I promise, the review is more interesting than the movie looks!!!!
The Shop Around the Corner 👎👎
Now, I've got one thing to get off my chest. I'm a big big big fan of "You've Got Mail". Quite possibly the biggest fan, since I'm not sure anyone else has that movie in their top 10 of all time list. And if someone does, that person probably also has "Sleepless in Seattle" in their top 10 list - which would be proof that they didn't understand what makes "You've Got Mail" so excellent.
What does this have to do with the movie I've pictured above?
Well, you see, normally I go out of my way to avoid movies in black-and-white. But when I heard that "You've Got Mail" is actually a "remake" of "The Shop Around the Corner", I had to know how much was taken from the original and how good the original was.
That being said, I'd like to take this moment to point out that
I'm a naive idiot. Because I actually expected aspects of "Shop Around the Corner", a movie written and produced in 1940 - literally not long after mankind had discovered movie technology - to at least have aspects that were better than the remake.
"You've Got Mail" is not only far superior to "Shop Around the Corner", I think it's a slap in the face to call it a remake. There was essentially 1 scene that was kept. Almost everything else was changed into something produced a far superior story. I'm surprised anyone saw anything potential in the original film. But to see that it could become what they "remade" it into is very impressive to me. So much so that I will stop thinking of "You've Got Mail" as a "remake" so much as a "salvage".
Enough of the preamble, let's get into details (
with minor spoilers).
This movie is about a couple who have an anonymous romance with each other through the mail - but have a conflict with each other in real life. But the movie shows you very little of the romance because only a few tiny pieces of the letters are read (and when they do, you wish they hadn't). So the romance isn't properly motivated - we're just supposed to assume that these two have a deep connection via written letters. What we're actually presented with is two people who bicker endlessly for no apparent reason. You don't end up liking either of them very much - though some small attempt is made to fix that.
But what's more, everyone in this movie is a phony. Not a single character avoids telling lies or kissing ass. But to make matters worse, the hero of the story ends up lying to his pen-pal girlfriend repeatedly AFTER he knows who she is. And that's where the movie takes its swan dive off into craptasticness....
Obviously a movie like this is about not judging a book by its cover, or first impressions being wrong, or how people interact in person can get in the way of real personality connections. But the movie misses the point entirely as in the end the hero is a liar, and the heroin is revealed s superficial. It's almost at that moment that the credits role. Right at the moment when she should be convincing us that she cares only about the contents of this man's brain she convinces us that she cares only about the contents of his wallet and his physique. She does this, seconds later he is delighted at having passed her test, and the credits role as the two embrace.
At that moment I'd expect to see a red "FAIL" stamp on the screen. Because, much like Benjamin Button above, the main characters - the ones who are supposed to be teaching us about avoiding the superficial - demonstrate that they miss the entire point of the movie.
It gets worse, of course. But the rest is just icing on the cake. The acting is sub-par (as seems to be the case with many movies made in the first few decades of movie making), endless scenes are wasted on incredibly boring and irritating characters (later gotten rid of in the "remake"), or on dull scenes that do nothing but fill the time until the next development in the plot is revealed.
At this point you might be figuring me for an ADD kid who doesn't understand the value of a director spending time to capture atmosphere or to lend a scene some gravity. This is not the case. I'm one of the few people who thinks the 2001 is not tedious. But I don't watch a movie so that I can listen to people drone on about the day-to-day operations of a store when it serves exactly no purpose in the plot.
Where "The Shop Around the Corner" goes wrong, "You've Got Mail" goes right. In the "remake" (and I'm using that term very loosely), we see the romance between the two main characters build, and they have real serious conflict in real life - not some contrived bickering that gets swept under the rug when they discover how they feel about each other. In "You've Got Mail" (which I'm really wishing were titled something else), you're presented with a couple who should not possibly be able to stay even civil with each other after what happens between them, but who are also madly in love. You
believe both of those things, which is what makes the plot interesting and engaging.
The 1940 characters not only lack the charm and acting ability of Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, or Dave Chappelle (though the 1940 version of Dave Chappelle's character is by far the best of that film). But it removes all of the romance AND conflict from the movie - leaving you with nothing but a boring plot and borderline catastrophic ending.
I will never again think of "You've Got Mail" as a remake. I'm so glad that somewhere in the decades between the invention of the "talkie" and today, humanity learned how to write/act/produce entertaining, engaging movies on occasion.
I've seen a number of black-and-white classics. Examples include Cassablanca, Citizen Kane (partially), To Kill a Mockingbird, Anatomy of a Murder, and now the "original version" of one of my all time favorites. I've come to expect bad acting, bad writing, and generally poor results from the much-revered black-and-white era. It makes sense to me that they'd be bad, and it's ok and understandable that they were, but it doesn't mean I should be watching it. It's a period of time when we were literally still trying to figure out how to make movies entertaining. Today it's a much better understood art. That's not to say that everything done today is good (see Benjamin Button above), but on the whole, I think we've come a long way.
The highlights were the action scenes, which are pretty graphic and brutal, and overall watchability - the downside was the believability of the whole endeavour, and the somewhat schmalty ending. Looks good on Blu-ray, but it won't be going on my shopping list/
The chick who played Amelia Earhart was quite hot too IMO.
