Listen you’re going to have to watch this at some point in your life! Suck it up and deal with it! I did! And I’m a whole lot better for doing so! So grab that Ryan Gosling band-aid and rip it off, don’t peel, just rip! This is ‘Screensavers; and I’m watching The Notebook. F*ck Valentine’s’Day!
What’s it about?
Love or something!
Love in the 1940s between two beautiful young people!
Okay! It’s a love story about a boy and a girl from different backgrounds, very cutting edge! She’s rich! He’s poor! She’s prissy! He’s still poor! Then there are two old people, a nice little old man named Duke and a nice, even littler old lady, they live in a nursing home and he keeps her company and tells her stories while she fights a losing battle with dementia.
It happens to be a very similar story to the one the movie is about (A twist?! What? That’s so unexpected in this genre!)! A boy and a girl who shouldn’t be together, get together, then fall apart, then make awful life choices before winding back up together! It’s in the south and there’s a war or something!
In all seriousness, it’s about a boy named Noah (Ryan Gosling) and a girl named Allie (Rachel McAdams) and how their lives seem intertwined, their on again, off again relationship and how destiny always seems to bring them back together.
No, they aren’t birds! Although if they were from an alternate Earth where humans were part bird this movie would have been a hell of a lot more interesting!
Birdless, you’ll have to soldier on! Just like our young lovers! A whirlwind romance tosses what should have been just a summer fling, into the winds of fate and the pair always find their way back to each other. War, disgruntled family, angry spouses, nothing can keep them apart especially when Noah has gone and built a huge house for them to live in (sorry that’s my cynicism leaking out!).
The whole story flits between the past and present, as Duke retells a story from an old notebook (and it literally just dawned on me why this movie is called The Notebook! Good god, this movie made me dumb!).
Essentially, the plot is about two people being stubborn and acting like that’s what love is about!
Who’s in it?
Well as mentioned above, everyone’s favourite dreamboat, Ryan Gosling is in it (honestly I don’t see it, I really don’t, and I find Beast from the X-Men cartoons attractive… your move Gosling!). He plays our plucky lovesick obstinate male manly masculine man and is joined by Rachel McAdams, girl from the right side of the tracks, prissy, devoted, pretty and feminine she woman.
To be fair to McAdams she would go on to do The Time Traveller’s Wife (a chance she could have used to turn back time on this first mess) and that would turn out to be steamier mess than this one!
There are other people in it I think! For the most part though the whole movie rode on the back of two young people who could speak ( and not act!) words at each other while making pained facial expressions of love (or constipation).
Is it really that bad?
You know at the time Polio was making its way around the US in an epidemic! It occurred to me that it may have been more fun to contract that disease than pal around with these two! Better yet they contract it, are quarantined and vanish!
Okay fine! I cried! There I admit it, I wept floods! I sobbed, wailed and even got that weird pain in your throat when you try to hold back tears too long! Not because the movie was good! No because the little old lady and the little old man and their story – I’d have actually happily enjoyed just the two of them on-screen with James Garner reading the script to Gena Rowlands.
Gosling and McAdams are insufferable… just like Polio!
What should I watch instead?
Kill Bill! You want a real love story, watch that! Seriously, nothing says love like getting revenge on the schmuck who broke your heart… and tried to kill you… with the aid of assassins who were your friends!
Editor-in-Chief, part-time super villain and hoarder of cats. If you can’t find me writing, I’m probably in the kitchen!
