Oh, hello, dear readers. Another Monday has arrived, and you have come once again to read an essay . . . or perhaps you’ve dropped by first thing on Tuesday morning, after you settled down at your desk with a cup of coffee and answered a couple of e-mails, and once you’d shooed the boss out of your office, you thought you could read Tomato Nation in peace. Alas, I regret to inform you that I cannot write my usual column this week. Quite the contrary: I must stay in bed, moaning weakly, so near my keyboard and yet so very far away, all because I went to the movies last night and made the grave mistake of seeing Here On Earth, only to find myself dodging falling anvils, throwing myself out of the way of the giant wheels of cheese that thundered towards me at regular intervals, and fending off repeated skillet blows to the posterior occipital region that left little of my poor head but a pulpy mass. Due to the large amounts of sickly-sweet dialogue I ingested, every tooth in my head has fallen out, rendering me unable to eat solid food, and after poking myself repeatedly in the eye with one of the sharper unpopped popcorn kernels in the bag, I cannot see very well either.

I did manage, however, to dictate a letter to the writer of the screenplay, one Michael Seitzman, and with the help of voice-recognition software – though somewhat impeded by my own toothlessness – I’ve posted it here for your perusal.

Dear Mr. Seitzman, Or Mr. Seitzman’s Agent, Or Mr. Seitzman’s Mom, Or Whomever I May Hold Responsible For Mr. Seitzman Not Meeting His Rightful Fate Of Drowning In A Hobnailed Boot,

I do not know you, sir. For all I know, you give freely to charity, help to keep your neighborhood free of litter, and accompany little old ladies across streets in the town where you live, and thus I do not wish to impugn your character. Still, I must insist, for the continued health and good fortune of American culture, that you never write another screenplay as long as you live. Put down your pen. Step away from your laptop. Go directly to law school: do not pass “Go,” and do not collect two hundred dollars, or two hundred thousand, or whatever dollar amount 20th Century Fox proposes to pay you for the next steaming pile of offal in your so-called oeuvre. Your writing is, in a word, wretched, and you must stop perpetrating it upon the innocent.

If you refuse to give up writing – if we may call what you do “writing” – for a career that better suits you, like, for example, any other career on earth, then please allow me to pass along a few words of advice before you begin your next project. I do not pretend to understand the vagaries of the screen trade, but I have watched a movie or two in my life, and I believe you will find my counsel helpful.

1. Do not include love scenes in which overwrought teenage boys name the body parts of their girlfriends after US states. If you must pen such a scene, please do not name the breasts “New York” and “New Jersey”; it causes unnecessary speculation as to which cities occupy the nipples. Also, it is almost incomprehensibly stupid and annoying.

2. Do not rely solely on John Hughes movies in order to reinforce class distinctions. Stuffing one of your male leads into a pair of pressed khakis and a Hilfiger button-down and ordering supporting characters to call him “Richie” will, alas, not get the job done. Furthermore, we all know you lifted the term from Pretty In Pink in the first place, so unless you plan to lobby for casting James Spader, try writing something original. I might add also that I have never in my life seen a boarding-school student dressed as well as Kelley, the ostensible prep, or even as well as Jasper, the alleged “townie.” Most boarding-school boys dress like vagrants. Visit the campus of Lawrenceville and look for yourself.

3. Do not bludgeon the audience over the head with exhausted clichés. Yes, yes, Kelley and Sam stand out in the rain, and it cleanses them of their carking cares. We get it. Yes, yes, the roses continue to bloom in Kelley’s dead mother’s greenhouse, even though every other plant in the greenhouse has died and begun to rot. It Is A Symbol Of Their Love. It is also very painful when applied via blunt-force trauma to the backs of our heads. We get it, Mr. Seitzman, I assure you. And yes, we understood from the moment Sam made that comment about not wanting to visit the doctor that she would die, but thank you for letting Foreshadowing trample every single toe on my left foot anyway. For the love of God, Mr. Seitzman, we get it. We all get it, all across the land. Amish people, the hard of hearing, unborn babies – we all get it.

4. Do not require the actors to perform mime sequences. I have done extensive polling on this subject, and I can tell you with no small degree of authority that nobody likes a mime, or a mime sequence.

5. If you must belabor a point several hundred times using “Birches,” please advise the sound team that they will have to turn up the mix, in order to drown out the sound of Robert Frost spinning like a propeller in his grave.

6. Did I mention that you should ease up on the trite symbolism? Because the audience can draw the parallel between the rebuilding of the restaurant and the building of the relationship between Kelley and Sam without any help. Truly. We get it.

7. The next time you compose a “heartbreaking” coda in which Our Hero recites another line from “Birches” . . . again . . . while the camera lingers on his face in endless close-up . . . and every violinist between here and Santa Barbara is attacking their strings with Carnegie Hall-level relish . . . please, I beg of you, tell the director to give him some glycerin. I find Chris Klein quite fetching, but he needs the help.

8. Go through your script, and cull out the following lines, and any lines resembling them: “I don’t know what we are anymore.” “I don’t want to lose you.” “He’s just like the rest of them!” (And its corollary, “Daddy, you don’t even know him!”)

9. Make it perfectly, unmistakably clear to the casting director that you do not want a Helen Hunt look-alike as the female lead, because the audience will keep expecting to see Paul Reiser lurking in a corner of the barn and attempting to sell us long-distance telephone service.

10. When relying on a lead character’s terminal illness as a plot point, it often helps the script’s credibility if the character does not “come down with” said terminal illness in the last twenty minutes of the film; it also helps if the character actually looks like she has something, anything at all, wrong with her. “Too much orangey make-up” is not a disease.

11. Yes, yes, she’s in heaven, running around in a field. We get it.

12. And in other news, we get it.

I have seen dozens of terrible movies in my life, Mr. Seitzman. I’ve seen all the Karate Kid films. I’ve seen most of Russ Meyer’s catalog. I’ve seen Wild Orchid, and I’ve seen Hook. Here On Earth is the worst movie I have ever seen. I confess that I only bought a ticket to it so that I could gaze upon Chris Klein, and the presence of Josh Hartnett didn’t hurt either, but I never expected to suffer for your art, and I would have just left the theater, but a giant boulder with the words “DOOMED LOVE” painted on its side fell from the sky and pinned me to my seat.

In closing, your writing bites, you owe me nine dollars and fifty cents, and I hate you.

“The next Titanic“? God help us all.
Tomatoes think alike.

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