If this film is anything to go off, follow these easy steps to make a girl fall in love with you:

1. Threaten to kill yourself until she agrees to go out with you
2. Play chicken in the road with her
3. Take her to an isolated, derelict house and have your way with her.
4. ???
5. Profit

The Notebook is a typical chick-flick, even down to starring Rachel McAdams, who's in so many of these films now that I feel like I'm supposed to cry when she gets hit by a bus in Mean Girls. It tells the story of two young people who fall in love, then get separated, then find each other again, but from the perspective of a flashback from the elderly versions of themselves.

The film begins with a confused looking old lady being read what's supposed to be a notebook, but is more like a novel, by her husband, who she doesn't remember because she has Alzheimer's. The book tells the story of how they met each other, and he reads it to her in the hopes it will bring her memory back.

The first flashback takes us to when they were teenagers in the 1940s. Noah, the strapping young lad that he is, takes a fancy to Allie from a distance, and consequently jumps on a ferris wheel with her, which he proceeds to dangle from until she agrees to go out with him. Then they go out to a movie and walk home, where Noah tells Allie to lie in the middle of the road with him. Why do women think it's cute to lie down in random places? They do it in Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind too. Anyway, she likes that, and they fall in love apparently.

Allie seems to fall for Noah pretty easily considering she's so controlled by her parents and they don't want her mixing with the poor commoners. This aspect of the story reminded me a lot of Titanic, and they are very, very similar, except instead of hitting an iceberg, they hit their 80s. Surprisingly similar effect.

The acting is decent on the whole, though the accents are absolutely terrible, and half the time they don't even bother trying to do it. The dialogue is very good when it's not being incredibly cheesy. You end up getting a lot of lines that sound good on the surface but don't actually make much sense. Things like when they're dancing while Noah goes "bum bum bum bum" to the tune of a song, and Allie says he's a terrible singer. What the hell did you think he was singing? The Bum song?

There's a scene that was just daft where they're playing around on a beach together. Allie runs into the sea and shouts "I'm a bird!" Probably because if she shouted the more appropriate "I'm a fish!", it doesn't sound as good, and if she jumped off a building and shouted "I'm a bird", the film would have been very different. Then Allie says "Do you think I could have been a bird in another life?" Yeah sure, but you could have also been a slug. Or someone without Alzheimer's.

When Allie and Noah are getting frisky for the first time, Noah takes her to the creepiest looking house I've ever seen. Being the gentleman that he is, Noah goes on ahead, presumably to set up some candles and make sure Leatherface is locked in his meat room.

Allie's parents decide to move her away to the city, and after a few years apart, Allie falls in love again and gets engaged. Allie spots Noah's picture in the paper, so she goes to look for him and shags him over the course of a weekend. I couldn't help but feel it was a bit mean of her to abandon her fiancée who she was, in her own words, in love with, to go and find Noah. She doesn't even seem bothered by it until she's been with Noah for a few days. Allie's mum comes and finds her at Noah's house and takes her for a drive to explain how she used to love a commoner too, and how she misses him or still loves him or something. It's pretty much just there to justify Allie cheating on her fiancée.

There's a silly bit where Noah takes Allie out on the lake in a boat and it starts pissing it down. They both start laughing manically. This is supposed to be significant, but I find it hard to believe that she loves Noah more because it started raining. Just because you play orchestral music over something doesn't mean you can do random shit.

After all these fun and frolics, it cuts back to the present day with the old versions of Allie and Noah. Here we find out that Allie wrote the book for Noah to read to her so she could remember who she is. How she managed to write a novel like that while suffering from Alzheimer's, I will never know. Also, how she knew all the stuff about what Noah was getting up to while they were apart for 7 years is a mystery. He could have told her, but surely she would have forgotten, and it's made to look like the book was written by her as a gift, so I doubt she got him to help make his own present.

It's at this point that they both randomly die. Neither of them seem frail or weak during the film, and then they just get in bed and die. It really is just 2 hours of making us like some people so it can cheaply kill them at the end and we'll give a shit.

It's a good, if unoriginal story, and shows the conflicted character of Allie reasonably well, but there's so much pure cheese in there that it can't good for your heart. I guess that's what the people who enjoy these type of films are looking for though. They love cheese. They're emotional fatties. Wow, that's a harsh double-meaning. Probably true though...