Worthwhile remake and update of The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 Ernst Lubitsch comedy (antiquated even at the time) about two lonely-hearts pen pals who don't know that they already know and don't like each other. Nora Ephron, the director and co-writer along with her sister Delia, has neatly whisked our secret correspondents from the old world of stamps and envelopes to the new world of Internet chat rooms and E-mail, and has transformed these former Budapest shop clerks into Upper West Side rival proprietors, respectively, of the latest link in a superstore chain called Foxbooks and of a mom-and-pop (or more precisely, mom-and-daughter) children's bookstore called, in salute to Lubitsch, the Shop Around the Corner. The transformation is total. Ephron, or both Ephrons, good company for one another and for us, have gone out into our own world and come back with a lot to say about it: not only about the computer versus the typewriter and the sprawling corporation versus the vanishing independent, but about Starbucks Coffee, The Godfather, cash-only checkout lines, TV talk shows, whatever comes up in the course of the day. She -- Nora alone -- is not the strongest directorial personality, swaying to the changing beat of the pop songs on the soundtrack, bowing down to the Hollywood "A" list, applying the occasional drop of oil to a smooth-running commercial machine. The end product has more in common than she might care to admit with the dreaded specter of Foxbooks. Remakes are Foxbooks, or same as. And pop songs on the soundtrack are also Foxbooks. And individually or together-again, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan -- whose ain't-I-cute routine is becoming less becoming, if possible, as she approaches forty -- are Foxbooks again. Beneath the gloss, beneath the pragmatism, beneath the compromise, however, are a beating heart, an alert eye, a sharp tongue. The distinct stages through which the romantic relationship progresses, particularly the last stage, when the straining horses smell a happy ending, may not be in ideal proportion. But proportions, or relationships for that matter, are tricky; and the mere marking of stages -- and more than just two of them -- lifts the relationship above Hollywood formula into the realm of cosmic complexity. Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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