The Notebook
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DVD details
Actor: Anthony-Michael Q. Thomas, Gena Rowlands, James Garner, Rachel McAdams, Ryan GoslingBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 123 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-02-08
Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: New Line Home Video
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- AC-3; Closed-captioned; Color; Dolby; DVD; Subtitled; Widescreen; NTSC
DVD Reviews of The Notebook
DVD Review: The Notebook was such a touchy-feely Movie that it made a Man out of liberal, old me since I lost my Virginity while viewing it!
Summary: 1 Stars
The stereotypical tearjerker-fest, The Notebook, is infamous for appealing mostly to women--because their gender is one that's characterized by emotionality, nurturing, negotiating and verbalizing (ok...and, yes, wild mood swings)--while being avoided by men. Due to our society's gender stereotypes, sensitive men who want to get in touch with their proverbial, "feminine" side by watching The Notebook will inevitably be derided as "g*y," "h*mo," "que*r"...you get the point.
Well, that's where I put MY foot down!!!! See, I don't give a damn if the whole world knows I'm a man--NOT G*Y, though (not that there's anything wrooooong with that, wink, wink!) who enjoys The Notebook!!!! I don't care if the whole world knows that I'm suffering through a mid-life crisis; am "whipped" by my wife in a one-sided marriage-of-convenience; stay at home watching the kids as a stay-at-home-dad while my wife brings home the bacon; or cry during and after extremely brutal and domineering sex with my wife (her nickname is "ballbuster"). I am a man (hear me roar; no, more like meow and purr) who just happens to really enjoy the emasculated-man's movie, The Notebook...to where I'm actively psychologically dependent on said movie just to get by every day of my life.
See, I'm the kind of man who's the leftover relic of the stereotypical, "sensitive," 90s-type man...except I'm now living in the 21st century. As such, I purposefully gravitate towards proverbial "chick flicks," films which will get me murderously derided as a "h*mo," "que*r," etc., just because I'm intentionally trying to get in touch with my feminine side (and my wife who whips the hell out of me has threatened to withhold sex AGAIN and berate me in public if I don't comply!).
So, it follows that The Notebook was the no-brainer choice for me to get in touch with my feminine side; you know, the side that's more nurturing, intellectual, loving...and also bossy, irrational, and oftentimes just plain bitchy (and definitely no good with managing money). Anywho, what attracted me instantly to The Notebook were the leads: Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams (both Canadians, which immediately lowered my respect for the casting director). Especially Gosling, who, when he removes his shirt in the film (4 times; I know; I counted), has that desirable, lean-muscular look that you could just picture yourself ******! Ahem, just disregard that last thought...I really wanted to write that McAdams is very hot. Very, very hot indeed. Yes, I'm a heterosexual man and I find women "hot." Yes, that's what I really meant.
I was monstrously confused by the abrupt and awkward flashback sequences of The Notebook; that's how it tells its story: James Garner and Gena Rowlands are the contemporary Noah and Allie, who are now old and near-death. The flashbacks tell the story of their meeting and sometimes torrid courtship and relationship while Garner and Rowlands are Noah and Allie in the present, one beset with Alzheimer's and the other having a bad heart.
The first flashback tells of Noah and Allie's first encounter. He pursues her at a carnival--which is so alien to me since as a guy in touch with his feminine side, my wife actually courted me--and actually does some ext*rtion to force her to go out with him (he hangs on a pole when the ferris wheel's stopped and threatens to let go). This leads to Noah and his friend bumping into Allie and her friend at the movies like THAT'S never happened before in a romantic movie! Noah and Allie get some alone time via going for a walk when it's revealed that their respective friends are horn dogs, who continuously stick their tongues down each other's throats at the movies (first, this lascivious showing of lust bothered me, but then I realized I was a moral relativist, so I was fine with it!). Their walk ends up deteriorating in a barbaric cliché of boy-meets-girl predictability: they confide in each other, and he "philosophically" asks her why she never does anything for herself! This sappiness and insipidness would've already rightly driven away any real, heterosexual man, but I'm proud to say that in-touch-with-his-feminine-side me had the estrogen-loving willpower to still sit through it!!!!
The flashback continues in a scene which has Noah luring Allie to an old, abandoned house he only claims he wants to fix up for her. Riiiiiight, we guys know what's really on Noah's mind in this case...he wants to cook her dinner, wind and dine her, and then NOT expect her to put out! Uhhhhhh, at least that's what my first date with my wife was like. Anywho, this abandoned-house setting brings forth the first, real untrustworthy part of the movie that even had a moral relativist like me discomforted.
Keeping in mind that this film is rated PG-13, I nearly had a momentary pang of conscience when I next saw that Allie was slavishly begging Noah to shag her. What made it worse was that due to the film's misleading rating, I had ALL of my children gathered on the floor in front of the TV and around my La-Z-Boy recliner about to have their innocent, delicate eyes and minds exposed to potentially lurid, Hollywood-style glorification of p*rn!!!! However, I soon threw moral decision-making out the window when I realized that my kids--Ali Baba, Hassan, Benazeer, Ibn Al Ryad Bin Fazoul, Achmed and Butch (Butch is actually my adopted son; all the rest are from my first marriage when I forcefully had them convert to Islam)--would probably be having profane sex soon anyway, seeing as how they're all enrolled in the Maine school system, where birth control's available for 11-year-olds.
So letting my kids watch the sex scene, I disappointingly discovered that it was merely the kind which frustratingly insinuates sex via the facial expressions and groans of the exemplary actors (kind of like the "lovemaking" in my marriage) instead of being full-on p*rn. Oh, well.
At this juncture Noah and Allie are separated by his feelings of resentful inadequacy at Allie's parents' (they're well-to-do, you know) derision of him. He fights in WW2 (I hated this patriotic, pro-American tangent of the character in the film; this ALMOST ruined what could've been the perfect, sappy vehicle to put me in touch with my feminine side permanently) and so breaks off contact with Allie for seven years. Bizarrely, though, the conclusion of the war finds him right back in the same town where--gasp!--Allie still resides also, probably due to the writers' abysmal shortcoming at understanding proper believability in film! In the meantime, Allie's been shacking up with an equally well-to-do man who also served in WW2 (two pro-war characters in one movie?! I almost wanted to shout, "F*** that!"), but soon stabs him in the back to fraternize with Noah (we all know the best romances are the ones where cheating on lovers is involved).
At this point in The Notebook, even old moral relativist me had a bit of a crisis of conscience in evaluating whether to allow my six kids to see this imminent sex scene, which turned out to be the more graphic of the two. When Allie makes an excuse to ditch her current fiancee, she gets together with Noah in Seabrook, where he takes her out rowing on a lake. Conveniently, it starts to rain as they come in from the lake, and this, naturally, would make any two people want to have relations (I mean, sex, of course). Though I finally had moral reservations about my kids seeing this sex scene--I actually let them view it because, as I wrote earlier, my kids go to school in Maine, so it won't be long before they're doing stuff like this--I began to appreciate the stark, naked beauty of this sex scene. It was so beautiful that I ended up spooning with myself (because my wife was at work) and crying like my wife just had her way with me in bed.
The sex scene was so beautiful and glorious (not obscene like those you see in Yale University's 2008 Sex Week!): when the rain came down, Noah clumsily grabbed Allie's face and pulled her face onto his despite the fact he made bad coordination and actually started kissing her eye. This occurs out in the fields, yet it's really surprising to see the couple still kissing in their clumsy way after the 500 or so yards it takes to reach the front door of his house--keep in mind they had to awkwardly keep kissing while making their way through the rain to the porch!
Here's where the sex scene really heats up in all its simulated, fabricated "passion." Inside the entryway, Noah coldly manhandles Allie and roughly shoves her against the wall (at this juncture, I was slobbering in anticipation of "rough sex"), still emotionlessly simulating all the way. Next, Allie, the repressed vixen she is, hungrily strips off her man Noah's slacks to the point where her face actually is level with his crotch for a bit; the beauty of this glorious scene of selfish lust was such a human moment in this film, let me tell you. My loins were further massaged when Noah then pulled off an article of clothing off of Allie (who cares what it was at this point) and also hoisted her up with her legs wrapped around his pelvis. At this point of serene, though fake, lovemaking, my feminine side was being nurtured so much that it was almost in reach, and I thought I was climaxing. The sheer beauty of this simulated lovemaking was further enriched when Noah proceeded to carry Allie all the way through the long hallway, up several flights of stairs and then finally into an upstairs bedroom instead of ravishing her right there on the hallway floor like a heterosexual man would. Obviously, the very sensitive writers knew that real men unnaturally delay their sexual impulses until they can ceremoniously carry their women through the length of the entire house. The sex scene wrapped up in the epitome of further beauty: both actors showing their Oscar-caliber acting by screwing up their faces in grimaces of, I guess, passion while making grunting sounds. This was the filmmakers' representation of the ideal scene of beautiful lovemaking, and as the sensitive man, I do agree.
At this point in the flashback, Noah gives Allie an ultimatum: to decide between him or her current, well-to-do boyfriend. Forwarding to the present again, the film shows Garner and Rowlands discussing this story up to this point. Keep in mind that the Rowlands character has Alzheimers and so cannot remember that Noah and Allie are in fact the present-day Garner and Rowlands. However, at this point in the film, a miracle occurs and Rowlands suddenly remembers everything! Woefully, though, this moment of fake peace is immediately ruined when Rowlands starts to go crazy and suddenly doesn't remember who Garner, as the older Noah, now is. Nurses then rush in and medicate Rowlands (about time, too!) while Garner starts crying and not about his Medicare benefits program being too hard to understand.
The movie concludes in a rather callous way when a stealthy James Garner creeps into a medicated Gena Rowlands bed, and the two of them die together overnight; a nurse then discovers the stiffs in the morning. I conjecture that the writers assumed this would be a touching moment on which to end the film, but I found it a bit creepy. Still, the movie achieved its mission by putting me completely in touch with my feminine side and allowing my wife to "whip" me even harder in my marriage now. And this is how The Notebook ended up making a liberal man out of me.
Description of The Notebook
Behind every great love is a great story. Two teenagers from opposite sides of the tracks fall in love during one summer together, but are tragically forced apart. When they reunite 7 years later, their passionate romance is rekindled, forcing one of them to choose between true love and class order.When you consider that old-fashioned tearjerkers are an endangered species in Hollywood, a movie like The Notebook can be embraced without apology. Yes, it's syrupy sweet and clogged with clichés, and one can only marvel at the irony of Nick Cassavetes directing a weeper that his late father John--whose own films were devoid of saccharine sentiment--would have sneered at. Still, this touchingly impassioned and great-looking adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks novel has much to recommend, including appealing young costars (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) and appealing old costars (James Garner and Gena Rowlands, the director's mother) playing the same loving couple in (respectively) early 1940s and present-day North Carolina. He was poor, she was rich, and you can guess the rest; decades later, he's unabashedly devoted, and she's drifting into the memory-loss of senile dementia. How their love endured is the story preserved in the titular notebook that he reads to her in their twilight years. The movie's open to ridicule, but as a delicate tearjerker it works just fine. Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember were also based on Sparks novels, suggesting a triple-feature that hopeless romantics will cherish. --Jeff Shannon
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