The Notebook [DVD]

Please note this is a region 2 DVD and will require a region 2 or region free DVD player in order to play.

Behind every great love is a great story.

Adapted from Nicholas Sparks' best-selling novel, and directed by Nick Cassavetes (the son of legendary director John Cassavettes).

A sweeping love story told by a man reading from his faded notebook (James Garner) to a woman in a nursing home (Gena Rowlands - real-life mother of Nick Cassavetes). 'The Notebook' follows the lives of two North Carolina teens from very different worlds (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams). Though her upbringing takes place in an antebellum mansion, and he grew up in the kind of house where musicians strum on the porch, that doesn't stop Noah and Allie from spending one incredible summer together, before they are separated, first by her parents and then by WWII.

After the war is over, everything is different. Allie is engaged to a successful businessman, and Noah lives alone with his 200-year-old house that he lovingly restores. But, when Allie reads a newspaper article about Noah's handiwork. She knows that she's got to find him, and make a decision once and for all about the path her life - and her love - must take.

When you consider that old-fashioned tearjerkers are an endangered species in Hollywood, a movie like The Notebook can be embraced without apology. Yes, it's syrupy sweet and clogged with clichés, and one can only marvel at the irony of Nick Cassavetes directing a weeper that his late father John--whose own films were devoid of saccharine sentiment--would have sneered at. Still, this touchingly impassioned and great-looking adaptation of the popular Nicholas Sparks novel has much to recommend, including appealing young costars (Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) and appealing old costars (James Garner and Gena Rowlands, the director's mother) playing the same loving couple in (respectively) early 1940s and present-day North Carolina. He was poor, she was rich, and you can guess the rest; decades later, he's unabashedly devoted, and she's drifting into the memory-loss of senile dementia. How their love endured is the story preserved in the titular notebook that he reads to her in their twilight years. The movie's open to ridicule, but as a delicate tearjerker it works just fine. Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember were also based on Sparks novels, suggesting a triple-feature that hopeless romantics will cherish. --Jeff Shannon