Brad reviews YOU’VE GOT MAIL (1998), starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan!

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Bradley Crain

Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) owns a children’s bookstore in New York City named “The Shop Around the Corner.” It’s a small, cozy store that she inherited from her dear mother, and it’s part of the lifeblood of who she is as a person, as well as the community itself. Joe Fox (Tom Hanks), on the other hand, is the heir to a major bookstore chain, Fox Books (think Barnes & Noble), that threatens to wipe places like Kathleen’s off the map. As fate would have it, the two meet anonymously online where they trade their hopes, dreams and insecurities through daily e-mails, with both excitedly opening their computers each night hoping to hear those three little words, “You’ve Got Mail.” Things begin to get interesting when Joe plans to open up a Fox Books Superstore just around the corner from Kathleen’s place with neither knowing that they’re real-life business adversaries. When will they find out that they’re enemies in the business world? Can true love find a way in the most difficult of circumstances? And isn’t that why we watch these kinds of movies in the first place?!

I’ll start off by saying that Meg Ryan is operating at the top of her “America’s sweetheart” phase here… she’s cute, sincere, nostalgic, slightly neurotic, and ultimately quite believable as a person who romanticizes her world and truly believes there will always be a place for her small store and the gigantic superstores! I grew up and still live in the state where Wal-Mart started so I definitely know how hard it is for the “mom and pop” stores to compete. Tom Hanks walks a bit more of a tightrope as Joe Fox. He’s likable enough that you want him to be able to win her heart, but he’s also just arrogant enough that you understand why Kathleen resents everything he stands for. Ultimately, Hanks is able to pull it off with enough charm that you still root for him even when he can be a little bit of a jerk at times.

What’s really strange about revisiting YOU’VE GOT MAIL at this point in my life is the fact that it takes me back to the late 90’s when the internet was something new to me and it seemed like something magical. In this movie, the internet connects two souls, and when we hear “you’ve got mail” as they fire up their computers, the movie expects you to feel genuine excitement, without a hint of irony. Compare that with where the world is today with almost any kind of online activity, especially social media. While there are still a lot of positives to be found, it’s sad that going online now is often exhausting, hateful, and stressful! In 1998, though, it was still possible to believe that logging on could lead to something incredible!

Nora Ephron, who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay, does a good job of presenting a sad reality of the real world underneath this romantic comedy’s love story. “Progress” can be cruel, and it seems like it just can’t be stopped no matter what! I spend a lot of time talking about the wonderful hours I spent in the video stores of my youth. Those stores are all gone now and have been for decades. The stores that replaced them are mostly gone now, and almost all of my movie viewing is now done through online streaming. In YOU’VE GOT MAIL, Fox Books certainly isn’t better than Kathleen’s Shop Around the Corner. As a matter of fact, it’s not nearly as educational or personal. What it is, however, is bigger, cheaper, and more efficient, and that’s what seems to win in the end, just like it did with the local video stores and Wal-Mart. This is where Ephron does her strongest balancing act. Joe Fox and Kathleen Kelly still fall in love despite the fact that the realities of the world around them take their realistic and natural course. A true human connection is made in the most difficult and painful of circumstances, and that ultimately means more than anything else in the film.

Revisiting YOU’VE GOT MAIL now doesn’t feel that much different than revisiting the film that inspired it, 1940’s THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. Both films are time capsules of a world that no longer really exists. However, both films ultimately realize the time-tested truth that it’s our relationships with other people that provides the most meaning to our lives. That’s a truth that won’t change whether we’re writing letters, sending e-mails, exchanging texts or whatever “progress” the human race achieves in communication in the future! I find some comfort in that.

Film Review: Cold Turkey (dir by Norman Lear)

Posted on June 16, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1971 satire, Cold Turkey, is the film that boldly explores just how much into the ground one joke can driven.

It’s a film that imagines what would happen if a big tobacco company decided to try to improve its image by giving people an incentive to quit smoking. In the real world, of course, they ended up funding Truth.org and coming up with anti-smoking commercials that were so lame that they would make viewers want to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes just to spite the self-righteous people lecturing them during the commercial breaks. In the film, however, Marwen Wren (Bob Newhart) comes up with the idea of offering to pay 25 million dollars to any community that can completely stop smoking for 30 days.

Wren figures that no large group of people will be able to just give up smoking for a month. Not in 1971! However, Wren didn’t count on the single-minded determination of the Rev. Clayton Hughes (Dick Van Dyke). Hughes is the stern and self-righteous minister of Eagle Rock Community Church in Eagle Rock, Iowa. He knows that Eagle Rock could really use that money so he sets off on a crusade to convince all 4,006 of the citizens of Eagle Rock to take the pledge to quit smoking.

As I said at the start of this review, Cold Turkey is pretty much a one-joke film. The joke is that everyone in the movie — from the tobacco company execs to the citizens of Eagle Rock to Rev. Hughes — is an asshole. They start the film as a bunch of assholes and, once they try to quit smoking, they become even bigger assholes. Soon, everyone in town is irritable and angry. The only people happy are the people who never smoked in the first place, largely because they’ve been set up as a sort of paramilitary border patrol. Even though his anti-smoking crusade lands him on the cover of Time, Rev. Hughes is also upset because he started smoking right before it was time to quit smoking. He deals with his withdraw pains through sex and frequent glowering.

Wren is concerned that the town of Eagle Rock might actually go for a full 30 days without smoking so he attempts to smuggle a bunch of cigarettes into the town and then runs around with a gigantic lighter that looks like a gun. It’s a storyline that doesn’t really go anywhere but then again, you could say that about almost all of the subplots in Cold Turkey. There’s a lot of characters and there’s a lot of frantic overacting but it doesn’t really add up too much. Storylines begin and are then quickly abandoned. Characters are introduced but then never do anything. For a while, It seems like the film is at least going to examine the Rev. Hughes’s totalitarian impulses but no. Those impulses are clearly there but they’re not really explored.

If I seem somewhat annoyed by this film, it’s because it really did have a lot of potential. This could have been a very sharp and timeless satire but instead, it gets bogged down in its own frantic storytelling and the film’s comedy becomes progressively more and more cartoonish. By the end of the movie, the President shows up in town and so does the military and it all tries to achieve some Dr. Strangelove-style lunacy but the film doesn’t seem to know what it really wants to say. It seems to be setting itself up for some sort of grandly cynical conclusion but instead, it just sort of ends. One gets the feeling that, at the last minute, the filmmakers decided that they couldn’t risk alienating their audience by taking the story to its natural conclusion.

Admittedly, while watching the film, I did find myself comparing Hughes and his bullying mob to the same people who are currently snapping at anyone who suggests that maybe the Coronavirus lockdowns were a bit excessive. It’s easy to think of some modern politicians and media figures who probably would have had a great time in Eagle Rock, ordering people around and shaming anyone who wants a cigarette. But otherwise, Cold Turkey was just too cartoonish and one-note to really work.

A Movie A Day #112: The Trial (1993, directed by David Jones)

Posted on April 29, 2017 by Jedadiah Leland

One morning, in turn of the century Prague, Josef K. (Kyle MacLachlan) wakes up to discover that two detectives are in his room. They tell him that he is under arrest but they do not tell him the charges. Josef remains free to go about his everyday life but he must report to the court whenever the court deems to see him. No matter where Josef turns or who he talks to, he cannot get any answers concerning what he has been charged with. Even his disinterested attorney (Jason Robards) can not give him a straight answer on why he is being prosecuted. No matter how much Josef protests that he is innocent of whatever has been accused of, his fate has already been decided.

On paper, this film version of Franz Kafka’s classic novel sound like it should be a masterpiece. The film was shot on location in Prague, the script was written by Harold Pinter, and Kyle MacLachlan seems like the perfect choice for Josef K. Unfortunately, director David Jones takes a very straightforward approach to the material and does not exploit the story’s nightmarish qualities. This is a version of Kafka that could easily play on Masterpiece Theater. (The perfect choice to direct The Trial would have been MacLachlan’s frequent director, David Lynch.) MacLachlan does well as Josef K. but he is overshadowed by a steady and distracting stream of cameos from actors like Anthony Hopkins, Alfred Molina, and David Thewlis.

Despite not being totally faithful to its source material, Orson Welles’s 1962 adaptation, which stars Anthony Perkins as Josef K., remains the version to see.