#THE NOTEBOOK MOVIE MOVIE#

(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.

#THE NOTEBOOK MOVIE MOVIE#

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.

F lash back to the summer of 2007: Spider-Man 3 was in theatres.

The notebook movie