Not Feeling "Notting Hill"

Hi again!

Let's see if I can actually write something quickly!

So there are a few themes in the movies I've been watching lately.  While this isn't an exhaustive inventory, I've been watching (including some rewatching) children's movies, heist movies, and some that I would broadly define as classics.  When I'm feeling not particularly interested in being challenged, I've been watching the occasional romcom.

That instinct, combined with Netflix's algorithm randomly REALLY pushing this movie hard in my immediately postpartum few days, led me to watch "Notting Hill" (1999).

...And I hated it.  A lot.  This is one of those rare movies I finished out of spite.

Here's why:

Quite simply, it's hard to believe these people like each other?

As William, Hugh Grant is peak Hugh Grant--compulsive yet unconvincing self-deprecation posing as charm, basically a walking British version of an American "aw shucks" and some purposefully unkempt--and yet perfectly kempt--hair as his whole personality.  Who is this guy?  He seems at once boring and exhausting.

Julia Roberts's Anna Scott is equally if not more poorly realized.  She is actually pretty awful to William, yet alternatingly also super into him?  Sounds like a toxic kink she could maybe work through in therapy.  But I guess we're supposed to believe an international celebrity could instantly fall for a random guy she has some dubiously cute banter with for 90 seconds before he spills alarmingly fluorescent orange juice all over her.

Truly this movie seems like a dude's embarrassingly improbable and poorly fleshed-out fantasy--that a beautiful famous lady would throw herself at a normy guy based on next to nothing--translated into film and thereby inflicted on audiences.

And also, why in God's name is this movie so long??  Especially when Anna and William spend comparatively little time together--SO little, with interactions that are at best a mixed emotional bag given Anna's rapidly oscillating behavior toward William--it's hard to wrap one's head around how this film crosses the 2 hour mark.

One of the rare potentially redemptive moments of "Notting Hill" is a dreamy continuous scene in which William walks through the markets of Notting Hill, at turns donning and doffing his jacket as the seasons change, trudging through rain and snow then basking in brilliant sunshine, passing seasonal goods for sale and neighbors whose lives progress, all to depict the unspooling of time between his contacts with Anna.  It would be a lovely and enjoyable passage if it didn't feel completely misplaced in what is otherwise a straight-ahead, not remotely cinematically inventive romantic comedy.

Finally, the pivotal "just a girl standing in front of a boy" line has aged into maximum cringe status.  This becomes especially true when William parrots it word-for-word to his assembled friends mere minutes after Anna delivers it to him in what feels like it was supposed to be a dramatic turn-about moment, rousing said friends in a romantic call to arms to help William reunite with Anna before she's out of his life forever.  The moment lands excruciatingly flat now.  I can almost hear the screenwriter congratulating himself for writing such a clever line and wanting to milk it for all it's worth, thereby justifying this bizarre victory lap.  Blech.

I gave this movie a 1.

{Heart}