Straight to Landfill Release

Ok, in my effort to recover content from Amazon.com--and resist creating new content for this blog, I've pulled another zinger from the handful of reviews I've left there. I was forced to watch this movie on a return-trip from Europe in 2000. The middle-aged American woman sitting next to me on the plane, seeing I was preparing to watch it, sang its praises. I was polite to her, but I can't say I withheld judgment before watching. I expected a sappy, product-placement-laden lukewarm bowl of poorly-prepared and nearly undigestable tripe. I was not disappointed. I can't remember when I originally wrote the review but I did "update" the review in 2004 in order to try to get it higher up the rankings. That didn't work. I'm on page 5. Sadly, only 12 of 21 people found the review helpful. I guess this is not surprising since most people wanting to view a romance film don't really want to read harsh criticism about it.

Straight to Landfill Release, March 18, 2004

Reviewer:

Christopher R. DeFay (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

It is difficult to redeem a movie as deeply disturbing as You've Got Mail. And I don't mean to knock the reviewers here who said they liked it. If you bracket the disturbing political messages of the movie and just talk about the "romantic" part then, yeah, sure it's ok. But...

I'd have to say that a 119 minute commercial for AOL, Starbuck's coffee and Giant MegaBookstore Corp. was just too much to bear. What was Nora Ephron thinking?

The political message of You've Got Mail seems to be that corporate monoculture (as embodied by AOL/Starbucks/Barnes&Noble/etc.) is really just grand. That if you're a small bookstore (or coffeestore owner, or whatever) owner trying to survive against mega-conglamorates that as long as you fall in love with the enemy that it's all ok.

Kathleen Kelly's (Meg Ryan's character) consciousness of the real political struggle facing small business owners is staggeringly shallow. There is no small irony that she and Joe Fox (Hanks' character) can go to the same Starbucks and she is oblivious to the parallels between her choice of coffee and the choice she expects her customers to make when they buy books.

That irrepressible scene toward the end of the film when she loses her business and goes in to Joe Fox's Mega-Book Corp's store is enough to make one physically ill. She sees, lo and behold, that Mega-Book Corp really can be a wonderful, caring place. It's enough to make her forget that she's just lost her business she'd developed for years. And the thing that moves her to this new state of unconsciousness? Love for Mr. Joe Fox. Wow!

I'm not saying that Nora Ephron needed to make a politically engaged story. It is a romantic movie, after all. But why a long commercial for conglamorates like AOL and Starbucks?