Some people hate this movie. Hate it.
Fox took her store in the end and that makes him a bastard and not a
hero. Except every time I looked at the movie and the heroine, Kate
aka Shopgirl, I saw a woman stuck in the past. When one of the
characters asked her What if you do lose the store what would you do?
She looked flummoxed. Her enter life had been that store and nothing
else. Hell, even her AOL name was Shopgirl. She identified as nothing
else even though it was apparent she loved books.
And, I may have been the only person
who watched that movie and thought, Thank God, when the store closed.
Go ahead. I'll wait for the tomatoes and rotten eggs to be thrown my
way.
Ok. Done?
The single redeeming factor is
that from the first scene you knew Fox and Kate belonged with each
other and not the pompous buttholes they were with. When they found
out who each other were, you knew, just knew, still they belonged
together.
In the end I just couldn't get one
nugget out of my head: what if you had to let something go? Something
you loved with all your heart? Something, that maybe, you should have
let go a long time ago.
I bridged that nugget with my favorite trope. The I Loathe The Very Being Of You romance trope. Love it. You get to
banter and I love banter. You get to sneak in all the glimpses of the
real person underneath and watch the hero and heroine fall. And
there's nothing better to get to that scene where the character
realizes they are head over heels in love and their general reaction
is, Oh, hell. Not you! I mentioned I was bent, right?
And then Lynne sort of just lurked in
the back of mind. She's a wannabe rebel. She's a big ol' softie. The
more I thought of the type of man who would make her go all Oh, hell.
Not you! The more I kept thinking You've Got Mail needs an
argument in its defense. (Ok. Not really what I was thinking, but
close enough. And it's a Nora Ephron movie and really she needs no
defense. She's brilliant.) I imagined the kind of man who'd make her
want to strangle herself before falling for him and then Nate started
to form. He's alpha, he's a jackass and he's brilliant at what he
does. And at the core he's a big ol' softie.
So, yeah, that's the big reveal in how an obsession
turned into a book. Frightening or enlightening? lol
