Consequently, Ephron is forced to shape and integrate the twin halves of the picture, and she does a splendid job - the intercutting is always fluid and never mechanical. Better yet, the script keeps surprising us, setting up stock situations and then pulling away from a stock treatment.
There are no surprises in Sleepless, and the audience is ahead of the characters every step of the way. But people seem to like it that way. And, hey, it works like a charm.
Sam and Annie only meet in person just 2 minutes and 5 minutes if you include the scene when Annie seeing Sam and Jonah in the beach and on the road, but the movie still be really good and leave me personally satisfying, why?, because they making both Sam and Annie personal life interesting, added with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, and Ross Malinger amazing performance, Sleepless In Seattle is incredible.
Sleepless in Seattle is an exceptionally tender portrayal of a love story. While fate plays a significant role, the romantic story of the male and female leads is deeply moving, like a breeze filled with Comrades: Almost a Love Story that brings them together.
Ephron develops this story with all of the heartfelt sincerity of a 1950s tearjerker (indeed, the movie's characters spend a lot of time watching "An Affair to Remember" and using it as their romantic compass).
Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed this, repeatedly alludes to the 1957 "An Affair to Remember" as her principal point of reference, yet at no point does she indicate any awareness of what makes that tragicomic love story sublime and this one merely cutesy.
For clever as it is conceptually, it violates the most basic rule of romantic- comedy construction. If boy doesn't meet girl, then the drama of boy losing girl and the final satisfaction of boy getting girl cannot happen.
While celebrating the lushly romantic, it also tweaks the tradition so that Sleepless in Seattle ends up something akin to a feature-length Taster's Choice commercial.
Quirky romantic dramedy uses its star cast well. While the screenplay is decent I found the leaps in logic from the plot to be a little too much! Still it was a fun watch in 2023.
Decent romance movie. It was kind of cheesy in a lot of parts in the movie. Overall though not bad. It's a classic a deserves to be seen at least once.
The movie feels cheesy at moments made from a well established recipe that aims to lure you in. But when it is a prefabricated as this then it is all anticipated and there is no suspense.
Romantic comedies are very difficult to get right. This “old classic” signed Nora Ephron is a good example of everything that can go wrong.
Built on the success of “When Harry met Sally”, we have cute heroine Meg Ryan playing one of her romantic leads roles, inclusive of tics and weirdness that were her trademark. She could easily be a slightly older version of Sally, with a worse haircut. This time, her character is called Annie and she lives in Baltimore.
Annie is engaged to Walter, whose main defect is being dull. This must be a terrible crime in Ephron’s book, since Walter is treated with zero respect. One night, Annie listens to Sam’s phone call to a radio station. Sam is a young widower, living in Seattle with his son Jonah. Just listening to his story Annie fells for him.
Many criticized this idea of falling in love, which however is not the worst point of the movie. People fall in love for lots of different reasons, so I could buy Annie falling for Sam and trying to meet him. What I do not buy is the artificiality of all the events presented after that.
Annie is a journalist and manages to be sent to Seattle to meet Sam, but somehow manages not to do so, even if she sees him twice (and he sees her too, managing to fell in love at “first sight”). They do not exchange words, even if she could have waited for him and introduced herself in a normal way. But that would have been way too dull for Ephron.
Then there is a letter which makes unbearable Jonah instantly like Annie. Jonah tries to push Sam to meet Annie on top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. This is contrivance at the highest level, built in the script together with many references to the movie “An affair to remember”. Since neither Sam nor Annie live in New York, this “romantic” meeting on Valentine’s is supposed to prove that “love at first sight” does exist and can even be the basis for a long lasting relationship….. or whatever.
What I got instead, is an overlong, unfunny movie where the two leads meet only at the end, which is certainly not the way I like onscreen romances to go.