemingly based on the song’s lyrics and not the problem-filled original book or film adaptation. Unlike those thorny objects, the song's lyrics leave no room for doubt or wavering or half-feels. They build and build as Ross and Richie one-up each other in a contest of harmonizing, more or less throwing each other into the air like a pair of acrobatic figure skaters who know they can never fall and crash. It’s sonic religious mania, except it’s about losing your secular virginity on a bed made of marshmallows. You’d never know it was the theme song to a movie where the boyfriend deliberately sets the girlfriend’s house on fire just so he can fake-rescue her.
This idiot-child of a remake is committed to a vision of non-awkward adolescent romance and perfect white skin and wavy hairstyles. It corrects all that old creepy stuff and focuses squarely on pretty things behaving prettily. Working-class David (Alex Pettyfer) and rich princess Jade (Gabriella Wilde), young lovers who meet at high school graduation and almost immediately begin making out, spend quite a bit of time stealing away for tasteful, PG-13 humps with one another when they aren’t frolicking at teen parties that seem to center around soft drinks and games involving impromptu dance choreography. It’s a way to spend a summer.
David’s mechanic father (Robert Patrick) is chill about the arrangement; so is Jade’s mother (Joely Richardson), a wet-eyed cheerleader for teen fornication who rarely misses an opportunity to announce how
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