Nora Ephron remake of other Nora Ephron scripted movies (When Harry Met Sally... and Sleepless in Seattle), but still with her charm. One senses, though, that there was scriptural interference, as the surface is not always smooth.
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan play Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a romantic movie. I mean, Hanks is Joe Fox, son and partner of Fox Books, a large chain store who open around the corner from Kathleen Kelly's (Ryan) family owned independent children's bookshop, The Shop Around the Corner. What they don't know is that they email each other on AOL every day and have fallen for each other, even though both are in somewhat unsatisfactory relationships. As Joe and Kathleen there's friction; but as NY152 and Shopgirl the friction turns into sparks. So boy meets girl online. Boy meets girl in person. Boy loses girl before he even gets her. But will boy get girl at the end? Come on! It's a Nora Ephron movie.
There's a load of product placement in this movie: Starbucks, AOL, Apple Mac - but then, I've realized, these products are part of our landscape, and to exclude them would somehow be false. Nevertheless, it's interesting to note that AOL joined up with Warner Bros to form AOL Time Warner not long after the making of this movie (in 2000). Funny how that evil corporate book chain was called Fox. Hmm. What does that remind you of in the movie and media industry?
Okay, so they used cheese to stick the edits together, but, being Ephron, it's still watchable and ever so slightly annoyingly endearing. This is what she does. And she's one of the best at it. Even though you've seen it before. From the very same actors.
Nugget: it's amusing to see how movies made in my own short lifetime are starting to show their age: dial-up internet connections, old versions of AOL. (And on the other side they were still using 3.5" floppy disks in Mission Impossible!)
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