'When Harry Met Sally...." movie review

-



In July of 1989, Columbia Pictures released “When Harry Met Sally…” a witty romantic comedy written by the late Nora Ephron (“Sleepless in Seattle”) and directed by Rob (“Stand by Me”) Reiner. Starring Billy Crystal as Harry Burns and Meg Ryan as Sally Albright, “When Harry Met Sally…” is a clever, humorous, yet unexpectedly moving look at the relationships between men and women. It covers various aspects of love and gender roles, but its most famous theme is Can men and women really be friends?  

“When Harry Met Sally…” follows the course of the titular characters’ relationship over a 12-year period that begins in 1977 and ends roughly in the movie’s Present Day. As Ephron and Reiner set up the scenario, Harry and Sally have jgraduated from the University of Chicago and are headed east to start new lives and careers in New York. They have never met before, but Sally’s a friend of Harry’s girlfriend Amanda (Michelle Nicastro) and has agreed to take Harry along as a co-driver for the 18-hour drive to the Big Apple.

It isn’t, as they say, love at first sight. Harry sees Sally’s optimistic attitude about life as naïve and 
unrealistic. Sally, on the other hand, thinks Harry is obnoxious, depressing, and shallow. They disagree on almost everything, but their main point of divergence is their take on male-female friendships.

Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends.

Sally Albright: Why not?

Harry Burns: What I'm saying is - and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form - is that men and women can't be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

Harry and Sally don’t get along too well during their drive to New York, and they go their separate ways. Sally becomes a journalist, Harry becomes a political consultant, and throughout the movie they cross paths every few years. They date other people, and at one point Harry gets married to a frosty lawyer named Helen Hillson (Harley Kozak).

But since this is, after all, a romantic comedy, Ephron and Reiner know that a movie titled “When Harry Met Sally…” has to get the two leads to be together. But before they do, they want Harry, Sally, and their best friends Jess and Marie (Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher) to delve into the thorny real-life issues of adult relationships. As a result, Harry and Sally must undergo various trials, including failed romances, the aftermath of a spontaneous sexual encounter that ends badly, and their different outlooks on life and sex.

If the story arc of “When Harry Met Sally…” is somewhat predictable (or else it would not be a romantic comedy), the true genius is in the details of the story. Ephron’s depiction of Harry was based on director Rob Reiner, who was coping with his return to the dating scene after a divorce. His feelings and views on women are the basis for Harry’s sometimes cynical world view. Luckily, when Billy Crystal was cast in the role, he added many of his lines and character traits, making Harry funnier and more likeable. Ephron was also inspired by the friendship between Crystal and Reiner; she infuses her script with material she mined by observing the two men’s interactions during pre-production.

Nora Ephron also gives Meg Ryan some of the best comedic material of “America’s Sweetheart’s” career. Ephron based Sally Albright on herself and several of her friends. The character’s famous pickiness about food comes straight from the screenwriter’s personality. 

  “When Harry Met Sally…” is a crowd pleaser in every sense of the word. The movie highlights outstanding performances by its two leads and supporting actors Bruno Kirby (“City Slickers”) and Carrie Fisher (“Star Wars”).  It also features a great musical score arranged by Marc Shaiman and performed, in part, by a then little-known jazz pianist and singer from New Orleans, Harry Connick, Jr. It’s a funny, wry, and often heart-rending film; “When Harry Met Sally…” truly deserves its reputation as one of the best romantic movies of all time.

“When Harry Met Sally…” Blu-ray Specs

Video
  • ·        Codec: MPEG-4 AVC (32.00 Mbps)
  • ·        Resolution: 1080p
  • ·        Aspect ratio: 1.84:1
  • ·        Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1


Audio
  • ·        English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
  • ·        Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
  • ·        French: DTS 5.1
  • ·        Portuguese: Dolby Digital 2.0
  • ·        Italian: DTS 5.1
  • ·        German: DTS 5.1
  • ·        Russian: DTS 5.1
  • ·        Spanish: DTS 5.1
  • ·        Polish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
  • ·        Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0

Note: Japanese available when the menu is set to Japanese

Subtitles
·        
      English SDH, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Cantonese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Mandarin (Traditional), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish

Discs
  • ·        50GB Blu-ray Disc
  • ·        Single disc (1 BD)
  •  

Playback
·        Region A
·        Rated: R (Restricted)
·        Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
·        Blu-ray Release Date: January 1, 2014
·        Run Time: 96 minutes
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year 1958, which is where parts of  11/22/63 
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’s first C.O.,
Read more

Bolero: The One Movie I Have Seen That I Wish Could Be Erased From My Memory

-
Image
If you could have 1 movie that you’ve seen in the past erased from your memory, what movie would that be and why? That’s easy.  Bolero. © 1984 Cannon Film Group Now, I have seen more than my fair share of movies that, for one reason or another, I don’t enjoy at all or once liked but have changed my mind about as I have grown older.  Me Before You  is an example of the former;  Avatar  and  Midway  are exemplars of the latter. But writer-director John Derek’s softcore porn movie disguised as an “adventure in ecstasy” is still the dumbest, most boring film I ever paid a movie ticket to go see in an actual multiplex. It’s so bad, in fact, that my friends (yes, I went with a coed group of buds from college) and I decided, collectively, that as spectacular as Bo Derek looks naked, she was way too old to play a nubile if naive girl in her 20s. The story was just a barely-there plot woven together around a series of nude scenes (including the obligatory girl-girl scene) that
Read more