Notebook

I remember lotsa hype about this one. I was mildly interested in seeing it. A few of my friends said they liked it. All female friends. This is a hardcore chick flick.   Caught it on cable one night and was 80% paying attention to it.

Told in flashback, it's set around WW II, a pretty teenage rich girl moves into town and the poor-but-noble teenage boy falls in love with her at first sight.

Unlike most Hollyweird love stories, they don't actually fall in love in eight minutes. It takes twelve. Just kidding. They do fall "in love" quickly, but the story does imply that they spent weeks or months together as they fall for each other more deeply.

But this is young love, so when the parents of the girl object her reaction is the usual, "You can't understand what we feel for each other!" Every young couple thinks they're unique in finding true and everlasting love like only one couple in a century experience. *heavy sigh* (I'm sighing for the young couples, not the story. The story captures that reasonably well.)

So the rich family moves away, taking the girl with her. They intercept the boy's letters (I don't think that's too much of a spoiler.) They try to carry on with their lives.

Then she spots a newspaper article about him and feels compelled to find out if what they had was real.

They both have entanglements that they have to deal with. One minor surprise was when the current girlfriend of the guy drops by and asks to meet her. Right after that, the mother reveals just how well she understood her daughter's feelings.

After thinking about it some more, I guess the initial attraction really isn't the central theme. It's more about what happens later and how they deal with it. That would explain why the story just kind of asserts, "Look. They're in love." without going into very much detail.

The story was pretty good. A little sappy, but not too bad. Certainly not anything like a formula Hollyweird movie. They actually threw in a little bit of real life disappointment, and how these characters would deal with that. I liked it okay.

The performances were okay. I thought the guy underplayed the early meeting a bit. He did have one or two attention-getting bits. But somehow it felt like he didn't really do anything and she fell for him anyway. Rachel McAdams was pretty sexy, of course.

On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Pay Per View.  It was okay, but a bit too hardcore chick flick for my taste.

Back to movies

Please email comments, typos, errors, dead links, and any suggestions to webmaster@mightydrake.com. (Privacy statement)
Copyright © 1997-2007 Mighty Drake, Inc. All rights reserved.
Last modified: August 20, 2005

Best viewed with:	Hosted by:	Composed with:	In association  with:	Fight Spam
Opera or Mozilla or Explorer or Netscape	Site 5	FrontPage	Amazon.com	Spamcop.net &  Popfile & Greylisting