Noah Calhoun

You start with The Notebook.

The definitive cinematic image of that entire era is Ryan Gosling as Noah Calhoun.

With the long hair and the beard.

With the beard, smiling in a boat in the rain.

And they want to do everything that they can to hold on to that.

And, you know, the husband, Noah, in the end is doing whatever he can to recapture moments, glimpses of what they had in

the past.

Oh, I know.

And she's very well put together and looks nice and kind of politely listens to the story.

And so he starts telling the story of this woman.

young couple, Noah and Allie.

And they come from very, they're two different young people, and they come from two very different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Then James Garner walks into the room as a man called Duke, ready to continue a story he's been sharing with her day after day.

He opens up a notebook and begins telling her a love story about a young man called Noah and a beautiful young woman called Allie, set in South Carolina in the 1940s.

And we quickly come to realize something heartbreaking.

Allie has Alzheimer's, and she doesn't remember any of the story Duke has told her before.

Every day, he starts again.

From there, we drop into the past, where Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams play the young Noah and Allie.

And honestly, the film does something really clever with its structure.

We keep cutting back to the nursing home, where Duke and Allie have these little conversations about the story.

And I, I guess I could give you that, and yet you should watch it, and you should study it, and, uh, you can learn from it.

So in this scene, uh, Noah has just met Allie at the fair, and he asked her out, and he's...

I don't know if he says like, "Will you go out with me?" And she's like, "No." And she's standing there with another guy who she's come to the fair with tonight, and he goes, "Why not?" Just unfazed, not pouty.

There's a pouty why not that's gross and makes everything worse.

[laughs] That's how you win her heart.

All right.

So n- she just told Noah no, and now she goes and gets on the Ferris wheel, and, you know, I guess it's all over for Noah because he tried, and now it's just time to give up.

We'll see what happens.