The Yule Tide (1998)

Just Their Type

The possibility that Tom Hanks is the anonymous correspondent with whom you have been exchanging intimate e-mails for weeks while sitting on the couch in your sweatpants, eating nonfat Haagen-Dazs out of the carton, is the reason why Internet services like America Online are a multibillion-dollar phenomenon, and why the romantic fabric of America today is woven with modem connections.

Actually, the anonymous correspondent is more likely to be Bill Maher. But it's the dream of Hanks that keeps hope alive, and keeps You've Got Mail alive, too. Nora Ephron's mightily unsteady, ultimately seductive romantic comedy seduces in huge part because Hanks, a 42-year-old Californian, is so effectively, endearingly, light-footedly convincing as a New Yorker in his indeterminate 30s. He's Joe Fox, the attractive, wealthy, hard-charging owner of the kind of book-superstore chain that regularly puts small neighborhood bookshops out of business. And what Joe doesn't realize is that the anonymous woman on the other end of the blinking cursor -- the unknown online enchantress whose every thought is far more captivating than any Ephronish barb falling from the sharp tongue of his aggressive editor girlfriend (Parker Posey) -- is Kathleen Kelly, the gentle owner of one of those very shops (a children's literary Eden, no less) he likes to devour. And that they live in the same adorable, highly cultured Upper West Side neighborhood that Nora Ephron lives in. And that the e-mail enchantress is Meg Ryan! (In real life, she's more likely to be Courtney Love.)

You've Got Mail steals from the best. ''Parfumerie,'' Miklos Laszlo's charming 1937 story about a Budapest shop girl who doesn't realize that her lonely hearts pen pal is a fellow employee, was first turned into The Shop Around the Corner (1940), one of the most irresistibly beguiling romantic comedies ever made, by master beguiler Ernst Lubitsch. (The story also inspired Judy Garland's film In the Good Old Summertime and the Broadway musical She Loves Me.) Lubitsch, of course, cast Jimmy Stewart opposite Margaret Sullavan. So right away, there's a shimmer of gold dust on Ephron's project, since Hanks' appealingly decent persona is so constantly compared to Stewart's.

But, pretty as it is, You've Got Mail also frequently veers from that great adaptation. For one thing, the director, collaborating with her sister Delia Ephron on the script, can't resist making the story something weightier than Lubitsch's gossamer romance. Addicted to social satire, she digresses to comment on the culture of laptops, of bookstore economics, of literary cocktail chat, even of attempting to pay with a credit card in the cash-only aisle of the famous foodie heaven Zabar's. And with so many pauses to toss off zingers, the pleasurable build-up to the satisfying clinch is thrown off-kilter; Ephron the writer is still in better shape than Ephron the director, who could have used someone to tell her, ''Funny! But lose the scene.'' We know Kathleen is meant for Joe, but the entire last quarter of the movie drags while Ephron juggles her arch, throwaway subplots: Kathleen's boyfriend (Greg Kinnear) is a vain newspaper columnist; the old bookkeeper in her shop (Jean Stapleton) once had an affair with a man who ''ran Spain''; Joe's father (Dabney Coleman, marvelously dry as zwieback) dates a string of young girlfriends, etc. (The rest of the supporting cast -- including Dave Chappelle as a superstore executive -- is uniformly terrific.)

Then there's the Sleepless in Seattle conundrum: Since Hanks and Ryan first clicked so lucratively for Ephron as circling soul mates five years ago, she is, understandably, loath to mess with the formula too much. And this doesn't leave much room for freshness. Joe may represent corporate greed, but he's also, after all, Tom Hanks, who eventually feels truly sorry about the business hardship he has caused. Kathleen may run her own independent enterprise, but she is, finally, twinkly, nose-crinklingly cute Meg Ryan, who, in the morning after her boyfriend goes to work, takes perky-pooky baby steps in her pj's and woolly socks to read her e-mail from the most ideal fella a lonely AOL user could ever imagine. (You know she's reading because her eyes pop and she grins busily; Ryan never does anything quietly, not even read to herself.)

Hanks, though, he reads like real men read (alert, but available to his dog). As Joe, he writes like women can only wish men would write, men who know there's more to online seduction than openers like ''What R U wearing?'' For giving millions of electronic- letter writers hope, alone, this valentine to modern love in New York deserves the letter B. -- LS

Taking a Stab

In one of the many unintentionally bizarre moments of Gus Van Sant's Psycho, Norman Bates (Vince Vaughn), a tall, polite, rather jittery young man who operates a depressing roadside motel, submits to a casual interview with Arbogast (William H. Macy), a pushy private eye who has shown up to investigate the mysterious disappearance of Marion Crane (Anne Heche). Norman, doing his best to appear friendly, extends the paper bag he is holding and offers the detective some candy. In the original Psycho (1960), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, this tiny affable gesture was a nerd's desperate attempt at ''normality'' -- his feeble stab at making the detective feel right at home. In the new Psycho, we watch Vince Vaughn, a strapping late-'90s hunk, nattering on about candy, and he sounds like a complete and utter wackjob. Norman Bates, of course, is a wackjob, but even Hitchcock didn't mean for him to be quite so obvious about it.

Psycho is one of my favorite movies (I've seen it close to 20 times), but when I heard about Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake, it sounded like an intriguing, even inspired, idea. Those who dismissed the notion of doing a big, shiny, color update as a sacrilege, or said that it was simply unnecessary, seemed to be missing the point. Unique among studio-system films, Psycho is a movie that invites you to watch yourself watching it. In killing off his lead character after just 40 minutes (and, along with her, our entire sense that a Hollywood movie would always unfold in an ordered dramatic universe), Hitchcock teased the audience's elemental desire for identification and, in the process, undercut the notion of identity itself. It was his ultimate ghoulish prank to make a movie about a monster -- Mrs. Bates -- who literally doesn't exist. The monster is in Norman's head -- and, as we watch, in our heads as well. To see Psycho is to experience a thriller as a test for the limits of rationality. That's why a remake seemed so seductive. What could be juicier, or more appropriate, than this post-postmodern Psycho, a movie that asks us to sit back and meditate on our self-conscious response to it?

Van Sant duplicates the dialogue, the camera angles, the squealy accelerated heartbeat of Bernard Herrmann's high-anxiety score, but, more than that, he mimics the precise visual rhythms of Hitchcock's film. When Marion takes her ominous highway drive, the rain pours down the windshield with the same pulsing density. Later, the shadow of Norman's mother passes across the Bates house window with the same languid, spectral flow. With a few pointed exceptions, everything in the new Psycho is an exacting mirror of the old. There's really only one difference -- but it turns out to be a major howler. The film is now set in the present day, and so a great deal of it no longer makes sense.

In the original, Marion absconds with $40,000 as a desperate means of rendering her sordid romantic relationship ''respectable.'' Janet Leigh plays Marion as prim yet deeply, neurotically divided; she's a fallen woman who sins to save herself. (Every other line is a malicious double entendre.) In the remake, Van Sant has Anne Heche, as Marion, come on as a vivacious pixie clad in wildflower orange. She looks like she belongs on the back of a chopper, so that when she steals the money (now $400,000), it's not really a sin -- it's just a whim. There's no whirlpool of guilt to her actions, no sense that she's being cosmically baptized (and then punished) when she finally steps into that shower. Vaughn, as Norman, works hard to update Tony Perkins' nervous-Nellie mannerisms, and he's quite good when he's mopping up after the murder (he looks full of nauseous anxiety), but the essence of Norman is that he appears harmless -- he ''wouldn't even hurt a fly'' -- and Vaughn is too naturally imposing. I would have given the role to Jeremy Davies (''Saving Private Ryan'').

In a provocative addition, Norman, true to his last name, now masturbates when he's peeping in on Marion, and we see rapid-fire shock cuts (roiling clouds, a macabre calf) during the murders. Van Sant probably should have gone further in this direction, adding gaudy explicit touches to what had been implicit before. Either that, or he should have set the entire film in a meticulously re-created past, a la Pleasantville, aping not just the cinematic ingeniousness of Psycho but the film's whole pent-up, black-and-white universe of repression, lust, madness, and release. What makes the original loom in our imaginations to this day is the way that through its violence and terror, its trapdoor nightmarishness, it slashed through the essence of the '50s itself. Van Sant's Psycho is a fascinating stunt, but it's as weightless as air, because it depicts the annihilation of a world that has already been destroyed. B -- OG

The Red Sea Diaries

The amazing fluidity of contemporary animation -- Look! That river ripples just like real water! -- has, by now, lost its ability to startle, and that's one reason I greatly enjoyed the beautiful pastel angularity of The Prince of Egypt. The first animated musical from DreamWorks, it has been drawn in a variation on the Disney photo-realist style, only here, the Egyptian setting, with its towering pyramids and intricately chiseled sphinx, its poker-faced hieroglyphics (which, at one point, come to life in spectacular pantomime), gives the animators a chance to create a mood of sunbaked sandstone vastness.

The Prince of Egypt is no more a vulgarization of the Old Testament than The Ten Commandments was. It may turn the stormy figure of Moses into a slender, mild-spirited young man (whose wispy beard makes him look like a draft dodger), but it takes him on a moral journey that's swift, sure, and compelling. Moses, as a baby, is sent floating down the Nile by his Hebrew slave parents and is adopted by the dour Pharaoh Seti. As Moses and his older brother, the jockish, self-doubting Ramses, come of age, they have a high time tearing around the urban-primitive maze, racing chariots, dropping water balloons, treating the edifice of civilization as a private playground. Before long, however, Moses begins to notice who's building the playground. All around him are broken-backed Hebrews laboring on the construction of Egypt's stately wonders.

Respectfully DreamWorked, The Prince of Egypt is now the story of a young man who redeems himself by freeing his people. The voice of Val Kilmer goes a long way toward lending Moses' gee-whiz ingenuousness some virility and heft, and Ralph Fiennes plays Ramses with a delicate quaver of vulnerability. Patrick Stewart makes the Pharaoh an imposing fascist. That said, there's a nagging disharmony between the grandeur of the tale and the lazily anachronistic dialogue, which spoon-feeds the audience. When Moses rears up at Ramses and says, ''Let my people go!'' I realized that the famousness of the line was all that prevented the screenwriters from turning it into something like ''Hey, can't you give us Hebrews a break?''

The songs, by Stephen Schwartz, are mostly ''operatic'' show-tune pap (though I did enjoy the Carl Orffian opening number), and their lack of splendor ties in to what's missing from the movie. What The Prince of Egypt doesn't get at -- it's nothing less than a biblical cornerstone -- is that Moses wasn't simply saving the Hebrews from captivity. He was elevating mankind to a place closer to God. I'm afraid, though, that the Big Guy's presence is rather muted here. He does come through with a few miracles, but even they seem like mere special effects within the magical world of animation, where visual wonders tend never to cease. In The Prince of Egypt, the Red Sea parts, and the feeling it gives you isn't awe; it's closer to deep impact. B -- OG

To Boldly Go...Again

You might think that by the ninth Star Trek feature film, there isn't a square centimeter left where someone hasn't boldly gone before. You obviously haven't been to the land of the Ba'ku, a race of 600 people who live simply and never require under-eye concealer: Their planet is bathed in an anomalous ''metaphasic radiation'' that reverses aging, and even women over 300 years old can look as young as Diane Sawyer, or at least no older than Anij (Donna Murphy), a lovely Ba'kuvian who purrs to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart): ''It's been 300 years since I've seen a bald man.''

In Star Trek: Insurrection, directed by Jonathan Frakes (who also plays Commander Riker and, no doubt buzzed by metaphasic radiation, shaves his beard), Picard and his Enterprise cronies discover that an extremely wrinkly, dying civilization with a moisturizer-challenged leader (F. Murray Abraham) has plans to displace the Ba'ku and conquer their salutary environment. Worse, the Wrinkly Ones have wrangled approval from Starfleet's Admiral Dougherty (Anthony Zerbe), who agrees in the name of progress. Picard thinks this is wrong. ''Where does it end?'' he growls, and prepares to disobey a direct order.

That's the moral nut of this highly unexceptional episode, a midlife production in which each Enterprise crew member does his or her vaudeville act. Data (Brent Spiner), kibitzing more and more like an android stand-up, explains that ''in the event of an emergency, I have been designed to serve as a flotation device.'' Worf (Michael Dorn), hormones surging, sprouts a Day-Glo zit. Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) exchanges girl talk with Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden): ''Have you noticed how your boobs have started to firm up?'' Picard breaks out in a mambo.

The battle scenes themselves march along with minimal effort, both on the part of the computer animators and the cast, whose knees, perhaps, have not absorbed enough special radiation to endure extended physical sequences. Bless them, I love their thickening life-forms. But perhaps the Enterprise crew might consider renting a Ba'ku condo and using it as a retreat to discuss just where they plan to fly from here. C -- LS

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