I guess I’m watching this now to try and get the foul taste of Moodysson’s latest Hole in My Heart out of my mind. This one has a happy ending, I recall, it will therefore make me happy. Weird thing is, coming back to it after Hole and the similarly shattering Lilya 4-Ever, in addition to the very disturbing short movie, “Talk,” included as an extra on this new Region 2 DVD (annoyingly only available in the Lukas Moodysson box set), I couldn’t help focusing in on the more negative aspects of this movie now. Gee, thanks, Lukas.

It’s still a lot more fun to watch, though. For better or worse, it probably paints the most realistic portrait of teenagers ever seen in the movies: at once beautiful, pathetic, and inconsequential. The soundtrack is excellent and the two leads are perfect for each other.

An all-time favourite that never lets me down, yet I don’t know what to say about it. It’s the ultimate romance-gone-too-far-gone-sour movie. I don’t think Kate Winslet has ever been better; I almost want to say the same for director Peter Jackson; and Melanie Lynskey is great in everything she does. The combo of Peter Dasent’s score and Mario Lanza songs make for one of the best soundtracks, and the visual effects, while a little on the low budget side, are somehow perfect for the young girls’ fantasy world. I don’t think beautiful and disturbing have ever been so close.

I really hope Quentin Tarantino lets some more of his scripts go out to other directors in the future, because the few examples we have of other directors dealing with his work, including this one, are really quite interesting. I remember reading an interview with Tarantino where somebody had asked him something along the lines of, “When are you gonna do a romance movie?” and he was like, “I did romance, I did True Romance!” It seems with each subsequent Tarantino movie, you can go back to this one and it seems more and more non-Tarantino-esque. Everything about this movie, including the remaining dialogue from his original script, seems to be striving for cuteness. From the Badlands like opening with Hans Zimmer’s imitation of the music and Patricia Arquette’s Southern drawl voiceover, to the repetition of the theme over dreamy close-ups of the characters as they have heartfelt revelations… even in the final shoot-out, feathers rain down on the blood… it all comes to a head I guess with the napkin on which Alabama (Arquette) scrawls “You’re so Cool!” It’s an extremely romantic movie in its own right, never mind “for a Tarantino movie…” This really is genuinely, so Cool!

I think my highest praise for this movie came during this viewing. My stepdad was watching it too and I commented on the physical comedy, it’s all through the movie, right from the start when Hanks and Ryan both sneak off to their computers when their respective partners leave them home alone, but my comment came in the montage where they’ve met, they’re aware of the real world conflict of small-big business, and they’re trying to avoid each other. Hanks hides behind a newspaper; Ryan hides behind flowers; then it leads into a supermarket scene, Ryan ducking behind her shopping cart, leading on to a great check-out exchange with some perfect peripheral characters, something that is completely typical of this movie.

My personal reaction to this has three parts to it: first I know it will forever resonate with me because of the internet love aspect. I wasn’t even online when the movie was made but shortly after my very first online experiences, I knew I had to see it, and my favourite moment in the movie comes when Meg Ryan receives her first IM (instant message) online from Hanks, it’s just perfect. She draws her breath in, has that look, “somebody’s speaking to me! right now! omg!” It’s perfectly done, and clearly this moment, like the rest of the movie, comes from the heart of someone who has really gone through it, the small details are just uncanny.

My second stage is, it’s a New York movie, possibly the best, and I know all the classic NYC movies, but sometimes you just have to be honest with yourself, this movie just really shows that friendly side of NYC (I haven’t been there but I trust 100% the many residents or visitors I’ve talked to) in a way that’s not like a commercial, it’s just really homely. Meg Ryan commenting on a butterfly alighting the subway; the universal Starbucks theory; early morning bakery scenes; even the main theme of the movie, the big versus the small, and the ultimate union thereof. It may be too optimistic, but I’m just saying that ‘cos I feel I have to it. It’s not extremely optimistic, it’s just realistically so. It has a happy ending, it all works out, but it’s thoroughly considered.

I hate romantic comedies. Like I wrote recently, for some reason I just couldn’t even sit through 10 minutes of Pretty Woman. I just hate shallowness in the end, and I hate entertainment for entertainment’s sake. People compare You’ve Got Mail to Sleepless in Seattle for obvious reasons and I don’t like Sleepless in Seattle. There is something about You’ve Got Mail that makes me enjoy things I don’t usually enjoy – physical comedy, romantic comedy.. I think it’s ultimately a combination of the great acting, great song selections, and my own personal memories associated with it. But I don’t want to explain it. There is something inexplicable in my enjoyment of the film, and I like that. Even though I love to pull movies apart and go behind the scenes and know everything sometimes, it’s nice to have a few movies like this where you really can’t fully fathom your reasons for loving it.

A purely average movie, unless, like me, you love both Val Kilmer and Mira Sorvino. Val Kilmer has done blockbusters in Batman Forever, biographical imitation in The Doors, movie-stealing cameo in True Romance, and now, he does the crippling disability thing in At First Sight. He plays blind perfectly, and then there’s the addition of him regaining his sight, all done as realistically as can be imagined. He is a fabulous actor… he just needs to bring all the great aspects of these different performances somehow together one day. The movie is a little long, but overall, I enjoyed it.