Every Julia Roberts Movie #1: I'm also just a girl

dreading potential and Notting Hill

I am obsessed with potential. My potential, and my wasted potential. I look at my hands and can see my grandmother. I look again, and see myself at seven. The inbetween is weird. When I was a kid my dad would say I was an indigo child. A term popularized in the 90s, referring to children believed to have special or supernatural abilities. I remember getting everything I ever wanted. Imagine that. Then I graduated college. Don’t ever graduate college, kids. I remember hating my mid-twenties. Not to be dramatic, but I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

Now, I’m 32. I rarely think about crawling into holes and perishing, but sometimes, when the moon is full or when I check my bank account, I think, “dang, what happened?” All this time (my whole life) I have loved making collages out of fashion magazines, and singing and dancing loudly. I’ve loved costume jewlery, sunbathing, movies, and actresses. And I’ve always been scared of hiking, and I’ve never known where to put the commas. I am seven and I am grandma. Where is my potential? Shouldn’t I have met it by now? At the very least I thought I’d be rich and famous by now, but whatever. Life is long and short at the same time. I have till I’m dead to reach it. That’s what my hands tell me, anyway. They also remind me that our memories are fickle.

Where are the indigo children of the 90s, now? And do we still have special powers? Here's the thing about being a “special” kid with “special” powers: you don’t really have to work hard at things. Things just happen. But then you become an adult and realize things do take work. Hard work, even. There is an argument here that special kids might just have special parents lolz. Anyway, that’s my goal for 2025, to work hard at the things I want. Also to watch every Julia Roberts movie.

We’ve got our work cut out for us.

I started Jan 1. I laid in bed till five pm on this day. I don’t bed rot often, but it was New Year's Day and la la la, c’est la vie! When I did decide to move from bed to couch, it was the TV which called to me.

Julia (Roberts) and I go way back. Talk about being seven. If you were a child in the late 90s/early 2000s and wanted to be an actress, and had brown hair, you had two starlets to look up to: Sandra Bullock and Julia Robert. I will admit, I was/am more of a Sandy girl, but my admiration for Bullock does not limit the love I have for Roberts. I mean, come on.

Julia Roberts at the Notting Hill premier.

Right off the bat I need to tell you, I love the vein in Julia Roberts' forehead, and I think she looks like my sister, Briana. These thoughts may come up several times when writing about her movies. Secondly, I am scared. I don’t really want to watch Mother’s Day. Although, I am excited for Pelican Brief.

The first Julia Roberts movie I watched in 2025 was Notting Hill. I love this movie. It is in my Four Favorites on Letterboxd, because it has everything I love; Richard Curtis, Hugh Grant, London, Roberts in Vans shoes, and the song “She” by Elvis Costello running through it. I was in the library once looking for screenwriting books, when a man appeared next to me and said, “look up Richard Curtis, what he writes are perfect movies.” The man was right. Notting Hill is a romantic comedy which first premiered in 1999. It of course stars Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant. Roberts plays the world famous Actress, Anna Scott, and Grant plays mumbling but charming, Will Thacker. To sum it up, Anna Scott walks into Will’s travel bookstore in Notting Hill, and the two fall in love.

Curtis claims the idea of the movie came to him during a weekly dinner with his friends. He wondered what a dinner would be like if he brought Madonna as his date. One friend would have absolutely no idea who she was, and the other would be on the floor with excitement. In the movie, Will takes Anna to his friends home for dinner and this idea plays out. It’s brilliant. I love the line, “I’m going to give the last brownie as a prize to the saddest act here.” It’s funny. I’m going to start playing this with my friends.

A thing I noticed while watching this time was the way Julia Roberts cries. She smiles into her tears, and it is so evocative. She has that killer smile, and her eyes fill with tears, and the forehead vein is putting in the work. You can see this technique on full display during the “just a girl” scene. If this movie is famous for nothing else, it is Julia Roberts' delivery of the line, “I'm just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” Jesus! Isn’t that it? Pick me! choose me! Love me!

Curtis says, “If you write a story about a soldier going AWOL and kidnapping a pregnant woman and finally shooting her in the head, it's called searingly realistic, even though it's never happened in the history of mankind. Whereas if you write about two people falling in love, which happens about a million times a day all over the world, for some reason or another, you're accused of writing something unrealistic and sentimental.”

I love sentimental! And aren’t we are all just asking the world to love us?

I’d say if you are having existential thoughts about potential and time, put on Notting Hill. It's a lovely romp.