The Notebook
Is this a joke? Are they parodying the romcom genre or is this the prototypical one, without any hint of any subversion whatsoever? Should have formed a polycule.
It’s the anti-drama, even the people that seem evil, turn out to be goody two shoes later on. The only real tragedy is what happens to Martha, but she gets about two scenes.
The protagonists are a rich girl slumming it on a rural area, and a “poor” boy that gets infatuated with her in the first seconds as he is introduced. There’s is no real courtship, he just loves her from the very start. She plays hard to get for 5 minutes, then the guy climbs a Ferris wheel and threatens suicide if she doesn’t go out on a date with him. Yikes!
They have their summer fling, his loving father loves her, her parents are nice but hate that he earns 40 cents an hour. At the end of the summer, she is moving to New York to college, and they are about to fuck, when her parents call the cops on them. They break up, and she leaves the next day.
They both still love each other, so the boy writes her 1 letter a day for a year, but her mother hides them. He gives up after that, and she seems oblivious that she is an adult with money, she could visit or something.
Seven years pass (including WW2), our boy uses the GI bill money to rebuild the crumbling plantation where they almost fucked, and instead of jerking off into sawdust all day, she has Martha the war widow, whom he never wants to be more than a fuck buddy. The girl meets and gets proposed by some former officer turned stock broker. Some Southern richy-rich, you know it’s blood money from slavery, just like her family.
By coincidence, she sees the boy’s picture in the paper, so she turns adult for a scene, and just drives there, and they fuck like rabbits. She finds out about the letters, but then her mother magically appears to tell her her similar story with some other blue-collar worker, where she took the richy-rich option. The mother then gives her the letters.
She pretends to have a conundrum between the guys, but the richy-rich dude understands that he does not want to force her, so she lives with the poor boy. Magnanimous, from a Patrick Bateman type, how many homeless guys were murdered afterwards?
The framing device is much later, when they are both elderly, she has dementia, and he pretends to live in the assisted living facility as a patient, and tells her the story every day. Can’t believe Adam Sandler stole this plot for My Girlfriend has Amnesia.
There’s a undercurrent of nastiness, completely unacknowledged. The first date happens because the boy threatens suicide. The Help is always black, in the South, even in “present” times. There’s a throwaway scene where they have an integrated dance, this is not Hairspray.
The final BS is taking a story of teenagers and having people in their older 20s. It makes the tantrums ridiculous. Should have gone with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, she looks a child even in her 30s. Casting Britney Spears would be a doozy.
Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to see the framing device without laughing. It’s just the writer stroking his own ego, by having the characters reviewing their own story as heartwarming. What a crock of shit.
Not even the best film where Ryan Gosling recites his baseline.
Can’t believe the director cast his own mother as the elderly woman, who then has dementia IRL.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.