As soon as it hit the video rental stores, my college friends and I rented it.  And then rented it again.  Because I was a poor college student, buying a movie on VHS as soon as it got released was like the ultimate honor I could pay to it.  And this was one of those rare movies I just had to buy right away and have as my very own to watch whenever I wanted to, and who cares if it cost more than it would in a few months.  

Of course, this was back when a movie finally was available to buy on VHS several months after it was available to rent (and it arrived at the rental shops six months or so after it was in the theater -- this is how we learned patience).  So we'd been able to rent it quite a few times before I was able to own my own copy.

And why were we so obsessed with You've Got Mail?  

We were all young women in our late teens or early twenties, and most of us were hoping to meet a nice guy at college and fall in love and get married.  And I think that was a huge part of this movie's appeal: Tom Hanks can play really nice guys.  Approachable guys.  Guys who don't seem like they're out of the realm of possibility for an average girl to get together with.  My friends and I were realistic about our chances of attracting a guy who looked like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt (never happening), but Tom Hanks was just enough of an average joe that we would have a chance with him.

And who doesn't want to have someone fall in love with who you really are?  Someone you can share your most whimsical, quirky, oddball, funky thoughts with?  Someone who takes the time to understand you?

That's what You've Got Mail is all about.

And, for book nerds like me, all the bookish goodness was a total perk.

Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) runs a children's book store in New York City called Shop Around the Corner.  She's warm and bubbly and quirky and feisty and complicated.  She's been online pen pals with a stranger for months.  They met in a chat room, bonded over loving NYC, and started exchanging their thoughts on various subjects, just for fun.

Kathleen's livelihood is threatened by the impending opening of a Fox Books mega bookstore nearby.  Her boyfriend, an opinionated newspaper columnist (Greg Kinnear), helps her organize a protest campaign to block the "big box" Fox Books from opening and ruining the indie-stores-only vibe of the neighborhood.

Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) is the third-generation businessman running the family company, Fox Books.  He's snarky and witty and sharp and kind and complicated.  And about halfway through the movie, he discovers that the awful woman who is throwing roadblocks in his bookstore's way and mocking him in public and generally being a pain in his neck... is also the lovely woman he's been corresponding with for months and might be falling in love with.

And then things get complicated :-)

You've Got Mail is a remake of The Shop Around the Corner (1940).  And I like it better than the original, mostly because both Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are playing such approachable, nice people.  The main characters in The Shop Around the Corner are both... kind of unlikeable.  I know one of them is played by Jimmy Stewart, but this is cranky Jimmy Stewart, not cuddly Jimmy Stewart.  I enjoy the movie, but I just don't love it like I love You've Got Mail.

Is this movie family friendly?  Um, fine for older teens?  Tom Hanks's character is living with his girlfriend.  A minor female side character leaves her husband for a woman.  There's some mild cussing and innuendo in dialog.  No violence, no nekkid people, not bedroom scenes.

This has been my contribution to the Film. Release. Repeat. Blogathon hosted by myself and The Midnite Drive-In all weekend!

I watched The Invisible Man (1933) for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and my real takeaway simply is: wow.

I got it from the library to watch with my mom and, as I started it up after I had put my teens to bed, she said to me, "This isn't going to give me nightmares, is it?"  I was like, "Mom, I haven't seen this before either.  But we've both read the book.  And it was made in 1933.  How scary can it be?  The special effects will probably make us laugh!"

I was half right and half wrong.  It wasn't scary in the slightest.  But the special effects?  They were most impressive and didn't make us laugh once.

The film begins when a mysterious stranger (Claude Rains) all bundled up against the snow arrives in a small English inn and pub.

He asks to rent a room, and to have supper served to him there, which leads to rampant speculation amongst the pub's regulars.  We may not have laughed at the movie's special effects, but we definitely laughed a lot while watching this movie!  It has lots of humorous parts, especially revolving around the pub's landlord and landlady.

Speaking of the landlady (Una O'Connor), she surprises the stranger at his supper, and he snatches up a napkin to cover his lower face quickly before she can see him.

She finds this most shocking and leaves in a huff.  But she would have been much more shocked if he hadn't!

He lowers his napkin after she leaves, revealing to us that... this is the Invisible Man, and boy howdy, is he ever invisible!!!

Now, thanks to the internet and film historians, I know in my head that they achieved this effect by having Claude Rains wear a black body stocking sort of thing with other clothes on top of it and filming him in front of a black cloth, and then they superimposed that over a background.  Something like this, yes.  But it is still breathtakingly cool!

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Great Britain, a scientist (Henry Travers) and his pretty daughter Flora (Gloria Talbott) are worried because one of his assistants has gone missing, and he was courting Flora, and she thinks he would surely not have left her without saying goodbye, right?

Well, we don't really have to wonder who that assistant is, or why he left so abruptly.  He's holed up now in this little inn, working madly away at figuring out how to reverse his condition.

The landlady hates her new lodger because he threatens people if they try to get in his room and even throws things at them, sometimes pushes them down the stairs.  Her husband is more concerned about getting a drink quick while his wife isn't looking than he is about pressing charges, though.

The police decide to intervene.  They burst into the stranger's room and demand he take off his disguise.  So he obliges.  

Once again, even when you pause and screencap it, these effects are so incredible!

Bit by bit, he removes all his clothing until he has nothing left but his shirt.  

He dances around them mockingly, then slips off the shirt and runs away unseen.  Now there's an invisible naked man loose, which terrifies absolutely everyone.

Flora's dad confides in his other assistant, Arthur, about what his protege had been working on and how dangerous some of the substances he'd used could be.

Arthur wants to get together with Flora himself, so he figures it's good riddance to bad rubbish until the Invisible Man shows up in his house and gets comfy there.  He's no longer interested in returning to visible form -- he wants to use his invisibility to get rich, to terrorize the authorities, to do whatever he wants to do.  He goes on a crime spree with spectacular results, and ends up back at that same inn.

There are a multitude of constables after him by then, and they converge on the inn, trying to capture him somehow.  The Invisible Man makes a desperate bid for freedom, and... is it really SPOILAGE if a book is 128 years old and a movie is 92 years old?  Well, if it is, skip to the shot of The End and don't read what I write between now and then.

Flora is distraught.  They finally find the Invisible Man by tracking his footprints in the snow, and are forced to shoot him before he can kill again.  Flora and her father rush to his bedside, for they're pretty sure he is dying.   

When he dies, the Invisible Man becomes visible again at last, leaving us with the biggest shock yet: Claude Rains Does Not Have a Mustache!!!  I repeat, it's a mustacheless Claude Rains, folks!  What?!

It's been a while since I read The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells, but from what I remember, this movie actually sticks really close to what happens in the book.  Unlike a lot of horror pictures made from classic books in the 1930s, it doesn't take a few character names and some story beats and make something new up around those, which is really refreshing.

This has been my contribution to the Early Shadows and Precode Horror Blogathon hosted this week by the Classic Movie Blog Association.  Be sure to click on that link or the blogathon button to read the other contributions by association members!

At its core, Chocolat is about finding a balance between discipline and indulgence.  If you are all discipline like the rigid Comte de Reynaud (Alfred Molina), or all indulgence like the abusive Serge Muscat (Peter Stormare), you're going to bring a lot of grief to others and yourself.  Even the heroine, Vianne (Juliette Binoche) swings from one to the other too much before finding her balance by the end.  The same goes for all the other main characters.  You have to stand on both feet to balance, knowing when to be disciplined and when to indulge in something fun or enjoyable.

I really love how Chocolate is framed as almost a sort of fairy tale.  Once upon a time, a woman named Vianne and her daughter Anouk (Victoire Thivisol) blow into a sleepy little French village on the earliest wings of springtime.  Vianne rents a vacant shop and revitalizes it with paint and love.  The locals are excited by having something new in town, even if it's just a new patisserie (aka bakery).  

But it's not a new patisserie.  It's a chocolaterie.  Opening just at the beginning of Lent, the forty days that lead up to Easter which Roman Catholics traditionally observe by "giving something up," or abstaining from some specific enjoyable thing (often meat, sometimes sweets -- it really depends on the person).  "Giving something up for Lent" is supposed to be a way to help a believer focus throughout the day on what Jesus gave up in order to win their eternal salvation from sin, death, and Hell.  But, too often, it gets turned into a pietistic outward act to make a person look good in the eyes of their friends and neighbors (or their local judgey minor aristocrat).  In this little village, everyone is expected to give up all sweets, it seems.  And yet, Vianne does a pretty good business.

This village is governed by the Comte de Reynaud, who makes it his business to know everything about everyone, or so he thinks.  He knows everything about the outward appearances of everyone's lives, anyway.  He's a one-man morality police, and even writes sermons for Pere Henri (Hugh O'Conor), the mild-mannered local priest.  

The Comte instructs Pere Henri to tell everyone in the village not to patronize Vianne's store.  Not only is she flouting convention by trying to sell delicious sweets during Lent, she has a daughter and has never been married.  She's a ruined woman who's going to ruin the whole town.  Repentance is a word the Comte likes to throw around, but he's very fuzzy on the ideas of forgiveness and living a renewed life.  

Vianne makes a few friends, like crusty old Armand (Judi Dench) and troubled Josephine Muscat (Lena Olin), as well as a sweet old widow (Leslie Caron) and her devoted would-be suitor (John Wood).  But her daughter Anouk is bullied at school and struggles to make new friends, relying on her imaginary kangaroo to keep her company.  

The last straw for the Comte comes in the form of a band of gypsies, among them a roguish musician and handyman called Roux (Johnny Depp).  Vianne befriends the gypsies.  The gypsies are even more Suspiciously Different than Vianne.  A careless comment dropped by the Comte in the hearing of a desperate and angry man leads to a dangerous and almost deadly crime, and the Comte suddenly begins to see that perhaps he's been terribly wrong about a good many things.  At the same time, Vianne realizes that her too-indulgent parenting and lifestyle comes with a potentially terrible price.

An epic (and comic) fall from grace puts the Comte back on the level with all the ordinary people of the village, particularly in his own eyes.  And Vianne has learned that indulging her whims and wishes, and relying only on herself instead of allowing others to truly befriend and help her, is also an unbalanced way to live.  

The movie closes with the whole village celebrating Easter, which is absolutely fitting in every way since Easter is the celebration of the day when Jesus rose from the dead, proving that he had balanced God's scales of justice and mercy for all time.

Is this movie family friendly?  Not exactly.  Some characters use double entendres.  We see the evidence of a man's physical abuse of his wife.  There are several suggestive moments and a fade-to-black love scene.  There's one scene of fairly intense physical violence and a scary fire.  An old woman dies, and a child finds her body.  And there are a handful of cuss words.  Not to mention a chocolate sculpture of a naked woman, although it's got a classic art sort of thing going on, it's not meant to be erotic.  I've told my teens they can watch it after they graduate from high school.

This is my contribution to the Food and Film Blogathon hosted this week by 18 Cinema Lane.  Check out Sally's blog for all the other delicious contributions.

We rented it again a few years later, when my brother had a stomach bug, and he ended up getting so sick that my parents left me alone to watch the movie while they took him to the emergency room.  I was probably 8 or 9, and it was the first time I got to stay home all by myself.  (Don't worry, our town was 5 minutes away, I knew how to use the phone, and I knew how to call the neighbors who lived a quarter of a mile away if I had an emergency.  The '80s were a good time to grow up.)  

As a young girl, my interest in this movie was mainly centered on how cool it would be to have a wolf for a friend.  When I got to my tweens, my attention switched more to how gutsy Natty Gann herself is.  And in my teens and twenties, I focused more on how cute John Cusack is in this.  And, now that I'm in my mid-40s, I kind of just love the whole package!  And the music!  We'll circle back to that.

The Journey of Natty Gann takes place during the Great Depression, almost a hundred years ago now.  Natty Gann (Meredith Salenger) is a tomboy living in Chicago with her widowed father Sol (Ray Wise).  Sol has trouble finding work, like so many others, and when he hears about plentiful jobs in the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest, he decides he can't pass the opportunity up, even though he doesn't have time to explain to Natty that he is leaving.  He leaves her a letter and convinces their landlady to look after Natty, and then he has to leave.

The landlady is a bully and a thief, as it turns out.  As soon as Sol is gone, she decides to put Natty in an orphanage and pocket whatever money Sol sends for Natty's care.  She hits Natty and tries to keep her locked up until someone can take her to an orphanage, but Natty cleverly escapes and sets off for Washington State to find her dad.

The bulk of the movie is about Natty's journey, as you might expect, given the title.  She helps a caged wolf escape from someone who has trapped him to sell to a dog-fighting ring, and the wolf becomes her traveling companion.  Natty and Wolf (Jed) help each other out, sharing food and shelter.  Wolf also protects Natty from a man who offers them a ride when they are hitchhiking, but then tries to molest Natty.

Natty stumbles into a hobo camp and acquires another protector in Harry (John Cusack), a young hobo a few years older than she is.  Harry helps Natty and Wolf learn safe ways to ride the rails and avoid railroad enforcers.  

Natty's dad Sol is devastated when he calls the boarding house and learns that Natty has run away.  Even worse, her wallet is found under a train wreck, and he has no way of knowing Natty escaped the wreck unharmed.  Assuming his daughter died, he throws himself into doing the most dangerous logging jobs, obviously trying to work until something happens to end his pain.

I won't totally ruin the ending for you, but you do know it's going to end happily, right?  This is a Disney movie for kids!  From the '80s!  Obviously going to end well.

Also, Wolf doesn't die.  I'll spoil that for you.  He's fine at the end.  The dog who plays him, Jed, was a Northwestern wolf-Alaskan malamute mix who also starred in the 1991 version of White Fang opposite Ethan Hawke.  

Anyway, I said I would talk a bit about the soundtrack.  The score used in the movie is by James Horner, one of my BFF's favorite film composers.  But there is another complete score for this film that was recorded but not used, which is by Elmer Bernstein, who is my favorite film composer!  I have both soundtracks on CD, and they are both amazing.  I listened to Bernstein's on repeat while writing my book A Noble Companion because it was just exactly the jaunty outdoor adventure sound I needed.  You can listen to the James Horner soundtrack here on YouTube, and you can listen to a suite from Bernstein's rejected score here on YouTube.  

Is this movie family friendly?  I mean, it IS a Disney movie meant for kids.  It actually has a handful of cuss words, and there's some pretty dangerous stuff here and there.  Like I mentioned, there is some physical and emotional abuse toward Natty, and a grown man does try to molest her, though that takes the form of him trying to scoot her toward him in the cab of the truck he is driving while saying things about just wanting to be friendly.  His meaning is clear to an adult and teens/tweens, but smaller kids might not understand anything more than that he's trying to make her do something and she is struggling against him.  It's rated PG.  

This is my contribution to the Hit the Road Blogathon hosted this weekend by Quiggy at The Midnite Drive-In :-)

I had watched The Sacketts (1979) not long before seeing this the first time, and I was absolutely tickled to see Tom Selleck, Sam Elliott, and Jeff Osterage playing brothers in a Louis L'Amour adaptation again.  Although I mightily enjoyed The Sacketts, most of my enjoyment there was due to having read all the Sackett books by L'Amour and liking how the characters were brought to life onscreen.  I haven't read the book The Shadow Riders yet, but man, do I like the movie!  (I'm not entirely clear which came first, actually -- the book or the movie?  I read somewhere that L'Amour wrote this story for Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott to star in, so did he write the book first, or just the storyline?  I haven't really dug around enough to find out.  If you know, please tell me!)  In some ways, I think this is a stronger movie than The Sacketts -- particularly in its ability to be enjoyed by people who don't know the storyline ahead of time.  I had to explain some backstory stuff and other things to my husband while watching The Sacketts because he got a bit confused by some of it, but such was never the case for The Shadow Riders.

Anyway, the story follows three brothers: Mac (Tom Selleck), Dal (Sam Elliott), and Jesse (Jeff Osterhage) Traven.  (Why does Jesse get a full name, but Mac and Dal only get what feel like half names?  Inquiring minds want to know.)  The film opens during the very end of the Civil War, with Confederate soldier Dal and Union soldier Dal just trying to get home to their Texas ranch again.  

I have to pause here and mention that my husband is a big fan of Sam Elliott.  And there's a moment when Mac and Dal first arrive home and are greeted by their father (Harry Carey, Jr.), but their mother (Jane Greer) isn't sure for a minute if Dal is who they say he is because a) he was reported dead during the war, and b) he's covered basically his whole face up with a bushy beard.  But when Dal says, "How're you doing, Mama?" she knows it's him because, as she says, "There's only one man in the world with that voice."  At that point, my husband completely busted up and was alternately laughing and crowing, "She's got that right!"  And he really loves to quote that moment now.

Anyway, as soon as they get home, they have to leave right away again because their two sisters and their brother Jesse have been kidnapped by white slavers, along with the woman Dal loves silently and deeply, Kate (Katharine Ross).  Off Mac and Dal go, determined to do whatever it takes to rescue their siblings and Dal's One True Love and whoever else might need rescuing.

Meanwhile, Kate is bound and determined to escape their captors and take all the rest of the kidnappees with her before they can be sold in Mexico.  And Kate is the sort of woman who doesn't get defeated easily.  I want to be friends with her.

Jesse gets free with Kate's help and joins back up with his brothers to plot how to rescue their sisters and Kate, and free the other captives -- the bad guys took a bunch of men like Jesse too to sell as slaves to Mexican silver mines.  (They're equal opportunity kidnappers, you see.)

The brothers enlist the help of their rascally Uncle "Black Jack" Traven (Ben Johnson), who steals every scene he's in.  I've been a Ben Johnson fan since I was 11 or 12, ever since I first saw Chisum (1970) -- I am always happy to see his name on the cast list for a movie, because I know I'll smile while watching it.  Even when he plays an antagonist, I still just want to hug him.

Of course there are lots of exciting altercations and narrow escapes and plot twists and such, including a sequence involving a micro-trope I love exceedingly much: people walking around on top of a moving train.  Even the first time I watched this, I was in no doubt of the outcome, though.  And that doesn't make this movie boring, it makes it comfortable and relaxing and downright fun.  For me, anyway!  It feels like a throwback to the westerns of the 1950s where everything is guaranteed to turn out all right in the end.  And I love that.

Maybe that old-fashioned vibe is partly due to The Shadow Riders being directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, who directed quite a few of my favorite old western movies, like The Rare Breed (1965) and Chisum (1970), plus episodes of so many great old TV westerns.  (He also directed The Blue and the Gray (1982), which I love very dearly, but that's not a western.  I still had to mention it, though.)

Is this movie family friendly?  Mostly.  Obviously, there's the whole human-trafficking plotline, but it's handled in a matter-of-fact way, shown to be a wrong thing that Must Be Stopped.  There's some mild cussing, consistent with a 1980s made-for-TV movie.  The violence is non-gory.  There's a bit of dialog innuendo about the fate the female kidnappees are headed for, and also a scene when we're introduced to Selleck's character where he's lying in bed kissing a woman and they get interrupted, but everyone is fully clothed and it is minimally suggestive.  I'd say it's fine for older kids and teens.

You can stream The Shadow Riders on Amazon, Tubi, and the Roku Channel, and also buy it on DVD and Blu-Ray.

This review is a contribution to this year's Legends of Western Cinema Week, which I'm co-hosting this week.