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You've Got Mail [1999]
from Warner Home Video
starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Katie Sagona, Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey
directed by Nora Ephron

Features:

• PAL
• Widescreen

Editorial Review:

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 neighbourhood 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 colour co-ordinates their wardrobes for cocktail parties. --Sam Sutherland

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

• A Contemporary Classic of Romantic Comedy
  
  I recently saw two films directed by Norah Ephron. This one and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). Both have held up remarkably well. Curious to know the background (if any) to You've Got Mail, I did a little research. Its basic plot can be traced back to Nikolaus Laszlo's play The Shop Around the Corner which was adapted in a film of the same name directed by Ernest Lubitsch in 1940, co-starring Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. Then in 1949, it was recycled as a musical (re-named In the Good Old... more info

• Get Out The Munchies....
  The great thing about this movie is that these days the Internet has grown to such a level that looking through the somewhat "innocent" eyes of chatting online that this presents in the 1998 movie is like looking back in time to internet infancy.
  Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan play very predictable characters that are well acted and well written, you can tell it was made specifically for them. The slightly frustrating thing about this movie is that it is a new-age Sleepless in Seattle, at times being almost... more info

• A Hat trick of Success for the 'Tom Hanks - Meg Ryan' Pairing
  The best thing about this movie being a remake from 'The Shop Around the Corner', is that it was not a disappointment. Very often, remakes are terrible, and should have been left alone. You've got mail was not one of these. I love Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together. The 3rd film where they were paired after Joe versus the volcano and Sleepless in Seattle.

• Love it
  Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together is a killer combination who always seem to represent people looking for true loves who are destined by fate. Although i prefer Sleepless in Seatle, this on is brighter in colour, cosier in settings and atmosphere and sweeter in general.

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