Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This includes using first- and third-party cookies, which store or access standard device information such as a unique identifier. If you agree, we’ll also use cookies to complement your shopping experience across the Amazon stores as described in our Cookie Notice. We also use these cookies to understand how customers use our services (for example, by measuring site visits) so we can make improvements. I just don’t like it when the movie does the welling up for you.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. Don’t get me wrong: I have no objection to shamelessly corny love stories that make you well up with tearful joy. Can anyone believe it, though, when Sam sees Annie staring at him in the street and he looks back dazed, as if he knew, just knew, that there was something special about her? (Mostly, it looks as if Sam had read the script.) I realize that Ephron is trying for something whimsically farfetched - for ”magic” - but when these two finally hook up at the Empire State Building, living out the meeting Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr never got to have in An Affair to Remember, the willed enchantment of it all is jaw-dropping. Hanks’ performance anchors the picture, giving it a touch of heart we can’t help but want to see this guy mended. A kind and thoughtful man, Sam dotes on his mischievous son (Ross Malinger), but he’s stuck in depression because he’s convinced he’ll never love anyone the way he loved his wife. Hanks, who has mostly played jocular wise guys, reveals a surprising gentleness here. In Sleepless in Seattle, Ephron is less a filmmaker than a matchmaker. Annie is essentially defined by the fact that she needs a man like Sam. And what makes Annie right for Sam? As played by the blankly enthusiastic Meg Ryan, she’s nice, and well, that’s all she is. It is one of the least appealing aspects of Sleepless in Seattle that even as Sam’s plaintive romanticism is supposed to have touched Annie in a tender and personal way, it also marks him in the film’s eyes as an official Great Catch. So do a lot of other women (his radio segment elicits thousands of letters). And so, tentatively at first, then with greater urgency, she tries to meet Sam. She has never known a passion that deep, certainly not with her fianceé, a dullard named Walter (Bill Pullman). Annie, a newspaper reporter in Baltimore, is driving back from her family’s home one Christmas when she tunes in to a call-in talk show and hears Sam, a Seattle architect, going on in a sad, quiet voice about how much he loved his wife, and how badly he misses her. Tom Hanks’ Sam and Meg Ryan’s Annie meet - in spirit, at least - on the radio. Sleepless in Seattle is about a couple of lonely hearts living on opposite sides of the country. She gets the corn (or an abstract approximation of it) without the smolder. What Ephron misses about the classic romantic weepers is their delicately sexy sparkle. When Harry Met Sally… was like one of Woody Allen’s urban valentines turned into a TV series, and Sleepless lacks even that movie’s intense peppering of jokes - it’s like a ’50s tearjerker synthesized by microchip. It would seem that Nora Ephron thinks in clichés: She mixes old ones from Hollywood with new ones from pop-psych therapy. What can you say about a contemporary love story that opens with the daringly original soundtrack choice ”As Time Goes By”? Directed and cowritten by Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally and made her behind-the-camera debut with last year’s This Is My Life, Sleepless in Seattle is bound to be hailed in some quarters as corny, romantic, and old-fashioned, and for good reason: The movie is so prefab, so plastically aware of being ”corny,” ”romantic,” and ”old-fashioned,” that it feels programmed to make you fall in love with it.
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