June 30, 2008
You’ve Got Mail
By now, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have amassed such a fund of goodwill with moviegoers that any new onscreen pairing brings nearly reflexive smiles. In You’ve Got Mail, the quintessential boy and girl next door repeat the tentative romantic crescendo that made Sleepless in Seattle, writer-director Nora Ephron’s previous excursion with the duo, a massive hit. The prospective couple do actually meet face to face early on, but Mail otherwise repeats the earlier feature’s gentle, extended tease of saving its romantic resolution until the final, gauzy shot.
The underlying narrative is an even more old-fashioned romantic pas de deux that is casually hooked to a newfangled device. The script, cowritten by the director and her sister Delia Ephron, updates and relocates the Ernst Lubitsch classic The Shop Around the Corner to contemporary Manhattan, where Joe Fox (Hanks) is a cheerfully rapacious merchant whose chain of book superstores is gobbling up smaller, more specialized shops such as the children’s bookstore owned by Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Their lives run in close parallel in the same idealized neighborhood, yet they first meet anonymously, online, where they gradually nurture a warm, even intimate correspondence. As they begin to wonder whether this e-mail flirtation might lead them to be soul mates, however, they meet and clash over their colliding business fortunes.
It’s no small testament to the two stars that we wind up liking and caring about them despite the inevitable (and highly manipulative) arc of the plot. Although their chemistry transcended the consciously improbable romantic premise of Sleepless, enabling director Ephron to attain a kind of amorous soufflé, this time around there’s a slow leak that considerably deflates the affair. Less credulous viewers will challenge Joe’s logic in prolonging the concealment of his online identity from Kathleen, and may shake their heads at Ephron’s reinvention of Manhattan as a spotless, sun-dappled wonderland where everybody lives in million-dollar apartments and color coordinates their wardrobes for cocktail parties. –Sam Sutherland
Director:Â Nora Ephron
VHS Tape: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
Company: Warner Home Video (1999-05-04)
ISBN:Â 6305368139
List Price:Â $9.98
Amazon Price:Â $0.01
Used Price:Â $0.01
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One of those movies that helped usher out the era of action films that had plots that made any sense (and also helped reverse the direction of Patrick Swayze’s career arc), Road House concerns a handsome, existential bouncer in a rinky-dink honky-tonk who owns both a degree in philosophy and a Mercedes. And that’s perhaps the most believable aspect of the whole movie. Swayze stars as Dalton, “the best bouncer in the business,” who runs afoul of Wesley (Ben Gazzara), the meanest SOB round these parts, by taking up with his former girlfriend, Doc (Kelly Lynch)–the only woman in town with an IQ approaching double digits, even if she had unfathomably hooked up with such a lowlife. Swayze had complained about being typecast as beefcake when this was made, but that didn’t stop him from revealing as much skin as possible–even guys like him, as revealed in a luridly seedy scene in which one of Wesley’s goons tells Dalton that he reminds him of the kind of boyfriend he had in prison (albeit in much saltier terms). It’s so insulting to its audience that it’s nice to be able to turn the tables and laugh at the filmmakers. –David Kronke
