![]() How to think of it now? I defer to Gosling, who said in that fateful year, 2007: “God bless The Notebook. To retrace the lines of this familiar ride, even if I now find many of them horribly cheesy, and my feelings cringingly earnest. It felt good during, you know, ALL THIS, to return to an old favourite, to slip along the slick grooves of worn emotions. But that look Noah gives Allie when he asks: “Goddammit, what do you WANT?” Yeah, that still hits.Ī couple of weeks ago, before this series assignment, I rewatched The Notebook on instinct. The idea of actually fighting this way? Laughable. It is almost thrilling – and the main draw for me now – to watch two ascendant, now-acclaimed actors make the hairpin turns of its dialogue somewhat convincing. The Notebook could have been a solid B-movie romance (see: every other Nicholas Sparks adaptation), but the lead performances power it far higher than its melodramatic parts. Rewatching The Notebook for the first time in years, it’s clear, of course, how silly it was to base my idea of maturity on this movie, and also how stellar McAdams and Gosling’s performances remain. Oh, adulthood has this? You lose your senses and can’t take your hands off someone? Good to know! The whole scene is only about 4.5 minutes long, but at 13 this felt like an eternity, and a guidebook. The camera mostly lingers on McAdams’ face as she has a transcendent time (again, disappointingly high expectations were set by this movie). As far as movies go, The Notebook has a rather tame sex scene – all soft lighting, swelling music, delicate shots that don’t reveal much, nudity-wise. He proclaims, famously: “It wasn’t over … it STILL isn’t over.” At the time, I had no older friends or siblings, no health class, just the steamy handprint from Titanic, so I was thrilled when they kiss, and he pushes her against a wall, and carries her up the stairs, and strips off her soaked clothes … and the camera keeps rolling. (Actually, he wrote her 365 letters! He wrote her every day for a year!). Importantly for me then, the film hinges on one pivotal, rain-soaked scene in which Allie asks Noah why he never wrote her when they broke up. (It is transparent they were falling in love off-screen.) These two were brain-meltingly hot, an unknowing factory of aspirational summer love gifs. ![]() Their chemistry was palpable and hungry with a sharp, heady sting. But at 13, on the cusp of high school but seemingly, for me, light-years away from sneaking out with a boy, the main draw was the heat between McAdams and Gosling. All of us watching that summer night ended the movie in tears, which was a cathartic bonding experience on its own. This twist – Noah and Allie have together composed an epic love story that she mostly can’t remember – landed like a gut punch for us as emotionally chaotic seventh-graders who had imagined our sunset years approximately zero times. You wanted to know what sex was “supposed” to look and sound like AND tell everyone you bawled at the profound idea of love transcending old age? You watched The Notebook. It was the romantic movie of choice, a portal into couple-shipping YouTube and, later, Tumblr holes, a benchmark for years of unrealistic dating expectations. The Notebook probably has fans outside my demographic – it’s an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks romance novel, a book/author/genre marketed to middle-aged women – but for girls in middle school (or, at least, my middle school in suburban Ohio) between 20 or so, it was a foundational text. And so one sleepover night in my friend’s basement, I faced at least three aghast faces: “You haven’t seen The Notebook?!?” ![]() I was 13 years old and, true to sheltered oldest child form, didn’t know about any of this. The famous re-enactment of the film’s climactic lift-and-kiss at the MTV movie awards by its stars, then a real-life couple, was two years old. And The Notebook, a movie starring Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling as star-crossed teenage lovers who reconnect as adults, was three years old. Two of the top five most viewed YouTube videos were by the band My Chemical Romance. Flash back to the summer of 2007: Spider-Man 3 was in theatres. ![]()
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