You've Got Mail . Tucson Weekly . 01-04-99

You've Got Mail

DIRECTED BY: Nora Ephron

REVIEWED: 01-04-99

Okay, let's clear this up: "You've got mail" is not grammatically correct. It is, in fact, redundant: it should be "You have mail," or even just "You've mail," if you want to give it a 19th-century feel. It's just the absence of 19th-century sensibilities that bugged me about this cute and intermittently funny romantic comedy. It tells the story of a petit bourgeois bookstore owner (Meg Ryan, who's maintained her pixie-like looks for far longer than should be naturally possible) who is driven out of business by a grand bourgeois owner of a chain of bookstores (Tom Hanks, who is either wearing a toupee or has an atrocious dye job, or both). Think they'll fall in love? While there's lots of sentimental whining about the loss of small businesses, I wondered why anyone should care when the exploited workers were as far removed from the means of production under one boss as the other. It's the hallmark of late 20th-century capitalism that production facilities have been moved away from the politically sensitized "first world" and into the emerging economies, where 19th-century conditions are not yet considered appalling and inhuman, and where child labor and cramped, dirty factories are far from the eyes of concerned do-gooders. Which isn't to say that a lot of people won't like You've Got Mail; if they liked Nora Ephron's other films (When Harry Met Sally and They Made Unchallenging Witty Comments for 90 Minutes Before Falling in Love, and Sleepless in a Very Cleaned-Up, Middle of the Road Version of Seattle). If so, then they'll have to like this one, as it's a virtual carbon copy of those earlier efforts...but why not read Volume I of Karl Marx's Kapital instead? It's informative and stars Meg Ryan as the bookish but sexy...oh, never mind.

--DiGiovanna

Full Length Reviews
You've Got Mail

Capsule Reviews
You've Got Mail

Other Films by Nora Ephron
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Film Vault Suggested Links
Two If by Sea
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Three to Tango

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