Slings and Arrows

Film Just blubbed my way through Nick Cassavette's The Notebook which is about the saddest bit of drama I've seen since Saturday. I didn't really know what the expect -- I'd rented it to see quite what the pre-Red Eye Rachel McAdams was doing the same year she made Mean Girls. I'd expected a chick flick with people running around in the rain pledging love for one another and men fighting each other over the woman they love -- well alright, Titanic on a farm. Certainly there are some of those moments, actually some of those beats are repeated, but this is actually one of those occasions when the direction, writing and performances transform what could have been predictable television movie fare into a real statement about the human capacity for loyalty and love despite the knocks that life can give you. It's a love story told Princess Bride-style by James Garner to Gina Rowlands in a convalescent home of two lovers many years before. In many ways it's classic Hollywood melodrama, but it's strong and clever enough not to present anything sugarcoated or too far outside the expected norms for human behaviour -- it has the capacity to not present the scenes you're predicting but something much truer to life instead.

[I had wondered what Rachel McAdams had been up to since The Family Stone. Turns out she's been in television as a regular on a show called Slings and Arrows which (according to Amazon):

"is based in the fictional town of New Burbage where legendary theatrical madman Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross) returns to the New Burbage Theatre Festival, the site of his greatest triumph and most humiliating failure, to assume the Artistic Directorship after the sudden death of his mentor, Oliver Welles. When Geoffrey arrives he finds that Oliver is still there, in spirit anyway, and with his guidance (and often in spite of it) Geoffrey attempts to reconcile with his past while wrestling the Festival back from the marketing department. Despite a bitter leading lady, a clueless leading man, and a scheming General Manager, he manages to stage a remarkable production of Hamlet; the play that drove him mad."

Whch sounds like In The Bleak Midwinter crashing into Northern Exposure with Mr.S along for the ride. Bites lips. How can one tv show push so many buttons? Must not order ... must not order ... oh what the hell ...]