Notting Hill 1999

Notting Hill is a likable but flawed romance about a world-famous actress who falls in love with the proprietor of a travel bookshop. Not seeking much of an acting stretch, Julia Roberts plays actress Anna Scott, and Hugh Grant, as the shy bookseller William Thacker, plays the same bookish but debonair role he's played many times before.
The standard romantic cliches are also intact. The pair meet cute (he spills orange juice on her after she visits his bookshop), they have a cute "getting to know you" date at a birthday party, and they engage in cute post-prandial hijinks after dinner. These scenes would have been perfectly pleasant if the film did not insist on blasting viewers' ears with movie "mood music" designed to warm the cockles of our hearts. Music for films should supplement the dialogue and action, not supplant them. In Notting Hill, viewers are subjected to two songs twice in the course of the film.

However, Notting Hill has more fundamental problems. Not a spark of passion flies between the overly chummy Anna and William, who are more buddies than lovers. Whereas Four Weddings and a Funeral had Andie MacDowell's delightfully naughty revelations (as in Hugh was lover number 32), sex is barely hinted at here.

There are also moments that ring extremely false, as when a tabloid-dogged Anna answers the door to William's flat, only to be suddenly confronted by hundreds of paparazzi (surprise!). Furthermore, the audience is never given a compelling reason why William should be so smitten with the actress, save for the fact that she's famous and looks uncannily like Julia Roberts.

Despite these flaws, Notting Hill manages to satisfy. The acting is solid, and Roberts in particular brings a refreshing weariness to her role as a woman trapped by the exigencies of celebrity. However, it leaves Julia Roberts in the same predicament as her character: If she ever wants to be thought of as anything other than a Pretty Woman, she's going to have to find something edgier than this rolling Hill.