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demigirlboss.bsky.social · @demigirlboss.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Notting Hill 10/10

Genuinely one of the best romcoms I've ever watched — if not the best. It's subtle, sincere, intimate, and profoundly human in a way few can manage. Hugh Grant's William Thacker is a gentle, sensitive, mildly posh, dryly humorous deadender with nothing much going for him in life. All of his friends are similarly mediocre, but the film is never mean-spirited about this. They're all basically happy in what they do, and they cherish each other in a way that's never quite stated outright but suffuses every interaction they have in the entire movie. Julia Roberts' Anna is an unexpectedly natural fit into their group, and the film's refusal to insist upon her star power means that the premise is allowed to be only that, the *premise*, while the actual content of the movie and the story occurs via the people. The thing I keep coming back to with Notting Hill is how *human* it all feels. The core romance is just two people who genuinely seem to really adore one another. The core conflict is one of them being a believably flawed person, and Anna for all her mistakes always comes across as a woman stretched too thin by a decade in the industry, not some mercurial manipulator. The iconic line near the end feels genuinely vulnerable, in a way that resonates as all too familiar with anyone who's done that sort of thing before, and after everything we've seen him go through Thacker's response really isn't hard to understand, even if he is, as Spike puts it, a "daft prick" for doing it. The final reconciliation has all the hallmarks of a good 10 Things style romcom ending, but it pulls through it without at any point devolving into saccharine fluff, holding onto its identity right through until the very end, where it finally allows itself to simply indulge its warm, lovely conclusion. I really like romcoms, of all stripes. 10 Things I Hate About You, The Fall Guy, The Princess Diaries, Just Like Heaven, so long as it's not a creepy rapefest crapshoot (cough Groundhog Day cough) it's probably harder to find one I *won't* like. Still, Notting Hill has something special about it that for me at least elevates it into a true love letter to the genre. Or perhaps it's more of a violin-playing goat.

#movie

Published 2026-08-31 17:46 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere