ianlouisiana Review of You've Got Mail

You've Got Mail (1998)

The Inernet is where people go to tell lies.....................

[7/10 · 14 August 2008]

If someone in a chat room told me it was Thursday I'd go and check with the calendar.But in 1998,when the world was young,it must have seemed so different,shiny - bright and innocent.How else to explain the haste with which the two leads accepted as gospel each other's outpourings.Never thought to step back and consider "is this person as he/she seems?" So they fall just a little bit in love (surely you can be no more a little bit in love than you can be a little bit pregnant?)courtesy of AOL.(advt.)Sigh. Some care is taken to give both characters a back-story which serves to empathise the audience;all the more surprise then when one of them turns out to be a shameless manipulator and the other a naive victim.As one is multi - millionaire Book Megastore owner Tom Hanks and the other small family businesswoman Meg Ryan little mental effort will be required to assign the roles. Mr Hanks discovers quite early on that his cyberlover is Miss Ryan who he is about to put out of business and spends the rest of the movie trying to hide the fact from her whilst encouraging her to become more and more in thrall to him.No more Mr Nice Guy eh Tom? Miss Ryan,in contrast,is all Blonde Innocence rather than Blonde Ambition,and signally fails to connect her business bete noire with the lovely,sensitive,caring New Man she has found courtesy of AOL (advt.) I was determined from the start of "You've got Mail" to resist the charms of Miss Ryan who had managed to slip under my guard in several previous movies and caused a manly tear to wrinkle my nose more than once despite playing basically the same character for some years.About 20 minutes in I gave up and sat back in admiration as this very shrewd and capable actress did yet another variation of her so - called "girl - next - door" schtick which can render even a grouch like me uncritical. I have to say at this point I have lived next door to several girls,none of whom was remotely like Miss Ryan in any way,shape or form.Indeed one was so unprepossessing that she had to hang a pork chop round her neck before her dog would go out with her (joke,joke). So our beautiful,ingenuous heroine is seduced by Corporate Bad Guy with all the trappings of literacy and compassion,which makes his deviousness even more reprehensible.I hope she divorces him very quickly and takes him to the cleaners.