infinite improbability

While I'm at it, here's why I didn't like The Notebook

I said I was going to post a review of The Notebook after Holton got a bit testy with me for dissing it, so here it is.

To start with, I'm not a big fan of movies that treat the audience as though they are stupid. The movie starts out with an elderly man reading out of a leather notebook to an elderly woman who is clearly suffering with dementia. Cut to the story in the notebook, where we see a young man first meeting a young woman. Now, unless you've been living under a rock in outer Mongolia or something for oh, the last hundred years, it should be totally obvious to you what the relationship is between the elderly couple and the young couple. But, does the movie show any respect whatsoever for the intelligence of its audience and admit that the two couples are one and the same? No, it keeps dragging you along for the entire film, trying to keep you guessing, so that then when you find out, you are supposed to feel an outpouring of emotion for how wonderful the guy is for sticking by the woman for all those years, even when he thought he had lost her. Problem is, unless you've been living under the aforementioned rock, it's not a suprise, and I don't particularly like films that not only insult the intelligence of the audience, but that use the very thing that is insulting the intelligence of the audience to manipulate the emotions of said audience.

If that's not enough, rather than try to create characters that are truely compelling, they expect us to relate those characters to elderly couples that we know, and to transfer our emotions about those real people to the characters in the movie. Both characters are cardboard cutouts who fall flat on their own, but once we transfer our emotions about real people to those characters, and start seeing the characters not as the cardboard cutouts that they are but as the people we know and love, then the movie is capable at tugging at our heartstrings. The whole time I was watching The Notebook, I was sitting there feeling like the director was trying every trick in the book to yank the right strings to manipulate my emotions so that I would cry, and while I have felt like crying in movies, it's never been in one where the director is so blatantly trying to make me cry. I can think of hundreds of ways that the story could have been made to be truely compelling, but rather than bothering with a real story, they relied on a cardboard stock framework. There were a few genuinely touching moments, but those moments were cheapened by all of the emotional manipulation that went on around it. Besides, I don't think that they gave us sufficient reason to like the young version of either half of the couple, and as a result, I had a hard time getting into the story. It would have been better if they had done flashbacks of the whole course of their life so that we knew how the young man and woman came to be the people they were at the end of the movie, because it's not a few years of a couple's youth that shapes them, it's the events over the entire course of their lives.