`You've Got Mail' - Cuteness Signed, Sealed and Delivered by Homer Yen (c) 1998
I've come to notice that I have a small defensive mechanism that occasionally pops up when a stranger approaches me. Invariably, I immediately make a subtle course change and try to discretely add some distance between the other person and me as we pass one another. If this oncoming person looks suspicious, you can bet that I'll veer even further from my path. Maybe by doing this, I am cheating myself out of an encounter that would have been infinitely fulfilling. I guess, in a sense, this is why technology and the internet is bringing our world closer together. By accessing some of these online chat rooms, for example, it affords us a chance to talk freely with others with out the humility of revealing our identities. It also offers the failsafe mechanism of turning off the computer if you feel that you've attracted one of the many weirdoes out in cyberspace. But maybe - just maybe - you might actually find someone that you can feel as comfortable with as your favorite fuzzy blanket.
Take Kathleen (Meg Ryan) and Joe (Tom Hanks). To each other in the online world, they are best friends who are intent to preserve their anonymity. When they are online, their lives become a rich tapestry of conversation whose long talks about nothing allow them to reveal more than any real face-to-face conversation ever could. Late at night or early in the morning, when they are not in the busy nine-to-five mode, they nestle up to their computers secretly wishing that they were nestling with one another. They flirt, confide in one another, and even contemplate meeting. But sometimes, relationships like these are better left a fantasy. The cold, hard reality of this seemingly cute bond is that in real life, they are actually enemies. Kathleen owns a small but wonderful children's bookstore. She has a heart of gold and is a romantic in every sense of the word. But everything that she has worked for is being threatened when Joe's company builds a Border's-like superstore just around the block. Despite the fact that I would just about hate anyone that drove me out of business, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are infectiously cute. The way Ryan rolls her baby blue eyes as she confesses her inner thoughts or the way Hanks bobs his head left and right as he searches for just the right words are real gems. And because these two are so affable, and because we're interested in what these two have to say to each other (they mostly talk about basically mundane things and offer small snippets of wisdom to one another), we are engrossed with the idea of them meeting. What will happen when they discover whom their online pen pal really is? Where will the story go from there? And this is what really allowed me to enjoy the film. I was never sure where the story would quite go. And whether they actually got together or not didn't really matter because in the end, I just enjoyed the characters so much that I would have been happy no matter what their outcome.
Grade: B+
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