This will probably seem a very petty, nit-picky critique, but a loud false note for me was the Gina McKee character is i
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Notting Hill
MdmBadenov — 10 years ago(February 14, 2016 10:42 PM)
This will probably seem a very petty, nit-picky critique, but a loud false note for me was the Gina McKee character is in a wheelchair, she has a modest-sized, comfortable looking house and her bedroom is upstairs. Her husband must carry her up there every night, and I suppose downstairs every morning. I have worked with a lot of disabled people and that depiction is ridiculous. First thing every person ending up in a wheelchair after an injury/accident does is get his/her home modified for convenience. That means everything is on a level the person in the chair can reach independently. So the rooms the disabled person must accessbedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining room, TV room, whatever other room is necessarywill be on the first level that's either flush with the outside entrance or has a lift or a ramp to access it. The absolute LAST thing a wheelchair-user wants is to have a room he needs to go into require him to be carried up stairs to get to. Same with going back down. A two-level house might have a chair lift that carries the disabled person upstairs, but usually the simplest thing is to redesign the living space to have all rooms the wheelchair-user needs to get into on one level. It might be necessary occasionally for him or her to be carried by someone over stairs, etc., but that wouldn't be in the person's home. It's important, and really necessary, for a person in a wheelchair to be able to get around his/her own home completely independently. It's simply impractical for a wheelchair-user to live in a home that requires another person to carry him up stairs. It's also a serious safety hazard.
This is even more true for anyone living in the UK. The government provides a great deal more assistance to the disabled for home modification than the U.S. does for its disabled citizens.
I guess the movie had it this way to highlight how very much in love the married couple was that the husband would carry the wife up to bed every nightbut it bugged me because it's so far outside the realm of the real world. -
sunchick116-872-583383 — 9 years ago(September 02, 2016 02:49 PM)
i didn't catch the stair life but this was also an issue if you saw 'the theory of everything'. they were lucky to have a bedroom on the first floor, but there were stairs EVERYWHERE in that house, and i've actually see interviews by Jane Hawking saying handicap accessibility is horrific in the UK. all the homes are like townhomes and stairs everywhere, so having to be carried didn't surprise me in the least.
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SeinfeldFriend — 9 years ago(October 14, 2016 02:51 AM)
I agree about the accessibility in English homes. Lucky for my husband's grandmother, she moved into a small bungalow that does not have any stairs as she got older. It was certainly praised as a new style of home for England. We got to go through my husband's childhood home and I couldn't believe how small it was. He and his brothers room was the crawl space in the roof, his mum had to make the bed from the ladder. I can understand why they wanted to move to Australia
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