Obligatory GoodReads review musical accompaniment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NboaT3...#I have mixed feelings about this movie now, even tho I loved it for years and years after it came out. (It's one of the few films I loved as a teenager but do not now own on DVD.) It's sort of like Pretty Woman, in a way -- full of nasty cliches masquerading as "realism" ("No, you pretty much want to nail them too"/"I don't kiss on the mouth either") which then are suddenly transformed into Hollywood cliches masquerading as "romance" (the stretch limo with opera blaring, the run through New York against time to the New Year's Eve party). And I watch entranced every time, hating myself half-an-hour afterwards. (This is also why I do not have a DVD of Pretty Woman and why, when I had a TV, I left not just the room but the house whenever cable or network stations reran it, which was often.) Without the touchingly stiff dignity of Meg Ryan (what happened to her, anyway? To Melanie Griffith? Julia Roberts even? All these sharp pretty young women with intriguing spiky edges who turned into weird soft-focus second-generation Xeroxes of, say, Gwyneth Paltrow....) -- without her, and without the endearing nebbishy charm of Billy Crystal, and the Autumn In New York cinematography, I'm struck by how particular the script is: how Rob-and-Nora it is (which she admits in the introduction -- Sally spoke for her, Harry for him), and how universally it was taken at the time, just as people in the sixties read D.H. Lawrence novels as marriage manuals -- or took Woody Allen films as being about anything other than Woody Allen. The insights which seemed daring and hilarious then -- men think about fucking a lot! women can fake it really well! -- now seem about as dated as that, well, canned perky "You've got mail!" greeting.My favourite parts were always the interviews in between the romantic comedy bits, altho apparently those were a lot less off-the-cuff (and used actual actors) than I always imagined. Blending Harry and Sally into them at the end makes good dramatic sense, but not emotionally -- their story of meeting up bears so little resemblance to what we've been watching it accidentally casts a pall back over all those other cute little soundbites. The script originally ended with Harry and Sally remaining "just friends," just like the original ending of Pretty Woman was two hookers going off on the bus to Disneyland, another factory of fantasies.(I have to say I have known personally at least three couples who thought they were "Harry and Sally" -- or at least where the female half declared to me, "We are Harry and Sally." Those relationships went about as disastrously wrong as you can imagine, and nobody wound up getting married, with sauce on the side.)(And don't even talk to me about that horrible horrible Sleepless in Seattle movie. People from Seattle hate it the way Iowans hate Field of Dreams. Gahhh.)
When Harry Met Sally has to be one of my favorite movies of all time. It is one of the few romantic comedies that actually tries to develop a relationship and makes me laugh while doing it. I'll share a few of my favorite bits of dialogue with you.Harry Burns: I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. Sally Albright: You see? That is just like you, Harry. You say things like that, and you make it impossible for me to hate you. Sally: When Joe and I started seeing each other, we wanted exactly the same thing. We wanted to live together, but we didn't want to get married because every time anyone we knew got married, it ruined their relationship. They practically never had sex again. It's true, it's one of the secrets that no one ever tells you. I would sit around with my girlfriends who have kids - and, actually, my one girlfriend who has kids, Alice - and she would complain about how she and Gary never did it anymore. She didn't even complain about it, now that I think about it. She just said it matter-of-factly. She said they were up all night, they were both exhausted all the time, the kids just took every sexual impulse they had out of them. And Joe and I used to talk about it, and we'd say we were so lucky we have this wonderful relationship, we can have sex on the kitchen floor and not worry about the kids walking in. We can fly off to Rome on a moment's notice. And then one day I was taking Alice's little girl for the afternoon because I'd promised to take her to the circus, and we were in the cab playing "I Spy" - I spy a mailbox, I spy a lamp-post - and she looked out the window and she saw this man and this woman with these two little kids. And the man had one of the little kids on his shoulders, and she said, "I spy a family." And I started to cry. You know, I just started crying. And I went home, and I said, "The thing is, Joe, we never do fly off to Rome on a moment's notice."Harry: And the kitchen floor?Sally: [sadly] Not once. It's this very cold, hard Mexican ceramic tile. If you haven't already, read the screenplay or watch the movie. Actually, just watch the movie. Go do it right now.
What do You think about When Harry Met Sally (2004)?
Did I ever mention how much I love script books? I like learning the dialogue and construction of a movie, the gestures and little parts that make the movie whole. This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and the movie itself is constructed of mostly dialogue. That's why it makes the book fascinating, although I would love to learn more actions and gestures to compare how the script is written to how the movie turns out.That being said, I still love Nora Ephron, think this is her best work ever, and that the dialogue is fascinating to follow. I also appreciate her foreword, crediting the directors and producers and how one lunch ended up being something much more than what they first planned. It makes us understand the world of scriptwriting a little better, and how much changed before and after the whole thing was made.
—Winna
This was a light-hearted comedy based on the well known movie. It's basically standard chick-lit -- It's all about getting together and breaking up and misunderstandings and getting upset over your previous relationship and having sex and then regretting it and finding your true love at long last. It would have been nice of the author had expanded on some of the scenes in this book. It's very short, the introduction took up about 40% of the book so the actual story was only around 50 pages long. It only took half an hour to read this book.
—Aoibhínn
p xiv-xviiAll this is a long way of saying that movies generally start out belonging to the writer and end up belonging to the director. If you're very lucky as a writer, you look at the director's movie and feel that it's your movie, too. As Rob and Andy and I worked on the movie, it changed: it became less quirky and much funnier; it became less mine and more theirs. But what made it possible for me to live through this process—which is actually called “The Process,” a polite expression for the period when the writer, generally, gets screwed—was that Rob and I each had a character we owned. On most movies, what normally happens in the course of The Process is that the writer says one thing and the director says another thing, and in the end the most the writer can hope for is a compromise; what made this movie different was that Rob had a character who could say whatever he believed, and if I disagreed, I had Sally to say so for me…I don’t want to sound Pollyannaish about any of this. Rob and I disagreed. We disagreed all the time. Rob believes that men and women can’t be friends (HARRY: “Men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way.”) I disagree (SALLY: “That’s not true. I have plenty of men friends and there’s no sex involved”). And both of us are right…When a movie like When Harry Met Sally opens, people come to ask you questions about it. And for a few brief weeks, you become an expert. You seem quite wise. You give the impression that you knew what you were doing all along. You become an expert on friends, on the possibilities of love, on the differences between men and women. But the truth is that when you work on a movie, you don’t sit around thinking, We’re making a movie about the difference between men and women. Or whatever. You just do it. You say, this scene works for me, but this one doesn’t. You say, this is good, but this could be funnier. You say, it’s a little slow here, what could we do to speed it up? You say, this scene is long, and this scene isn’t story, and we need a better button on this one.
—Steph
