I resolve never to watch The Notebook again. That movie was even worse than I expected. Apart from the odd genuinely funny line of dialogue and some great acting from the old people, it was a massive sack of crap. And before Mindy whines about manliness, everyone in my family disliked it - my mom perhaps most of all.
The story was pathetically thin (worse even than most romantic dramas), most of the characters were at best base-trim archetypes with no particularly interesting traits, Walt Whitman's poetry is even worse than last I'd heard it, the main plot distracted from the far more emotionally involving story about an old man experiencing the pain of watching his wife succumb to dementia whilst undergoing physical degeneration himself, and some of dialogue was just revoltingly indulgent and self-serving, especially the parts where the old woman remarks on how good the story is. The male lead is weirdly obsessive but apparently not enough to stop him from getting some ass on the side whilst the female lead is away, without showing any particular affection for the other woman in question. Perhaps worst of all, the female lead was just an indecisive, incompetent, irresponsible, compassionless, nymphomanic wretch who couldn't so much as take a dump without supervision. Her fiancee kinda gets tossed by the wayside despite being an entirely likeable character whom the female lead ostensibly likes a lot.
Oh, and the female lead is rich. And the guy is poor. God forbid we have a romance that doesn't involve some kind of prejudice, otherwise we might actually have to try to justify the behavior of the individuals and put more than 20 minutes into crafting the relationship between the two characters. One could argue it's just fantasy and so the expectation of realism is misplaced, but Gurren Lagann is fantasy and that had a 3-hour fight that culminated in robots larger than galaxies beating the crap out of each other. The Notebook has Rachel McAdams shoving Ryan Gossling.
The movie tells rather than shows, and tells in a way resembling a precis rather than a real story. It's extremely difficult to understand what emotions are at work because nothing gets developed. It's perpetually giving the audience orders without any particularly good reasons for those orders, perhaps because the writers were so scared of revealing the idiotic rationale behind this nonsense that they decided to just not write anything and 'let the audience decide' to create the illusion of complexity and nuance so all those dumb bastards on Tumblr can dispute the subtext.
