workplace
comedy directed
by : Nora Ephron featuring
: Tom Hanks - Meg Ryan - Parker Posey - Greg Kinnear - Jean Stapleton running
time : 2 hours
Sleepless In Seattle
director Nora Ephron originally made a name for herself as the writer of
romantic comedies such as This Is My Life. She continues the genre with
You've Got Maill,
marking her second collaboration with actors Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The
story brings romance and courtship into the electronic age of the World
Wide Web via e-mail and chat rooms. Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly live and
work blocks from each other on New York City's Upper West Side. Their lives
are practically intertwined. They both shop at the same place, frequent
the same coffee shop, and even own competing bookstores on the same street.
They also both have significant others of their own. Joe has the overly
hyper book editor Patricia Eden (Parker Posey), while Kathleen lives with
the scholarly newspaper columnist Frank Navasky (Greg Kinnear). Then they
meet in a chat room. Though they keep their identities secret (they're
known only by screen names NY152 and Shopgirl), they tell each other everything
about their lives, including their private feelings, which slowly turn
into affection for each other. When Joe decides to expand his "Foxbooks"
bookstore into a superchain, Kathleen, with her "Shop Around the Corner,"
is doomed. Surely her boutique business will be lost to the conglomerate
with a built-in newsstand and coffee bar. When Kathleen confides her work
woes to her e-mail buddy, Joe puts two-and-two together. How can he reveal
himself to her now, knowing that he is the cause of her misery? Hopefully,
love will conquer all.
Back in
the genre that served her so well with When Harry Met Sally (1989) and
Sleepless In Seattle (1993), New York-based writer/director Ephron reunited
Sleepless stars Hanks and Ryan for the romantic comedy You've Got Mail
(1998). Updating Ernst Lubitsch's charming The Shop Around The Corner (1940)
for the email and super-store 1990s, Ephron created a glossy valentine
to Manhattan's Upper West Side, with its neighborhood shops, cafes, and
resident litterati. Unfortunately, as critics noted, Lubitsch's incomparable
wit and light touch mostly got lost in the translation as cute-as-a-button
Ryan and laid-back Hanks spar over bookstores in public while they anonymously
fall in love via America Online in private. Still, audiences were happy
to watch Hanks and Ryan interact on screen (unlike in most of Sleepless)
amid a romantically idealized New York; Kinnear and Posey provided a dash
of comic relief as Ryan's and Hanks' spurned mates. You've Got Mail became
a Christmas season hit, proving that Ephron's brand of old-fashioned romantic
comedy could make box office lightning strike again.
