Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) is the world’s most famous movie star. William Thacker (Hugh grant) owns a travel bookstore in the quaint neighborhood of Notting Hill. When their paths cross, the couple comes to face the ultimate question: can two people fall in love with the whole world watching?They don’t really make many romantic comedies like Notting Hill anymore–blissfully romantic, sincerely sweet, and not grounded in any reality whatsoever. Pure fairy tale, and with a huge debt to Roman Holiday, Notting Hill ponders what would happen if a beautiful, world-famous person were to suddenly drop into your life unannounced and promptly fall in love with you. That’s the crux of the situation for William Thacker (Hugh Grant), who owns a travel bookshop in London’s fashionable Notting Hill district. Hopelessly ordinary (well, as ordinary as you can be when you’re Hugh Grant), William is going about his life when renowned movie star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) walks into his bookstore and into his heart. After another contrived meet-cute involving spilled orange juice, William and Anna share a spontaneous kiss (big suspension of disbelief required here), and soon both are smitten. The question is, of course, can William and Anna reconcile his decidedly commonplace bookseller existence and her lifestyle as a jet-setting, paparazzi-stalked celebrity? (Take a wild guess at the answer.) Smartly scripted by Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral) and directed by Roger Michell (Persuasion), Notting Hill is hardly realistic, but as wish fulfillment and a romantic comedy, it’s irresistible. True, Roberts doesn’t really have to stretch very far to play a big-time actress who makes $15 million per movie, but she’s more winning and relaxed than she’s been in years, and Grant is sweetly understated as a man blindsided by love. Together, in moments of quiet, they’re a charming couple, and you can feel her craving for real love and his awe and amazement at the wonderful person for whom he has fallen. The only blight on the film is its overbearing pop soundtrack, though Elvis Costello’s heart-wrenching version of “She” gets poignant exposure. With Rhys Ifans as Grant’s scene-stealing, slovenly housemate and Alec Baldwin in a sly, perfectly cast cameo. –Mark Englehart
Notting Hill (Collector’s Edition)
Pinned on January 24, 2013 at 1:50 am by Todd Ponce
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Pleasantly, not what I’d expected! Let me just say that I’m not particularly a Julia Roberts fan. So when my wife asked to go see Notting Hill in the theater, I politely declined… but I figured that I’d give her a suprise and buy the DVD for her. Well, I sat and watched it with her, and was pleasantly suprised, myself!
About a girl, asking a boy to love her. Hugh Grant’s role as Travel Book Shop employee William Thacker reprises the same shy, humble, lovable, but lonely character with a small group of friends that made him a star in Four Weddings And A Funeral. That may be because Notting Hill, like FW&AF, was written by Richard Curtis. “And so it was another hopeless Wednesday when I walked a thousand yards to work, not suspecting that this was going to be the day my life would be changed forever.” In two words, that catalyst is Anna Scott, currently one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, who is promoting her latest film Helix, a sci-fi film whose costume design and one interior setting owes a nod to Kubrick’s 2001. She happens in his bookshop, but that first meeting sets off a series of meetings where they spend time with each other.