Product Description

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.Running Time: 124 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA UPC: 794043749728

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #135 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2005-02-08
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Full Screen, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 124 minutes

Amazon.com
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

From The New Yorker
Another story from the sap-filled pen of Nicholas Sparks ("Message in a Bottle," "A Walk to Remember") is given the familiar golden-hued treatment by the director Nick Cassavetes and the screenwriter Jeremy Leven. This love story, told through flashbacks to the nineteen-forties, concerns a woman (Gena Rowlands) who is suffering from Alzheimer's and the attempt by her old flame (James Garner) to rekindle a memory of their romantic past. Their younger selves are played by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, and their idealized love story is filled with clichés. Cassavetes unapologetically lifts romantic set pieces from earlier films like "On Golden Pond" and "East of Eden" in an attempt to rustle up some first-love tension, but the film is as bland and sentimental as a greeting card. -Bruce Diones
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

The Notebook
This is my all time favorite movie! It is one of the best love stories of all times! it makes me cry everytime! The Notebook is one of thoes movies i had to own!

Sweet at best, Sappy-Dappy and Cliched at Worst
Seriously, I don't get the rave reviews for this movie. People I know are ranting about it as if actually came within a mile of such love classics as "Titanic", "Pearl Harbor", and "A Walk in the Clouds". Trust me, it doesn't; this film doesn't set a toe on the royal grounds of films like that. And what beats me is, why? This movie has an excellent story, is based on a breathtakingly moving book, and stuck almost entirely to the book; what went wrong??

Maybe it's the characterizations. Let's start with romantic hero (or maybe fanatic) Noah. The initial meeting between them, so gently lovely in the book, is nothing even close in the movie. Instead of a mutual attraction like the one in the book, we have heroine Ally on a date with someone else and Noah chasing her like some lovesick clown. She's not interested, he won't take no for an answer, and he follows her around the whole date, even hanging from a bar on the ferris wheel, dangling in front of her seat at one point! Is this supposed to be endearing? I found it annoyingly idiotic: this guy isn't a romantic, he's a clownish dope. Eventually, for reasons I can't remember, Ally agrees to a date and finds herself slowly drawn into him. It's beyond me why; his idea of quiet time is lying on a street beneath a traffic light, late at night when the street's deserted. When he does this in front of her, she slowly lies down and joins him on the pavement with a thoughtful look on her face, as though she actually finds what he's doing to be clever or interesting (or maybe I mistook that look on her face; she could have been wondering if he'd resist when she drove him to a mental home. I rather prefer that theory). When a car nearly hits them as they're lying in the street, they scream, jump up and run, and for some reason afterwards Ally decides he's fun enough for her to date again (I guess almost getting killed by a car does give one a thrill). Their relationship progresses ever deeper after that.

The good news: Noah's character stops being an idiot and becomes deeper, along with his love for Ally. The bad news? Once Noah gives up the title of date-hungry goofball, Ally's character picks it up. Ally, to my disappointment, becomes a needy chatterbox. In the first sex scene, they go into an abandoned house and begin making love on the floor. Once they're naked and halfway into the act, Ally wrenches her lips from his long enough to say, "Are we really doing it? Are we really having sex?" He grabs her lips again, but she pulls away and says, "No really, are we actually doing this?" Well honey, he's halfway into you and your clothes are lying over there; what do you think? For some reason, the girl doesn't shut up. She keeps yapping about what a big thing it is they're doing and the scene, for me, was totally ruined (judging from poor Noah's exasperated face, it was ruined for him too). Why the director felt the need to give Ally so much unnecessary dialogue at such an unnecessary time is beyond me. This isn't the only time there's a flood of unnecessary chatter, either: when they break up not long afterward, their painful argument ends with Noah hopping in his truck and preparing to speed off. Ally watches in quiet anger and the pathos of the scene is effective..until Ally runs up to the truck and starts yapping in the window "Are we really breaking up? No seriously, are we really doing this, Noah?" Naturally, he gives her a disgusted look and speeds off anyway. WHAT is with this scene? Silent anger one minute, the girl blathering like an idiot in his face the next? Are movies like this the reason people think women can't make up their minds?

The rest of the plot is completely contrived, from them getting back together and face-sucking like mad in a rainstorm, to the scene where they finally make love, with Ally yanking Noah's pants down and Noah carrying her up the stairs with his trousers down around his ankles. And the killer is, it SHOULD have been moving! What's missing? Credibility I guess, or real pathos. The single flawless scene in the movie consists of Ally sitting on Noah's porch in early morning, painting while wrapped in a blanket the night after their love-making. If every scene had been as gentle, as sincere and vulnerable as this, the movie would have soared. Instead, it just came off as a would-be model for a moving film. Don't let anyone fool you into thinking this is a classic on the same plains as a Shakespeare or a Titanic. It's a semi-effective chick flick, and that's it. If you want to know my views of the film's ending (which I don't wish to spoil here), please read the first comment in this review's comment section.

Beautiful movie
I can't believe it took me so long to see this movie. I tend to stick to the older love stories, like Breakfast At Tiffany's, Casablanca, Gone With The Wind, etc..difficult love intrigues more more than the simple boy meets girl, she must chose, teen angst, first love romance. Which is what The Notebook is and yet it amazed me from beginning to end. It's a typical love story in so many ways and yet it's able to stand on it's own as a epic love story like no other.

What makes The Notebook so different are the actors. Enough can not be said about classics like James Garner and Gena Rowlands who are spectacular as the aging Noah and Allie. That said it was truly Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling that stole this entire film with every single scene they are in. You felt the connection between Allie and Noah from the start and knew that this kind of love was so pure and true and yet they were sweet, real, endearing, cute and most of all humorous.

Allie is the spoiled city girl from big time money and yet she's down to earth, witty and leads her life with her heart. Noah is a simple, sweet country boy who only has eyes for Allie from the moment he sees her. Noah sees a light in Allie that no one else can see and she becomes the color in his dull world. Noah is also the man all women want. He makes promises and he sticks to them. He loves with all of his heart and he finished what he starts.

They met, they fall in love and they are separated by parents, school, war, time and new people in their life. Allie who is lead by her emotions finds a new love but Noah ends up hardened by lose in war and his fathers death. He has a relationship with another but purely for physical needs because he can not give his heart to anyone but Allie. He then puts all his time into building the dream house she wanted thinking it will bring her back one day.

Seven years separate them. Allie is engaged to a man who is truly perfect for her world until she sees a picture of Noah in the paper and her world comes crashing down. Allie is then drawn back to Noah and feels she must see him again for reasons she does fully understand yet. She goes to him and finds her love for him is still as strong as ever and has been bottled up for seven years..(in one of the hottest movie sex scenes ever..check out the DVD extra's). Allie must finally take hold of her own life and do what she truly wants instead of what is expected of her. She must make a choice between a wealthy, easy life with a man who loves her or the not so easy life with someone who challenges her and loves her even more for exactly who she is. In the end Allie goes with her heart and and chooses Noah simply because she loves him more.

The Notebook is about how far love can really go. Through time, hardship, pain, lose, disease, illness and the heavy had of time, nothing changes true love.