Cry, then laugh out loud

We wept during Message In A Bottle, we cried in A Walk To Remember, and we take out the Kleenex once again for The Notebook, the latest tearjerker adapted from a book by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks. Sparks has written about all forms of love in his novels: young, inevitably tragic love in the aforementioned Mandy Moore drama, love and death in the Kevin Costner starrer, even brotherly love in his new memoir Three Weeks With My Brother. But in The Notebook, we see an idea that’s Something’s Gotta Give-ish that hasn’t been widely dealt with in movies recently: the topic of love among the elderly.

James Garner plays an old man who visits an elderly woman (Gena Rowlands) in a nursing home, and reads her the love story of Noah (Ryan Gosling), a blue-collar lumber mill worker and Allie (Rachel McAdams), a rich, beautiful celebutante; they’re a young couple who, after their summer romance, gets in hot water with Allie’s parents: Because of the their large financial and social difference, her mother wants the affair to end. Allie refuses, though she’s eventually separated from Noah when her family moves to the city as World War II looms. Noah enlists and loses contact with Allie. Fourteen years later, Noah and Allie meet once again, though this time Allie’s engaged to a successful businessman (James Marsden), and she must ultimately decide who she wants to spend the rest of her life with.

The delicate love story in the core of The Notebook is a simple one, yet what makes it so powerfully poignant and compelling are the distinct stages of Allie and Noah’s passionate love: We see them in the heated, sexually-driven urgency of teen romance, and then in the fragile, fleeting tenderness of old age that Alzheimer’s is taking away from them. The story may seem maudlin, syrupy and rife with contrivances, yet director Nick Cassavetes makes it all work; the genuine earnestness and profound poignancy constantly felt in the film is a testament to the entire cast, its director, and screenwriter. The screenplay is terrific in its simplicity, and the acting is superb: Gosling, who blew us away in 2002’s brilliant neo-Nazi drama The Believer, is a formidable romantic lead; McAdams, who played the lead Plastic, Regina, in this year’s superbly witty and hilarious Mean Girls, is beautiful and graceful; and Garner and Rowlands, who play the lovers in their old age, are simultaneously heartbreaking and endearing.

Bottom Line: Though it isn’t perfect, The Notebook is a love story that we haven’t seen in a while – it’s sincere, endearing, poignant and profoundly heartbreaking.

Grade: B

Connie And Carla

Practically a remake of Some Like It Hot, Connie and Carla is the sophomore effort of Nia Vardalos, who, just as she did in her hit debut My Big Fat Greek Wedding, writes and stars in this cross-dressing comedy. Vardalos is Connie, one half of a musical duo that sings show tunes to expectant passengers at an airline lounge. But after she and Carla (Toni Collette), her singing partner, witness a mafia murder, they travel to LA to escape the hitmen. There they’re hired as dinner-theater singers; one catch: It’s a drag club, and they’re undercover as gay men in drag.

Nia Vardalos had a lot riding on this movie, as it is her follow-up to the biggest grossing indie of all time; however, turns out Greek Wedding was just a fluke. As Carla says early in the film, they’re "women dressed as men dressed as women," and the director, Michael Lembeck, expects us to be entertained with that thin premise without even tenuously developing it throughout Connie and Carla’s 98 minutes. The rest of the humor and plot points, like the poorly executed David Duchovny-as-romantic-lead subplot, are tired and stale, but at least self-deprecating; the film knows it’s bad, and it doesn’t do anything about it. And though at times it takes a few jabs at defending the lifestyles of drag queens, it just ends up insulting them instead of giving justification.

Bottom Line: A one-note joke movie solely relying on its uninspired "women dressed as men dressed as women" premise, Connie and Carla goes from Some Like It Hot to Some Like It Not.

Grade: C-

Super Size Me

When director Morgan Spurlock heard of two young obese girls who sued McDonald’s for their health problems, he thought of this outrageous idea: eat noting but food from the Golden Arches for 30 days and document the diet’s physical, mental, and emotional effects on video. The result is the superb documentary Super Size Me, for which Spurlock won the Best Director award at Sundance this year.

He’s no Michael Moore, one of the most brilliant documentary filmmakers of our time, and Super Size Me is no Fahrenheit 9/11, one of the best documentaries of all time and one of the best films of the year. Nevertheless, Morgan Spurlock is one very funny, clever, and brave man, especially with what happens to him during his 30-day McDiet: he gains 25 pounds, his cholesterol rockets, he goes through depression, he loses his libido, and his liver is compared by one of his doctors to pâté. As he goes through eating Big Macs at Mickey D’s all over America, we are presented with shocking, incredibly frightening McNugget-sized facts about fast food and America’s fast food culture; this documentary is so scary that I don’t think I’ll ever go to a McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, Burger King, or any kind of fast food chain ever again. But Super Size Me isn’t just a made-to-shock doc against McDonald’s; it’s also a thoughtful, insightful meditation on the issue of obesity in the US.

Bottom Line: Super Size Me is as hilarious, witty, crazy and outrageous as it is a thought-provoking and intensely terrifying reflection of America’s fast food culture.

Grade: B+

To-Do List

Movies

• Watch The Notebook.

• Watch Super Size Me.

• Watch the first look from the set of Elektra. For those of you who thought one of the only good things about Daredevil was Jennifer Garner as the sexy Elektra Nachios (I was one), its spin-off, Elektra, is set for US release February 18, 2005, and I cannot be more excited. To whet your appetite, watch the first trailer/behind-the-scenes look on TheMovieBox.net.

• Don’t watch Connie and Carla.

• Don’t watch Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid. The sequel to 1997’s Anaconda doesn’t only have a stupid plot, excruciatingly terrible acting, and cheapo-looking CGI: it doesn’t have J.Lo!

TV

• Watch Sex And The City, every Tuesday at 10 pm on HBO. The sixth and final season of Sex And The City – one of the show’s best seasons – is made up of two parts: the first bunch of episodes is a 12-episode clump; the second bunch, which ends with the series finale, has eight episodes. Currently showing on HBO is the first clump, wherein Charlotte converts to Judaism and gets married again, this time to her divorce lawyer Harry (and finally, unlike Trey, he can get it up); Samantha actually falls in love with Smith; Miranda realizes she still has feelings for Steve; and Carrie meets acclaimed Russian artist Aleksandr Petrovsky. Season six also features the most infamous breakup of SATC history: Berger dumps Carrie via Post-it. Also, look out for one of my favorite SATC episodes, A Woman’s Right To Shoes, wherein Carrie loses her $485 Manolos and Samantha coins a new definition for the word "teabag."

• Don’t watch The Swan, every Friday at 8 p.m. on Studio 23. A twist on Extreme Makeover with a hint of Queer Eye, every episode of The Swan has two "ugly ducklings" go through drastic surgical procedures – liposuction, breast implants, nose jobs, chin implants – to look "beautiful." What’s more, one of the two will be chosen to later on join a beauty pageant to crown the ultimate "Swan." Not only is it the most shamelessly misogynistic and degrading show on TV, the message it sends includes everything that’s wrong with society: the stereotyping, the forced conformity, the image that true beauty is having big boobs and a perfect nose.

Award Show Countdown: 16 days left till the 56th Annual Emmy Awards

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For comments, e-mail me at lanz_gryffindor@yahoo.com.