Editor Reviews:

Description:
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?

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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

Amazon.com:
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

Rating : - Notting much here...
I have no problem with light "date" movies. But there has to be some sort of plot and the characters have to be developed. In Notting Hill, you have an underwritten screenplay and two underdeveloped characters cruising on autopilot. The actress character is totally unbelievable--she's hollow (I don't mean shallow...I mean they didn't bother to write a character and relied too much on Julia Roberts' 24-carat teeth) and boring--what exactly has made the world fall in love with her? She's dull as a mole on a vole, and she basically plays a blander, more dumbed-down version of Julia Roberts, if that's possible. Same with Hugh "I'm Too Cutsie For My Shirt" Grant--sorry, he just can't pull off an ordinary guy who runs a shop any more than Cary Grant could. Now, if they'd cast it with an unknown here it might have been more interesting. As it is, this couple is just too picture-perfect for reality.

The story here is certainly possible, but the execution is ludicrous, chock full of inconsistencies. When it's convenient for the plot Julia is hounded by the paparazzi. When it's convenient for the plot she can slip into a restaurant with her new beau and no one in the place notices her. Sometimes she can walk down the street undisguised and sometimes she can't, depending on what works for the story at that moment. Consistency isn't a concern here.

The supporting cast is mostly wasted. We have the obligatory and cliched flatmate who's an embarrassment and provides moments of grossout-ness, yet he's never developed and could have been cut from the story completely for all he does. Other miscellaneous characters fade in and out--a very vaguely-developed restaurateur who ends up closing down his business comes to mind. The only really intriguing people are a couple in the form of a wife in a wheelchair and a husband coping with what may be an empty midlife. They have a certain Bergmanesque quality (Scenes From A Marriage?); if only they were more central this could have been an interesting movie. They are part of one of the two best scenes--that where Julia comes to the dinner party and meets "ordinary folks." For a while I thought the film would now take off, but afterwards it falls back into warmed-over formula. (The other fun scene was where Hugh unwittingly attends a press conference at Julia's hotel suite, and winds up "interviewing" not just her, but the co-stars of her latest flick as well. "So I guess this is your first film," he says to an eight-year-old actress. "Actually," she replies with a casualness beyond her years, "It's my twenty-third.")

Some of the dialogue could be used at poison control centers to induce vomiting. "I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking to be loved," says the Pretty Woman with her goo-goo eyes. If there is a hell for screenwriters, I wonder if they have to sit through that line looped for eternity; such a prospect makes the horrors in a Hieronymus Bosch painting seem pleasant by comparison. I know we expect a sappy ending, but famous actresses have a lot more self-possession than this slop. The climax, by the way, somewhat rips off a far far better film about differences in caste and circumstance--1953's Roman Holiday, with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck.

The worst thing about the film is the choice of music, however. Like all of today's date films, we must have a wall-to-wall soundtrack of pop hits. Only these are about as subtle as bulldozers as they talk us through the story. I guess no one trusts the audience even a little bit these days. I'm surprised they didn't have captions flash up that read "CRY NOW" and "LAUGH NOW."

Nottin' Hill was so lame I didn't watch any of the supplements. I can't imagine what commentary the director could yap about. This isn't Billy Wilder, after all. --Now *there's* a guy who made smart comedies...