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'Your Friends and Neighbors'
'You've Got Mail'

'Your Friends and Neighbors' (8/24/98)
Directed by Neil LaBute
Starring Ben Stiller, Nastassja Kinski

As anyone who saw Neil LaBute's incendiary first feature, "In the Company of Men," knows, this writer-director has a gift for creating loathsome leading men. This time his focus is on the sexual relations between men and women. There are six unnamed characters, three men and three women, all of whom are engaged in either inflicting or enduring misery. All the characters are introduced in bed, having a bad time. Ben Stiller's razor-edged girlfriend (Catherine Keener) calls an abrupt halt to their coitus to complain about his incessant talking. The hapless Aaron Eckhart prefers masturbation to sex with his sweet, masochistic wife (Amy Brenneman), which makes her perk up when the wormy Stiller, her husband's friend, suggests they have an affair. Keener, meanwhile, takes Nastassja Kinski as a lover: what begins happily soon turns as sour as all the other affairs. The nastiness of "In the Company of Men" felt new, shocking, revelatory. The nastiness of "Your Friends and Neighbors" feels old, mechanical, jejune. LaBute can turn an amusingly nasty phrase, but his deliberately theatrical direction makes this all-indoors movie more static than it needs to be. What keeps you in your seat is the acting.
DAVID ANSEN
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You've Got Mail (12/21/98)
Directed by Nora Ephron
Starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan

In the anonymity of cyberspace, Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) can open their souls to each other, and disregard the fact that both are involved in less-than-perfect relationships. Joe is with a brash Manhattan book editor (Parker Posey) and Kathleen with a vain intellectual (Greg Kinnear). But should they take the big leap and meet in the flesh? The twist in "You've Got Mail" is that unbeknownst to them, they have met, and detest each other. As the owner of the megachain Fox Books (think Barnes & Noble), Joe not only represents everything Kathleen hates, he threatens to put her cozy little children's bookstore out of business. Nora Ephron's latest romantic comedy, co-written with her sister Delia Ephron, must overcome a tepid first half, filled with mildly satirical Upper West Side jokes and flat scenes involving the none-too- interesting staff of Kathleen's bookstore. But have patience and the film will reward you. The love story proves surprisingly touching. Thanks to the chemistry that pros Hanks and Ryan generate, "You've Got Mail" ultimately achieves that lump in the throat that is the romantic comedy's promised land.
DAVID ANSEN
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