Notes on a Scandal: 2006

I don't think I would have been ready for a movie like this until today. It just isn't my style. Also, I find it hard sometimes to ferret out what people are saying or meaning in an English accent or Australian on New Zealand accent. Though we share the same language we use completely different adjectives and adverbs which here in California might make no sense at all at times. So, the accents and different slang uses for words is a bit much at times.

However, this movie with Judy Dench and Cate Blanchet really nailed it. There are both such excellent and powerhouse actresses you are holding your breath throughout the movie. Judy Dench plays and older schoolteacher obsessed with younger women. And Cate Blanchet plays an art teacher having trouble in her marriage with two children and having an affair with her 15 year old art student. This leads to many strange and sort of crazy outcomes.

But, from watching this movie you sort of get what is going on inside of attractive women having affairs with their students. (IN this case a 15 year old boy).

Notes on a Scandal (2006) - IMDb

www.imdb.com/title/tt0465551/‎

Internet Movie Database

Rating: 7.5/10 - ‎54,385 votes

Directed by Richard Eyre. With Cate Blanchett, Judi Dench, Andrew Simpson, Tom Georgeson. A veteran high school teacher befriends a younger art teacher, ...

‎Awards - ‎Full Cast & Crew - ‎Quotes - ‎Plot Summary

Though I never had an affair with any teachers at 15 (or ever) I saw this 15 year old boy in regard to self confidence with women much like myself at that age. By age 16 I had bought a car with my money from working after school and summers and was dating someone age 21 by 16. So, in this sense in regard to women I grew up very fast.

However, the other side of this was I remember going into a drugstore and meeting two of my friends who had a baby and who had to get married. I didn't know this had happened so when I saw them with a baby I almost threw up. This was impossible for me to emotionally deal with that friends of mine were both pregnant and married at 16. This was probably the biggest rude awakening for me at that age.

Though I knew of many girls who got pregnant at 15 or 16 and didn't get married then in 1963 it was a different time than now. If you asked them why they got pregnant it would be something like, "I just wanted a pretty little baby to love me and to love." or something like that. With programs on MTV about girls 16 getting pregnant now there is a lot more knowledge and we are now at a 40 year low even on abortions because of the changes to mores and society from the early 1960s.

In my own case people were always falling in love with me that I knew and met from about age 10 and it started to get pretty serious by the time I was 15. But it was people of all ages and I found the unwanted attention a little scary as a young man. Being 6 foot 4 and 1/2 inches tall by 21 and at least 6 foot 3 by age 17 I could always defend myself if necessary. However, it was only nice to be handsome and young and tall if the person falling in love with you was someone you wanted to be with too and if you were free (not already going steady with someone else) in those days. So, it was just as complicated and in some ways even more so than now in life because this was before abortions were legal. So, for a legal abortion a girl would have to go to Japan then. So, everything in some ways was much more risky then because the birth control pill wasn't even legal until 1960.

It was an entirely different world than now.