‘Nights in Rodanthe’ is both patronizing and boring

Forget about “Nights in Rodanthe.” I couldn’t even stand 97 minutes there.

As an even more patronizing insult to the female target audience than this month’s pandering “The Women,” today’s romance melodrama may boast fancy production values and the likes of Richard Gere, Diane Lane and James Franco in it. But it delivers such affected theatrics, mechanical love scenes, soapy plotting, and eye-rolling corn, it makes the previous Nicholas Sparks novel adaptations “Message in a Bottle” and “The Notebook” — heck, even a Lifetime movie — seem positively edgy by comparison.