Hacker Cinema
Notting Hill
1999 · Film · 124 min
Directed by Roger Michell
London bookstore owner William Thacker's quiet life turns upside down when a chance encounter with famous actress Anna Scott sparks an unlikely romance challenged by their vastly different worlds.
2 positive4 neutralfrom 6 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
6 comments on Hacker News
It reminds me a little of set dressing in movies. Every sophisticated character owns a chemex, but they use a french press to make coffee onscreen. Harks back to the days of Notting Hill when we had to believe that Hugh Grant ran a failing second hand bookstore while living in a well-decorated house in central London. Do we think the author uses his Teenage Engineering pocket operators, or are they window dressing? Do we need Godel, Escher and Bach as the backdrop for a completely unrelated photo?
I watched the movie first, found out who wrote it, and read the book it was in.
I did love a lot the short story, and kind of got mad at "Arrival" for some of the changes it makes to the story. But. After several (SEVERAL) re watches of the movie, I got to "understand" what Villeneuve was about, and I fell in love with the movie as well.
It currently sits in probably my top 5 preferred movies to re watch (Being the others both Blade Runners, About Time & Notting Hill in no preferred order)
* Flesh out a movie about x following the Hero's Journey in the style of Notting Hill.
* Create a scene in which a character with the mannerisms of Tom Cruise from Top Gun goes into a bar and says "...."
Meanwhile, the x.com domain seems to be somewhat shambolic.
As I write this, it hits a Godaddy parking page. According to this[0] tweet[1], it's been a Godaddy site, a dead link, a redirect, and now a godaddy site again.
Shambles.
[0] https://twitter.com/rothschildmd/status/1683289016723202050
[1] No, I'm not calling them X's. That name is saved for those who broke my heart, made me cry, and left me binge watching Notting Hill.
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
Personally I'd say put the book down and just do it, but then I've been writing since I was 15.
My best advice would be to read a really good novel while you're writing, because there's something about seeing a novel unfold whilst you're writing one that seems to help the process along. You'll likely get through 3-4 books (if you read like me) when writing a novel and this can really help in the beginning because you see something started in the beginning really unfold at the end and it's like 'holy crap, thats the best thing in the entire book', then you have a moment thinking 'well why the fuck aren't I doing something like that!', then you do.
The other advantage in reading while you write is that I think it reassures you when you get blocked, because 99% of the time you'll think the story is going too slowly, however that's because it takes like 10-100 times longer to write something creative than it does to read it. I think it was Richard Curtis (Notting Hill/Bridget Jones/Love Actually) who made this point; he was asked why there's such a large gap between all his great award winning movies and he said quite simply, 'because it takes a lot of time to write something important to me'. This is quite well illustrated by his writing credits, he switches between writing a blockbuster movie and TV comedy (Mr Bean) with his friend from university.