Two Christmas Movies

Star Trek: Insurrection

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You've Got Mail

You've Got Mail (or YGM, as I am going to call it from now on) was basically a remake of the Shop Around the Corner with some nineties touches, and not too many of those. The hero and heroine lived unmarried with their partners, they both had computers with email instead of having to rely on ink and dead tree materials, and so forth. But an anachronistic attitude hovered over the film like a, well, film. Though the fact that the heroine loses her business was glossed over in this instance by her almost not seeming to really care that she was now without a means to pay for her nice Upper West Side apartment (I am guessing that along with a bookstore her late mother also left her a sizeable trust fund, rents not being today what they were in the thirties or whenever the original film was made). Her sad-sack ex-employees even seemed happier and more fulfilled working in the big, bad chain bookstore that crushed her small business. But the overall attitude was, as I suppose it must have been in Shop Around the Corner, was that the heroine would be happiest giving in to the rich man and giving up her business to marry.

There were no poor people, not even cutesy ones, in YGM; Giuliani's New York (or should I refer to it as GNY?) never looked prettier or cleaner. Despite the America Online ad build up I did not see any of the "paean to the internet" stuff that was supposed to be in the film; the main characters used their AOL accounts as if they were still not sure what "press any key" meant. (It took them two-thirds of the movie to figure out that they could just instant-message each other instead of having to wait for each others emails.) A nice touch was the choice of computers the characters were shown using, which served somewhat to delineate the characters: the heroine used a cute little Mac Powerbook at home and an ancient DOS-based system at her shop; the hero (and supposed Big Bad Rich Guy) only seemed to use Windows 95. (And the fact that they both used America Online was a nice character-leveller, though one would have expected a business tycoon to have his own server; but then, the movie is already over a year old. Maybe it never occurred to the filmakers way back then - one year makes about ten computer years - that such a thing was possible.)

The movie wasn't too terrible, but it wasn't that good either. Ryan and Tom Hanks didn't seems to have any chemistry (I have not seen Sleepless in Seattle so I can't say whether they have ever had any chemistry together in a film ); the other characters - Dabney Coleman as the rich guy's rich dad, Jean Stapledon as the heroine's older friend and employee, and so forth, didn't seem to be in the movie for any reason; one could not figure out why our main characters were living with their soon-to-be exes (Parker Posey as a stereotypical caffeine-addicted New York neurotic, and Greg Kinnear as a Luddite journalist with an unholy fetish for typewriters). On the whole, the movie just seemed to go on way too long, and there were a few scenes that could have been edited out whole of the movie to speed it up and make it less painful, such as the Christmas day celebration scene wherein our hero's pre-adolescent "aunt" sings "Tomorrow" from the musical Annie in its entirety. There was a hint early on that the movie might have something to say about the way the new megabookstores like Barnes and Noble are crushing out small, independent booksellers, but this notion is dropped like a hot rock when it looked as if it would get in the way of the romance.

Star Trek: Insurrection was a pretty good installment in the series. There was no sign of any of the old actors from the original series, which was fine with me. The Next Generation characters have finally grown some depth. The best character is, of course, the token "nonhuman" - this time not a Vulcan but an android, Data, but the humans aren't too bad either. And the plot was not as simplistic as it first seemed - what looked to be just a save-eden-from-the-exploiters episode actually had a twist, which I will not spoil. There are the usual problems with the Star Trek universe: everyone seems to speak English; the "alien" cultures aren't particularly alien (one day filmakers are going to have to use something other than the presence of a weaving loom and pseudo-medieval clothing to delineate another planet's native culture); and so forth, but at least the heroine doesn't tragicaly die at the end, leaving the brave captain bereft and sailing, or starfaring, stoically on, yadda yadda. This movie was also well-paced - none of the scenes were too long, everything was kept moving so that our attention didn't wander. And the heroes leaving Paradise for a life back in the so-called real world did not seem as forced and contrived as these denouements usually are. It was fluff, as such things go, but fluff with a bit of a message.

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