Ryan, Meg

Sleepless in Seattle (10th Anniversary Edition)

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star in Nora Ephron's wonderfully romantic comedy about two people drawn together by destiny.Tom Hanks stars as Sam Baldwin a widowed father who thanks to the wiles of his worried son becomes a reluctant guest on a radio call-in show. He's an instant hit with thousands of female listeners who deluge his Seattle home with letters o comfort. Meanwhile inspired in equal parts by Sam's story and by classic Hollywood romance writer Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) becomes convinced that it's her destiny to meet Sam. There are just two problems: Annie's engaged to someone else and Sam doesn t know - yet - that they're made for each other.System Requirements:Running Time: 105 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: PG UPC: 043396016323 Manufacturer No: 01632

You've Got Mail

By now, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan have amassed such a fund of goodwill with moviegoers that any new onscreen pairing brings nearly reflexive smiles. In You've Got Mail, the quintessential boy and girl next door repeat the tentative romantic crescendo that made Sleepless in Seattle, writer-director Nora Ephron's previous excursion with the duo, a massive hit. The prospective couple do actually meet face to face early on, but Mail otherwise repeats the earlier feature's gentle, extended tease of saving its romantic resolution until the final, gauzy shot.

The underlying narrative is an even more old-fashioned romantic pas de deux that is casually hooked to a newfangled device. The script, cowritten by the director and her sister, Delia Ephron, updates and relocates the Ernst Lubitsch classic, The Shop Around the Corner, to contemporary Manhattan, where Joe Fox (Hanks) is a cheerfully rapacious merchant whose chain of book superstores is gobbling up smaller, more specialized shops such as the children's bookstore owned by Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Their lives run in close parallel in the same idealized neighborhood, yet they first meet anonymously, online, where they gradually nurture a warm, even intimate correspondence. As they begin to wonder whether this e-mail flirtation might lead them to be soul mates, however, they meet and clash over their colliding business fortunes.

It's no small testament to the two stars that we wind up liking and caring about them despite the inevitable (and highly manipulative) arc of the plot. Although their chemistry transcended the consciously improbable romantic premise of Sleepless, enabling director Ephron to attain a kind of amorous soufflé, this time around there's a slow leak that considerably deflates the affair. Less credulous viewers will challenge Joe's logic in prolonging the concealment of his online identity from Kathleen, and may shake their heads at Ephron's reinvention of Manhattan as a spotless, sun-dappled wonderland where everybody lives in million-dollar apartments and color coordinates their wardrobes for cocktail parties. --Sam Sutherland

Neigborhood bookstore rivals unwittingly become e-mail pen pals in this charming remake of The Shop Around the CornerRunning Time: 119 min.System Requirements:ACTORS Jane Adams Reiko Aylesworth Michael Badalucco Heather Burns David Chappelle Dabney Coleman Elwood Edwards Kate Finneran Tom Hanks Hallie Hirsh Greg Kinnear Parker Posey John Randolph Meg Ryan Katie Sogona Howard Spiegel Jean Stapleton Steve Zahn LENGTH 2 hrs RATING PG ComedyFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating:  UPC: 085391695424 Manufacturer No: 16954

French Kiss

Meg Ryan emerges bloodied but unbowed from this botched comedy by Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill). Ryan plays a woman whose fiancé (Timothy Hutton) leaves her for a Parisian beauty. She jets over to the City of Lights to fight for her man, but an incapacitating fear of flying forces her to seek help from a fellow passenger, a French thief played by Kevin Kline, who then tutors her in the ways of getting her beau back. Kasdan seems incapable of pacing the story, let alone getting a firm grip on its comic tone and intentions. The production sputters and regroups and stalls repeatedly, forcing Ryan, particularly, to find the boundaries of her own screwball performance. --Tom Keogh

Kate flies to Paris to keep her fiance from running off with a French woman, but becomes involved with a sexy French thief who assures her he will help.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: PG13
Release Date: 11-JAN-2005
Media Type: DVD

Top Gun (Widescreen Special Collector's Edition)

Jingoism, beefcake, military hardware, and a Giorgio Moroder rock score reign supreme over taste and logic in this Tony Scott film about a maverick trainee pilot (Tom Cruise) who can't follow the rules at a Navy aviation training facility. The dogfight sequences between American and Soviet jets at the end are absolutely mechanical, though audiences loved it at the time. The love story between Cruise's character and that of Kelly McGillis is like flipping through pages of advertising in a glossy magazine. This designer action movie from 1986 would be all the more appalling were it not for the canny casting of good actors in dumb parts. Standouts include Anthony Edwards--who makes a nice impression as Cruise's average-Joe pal--and the relatively unknown Meg Ryan in a small but memorable appearance. --Tom Keogh

Jingoism, beefcake, military hardware, and a Giorgio Moroder rock score reign supreme over taste and logic in this Tony Scott film about a maverick trainee pilot (Tom Cruise) who can't follow the rules at a Navy aviation training facility. The dogfight sequences between American and Soviet jets at the end are absolutely mechanical, though audiences loved it at the time. The love story between Cruise's character and that of Kelly McGillis is like flipping through pages of advertising in a glossy magazine. This designer action movie from 1986 would be all the more appalling were it not for the canny casting of good actors in dumb parts. Standouts include Anthony Edwards--who makes a nice impression as Cruise's average-Joe pal--and the relatively unknown Meg Ryan in a small but memorable appearance. --Tom Keogh

A daredevil Navy pilot striving to be the best at a Top Gun flight school doubts his abilities when his best friend is killed in training.
No Track Information Available
Media Type: DVD
Artist: CRUISE/MCGILLIS/EDWARDS/KILMER
Title: TOP GUN
Street Release Date: 11/16/2004
Domestic
Genre: ACTION / ADVENTURE

Joe Versus the Volcano

Joe Versus the Volcano is a true early-1990s cult film. This fantasy-comedy was the first pairing of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, yet it polarizes viewers like a Blue Velvet or Happiness. As the only directorial effort from John Patrick Shanley (the Oscar-winning writer of Moonstruck), it is something special, and it's hard to resist the film's feather-light heart tugging. Joe Banks is having the life sucked out of him at a dead-end job. Miserable in his gray surroundings with stark fluorescent lighting, Joe dreams of being brave again. A visit to the doctor reveals that he has a "brain cloud." It's fatal, but he'll be fine for a few more months. An eccentric millionaire, Samuel Harvey Graynamore (Lloyd Bridges), hears of Joe's predicament and comes to him with a proposal: The people of the Pacific island of Waponi Woo need a human sacrifice to appease their gods. Why not live like a king for a few weeks, then throw yourself into a volcano? (Graynamore needs a sacrificial victim to offer in exchange for permission to mine the island for a rare mineral.) Joe accepts Graynamore's lavish proposal and on his journey meets three romantic possibilities (all played by Ryan). Joe embraces life; so does the movie. It's packed with smile-inducing supporting performances by Bridges, Ossie Davis, Robert Stack, and Dan Hedaya; playful songs ("Sixteen Tons," "Ol' Man River," Presley's version of "Blue Moon"); and amusing scenes (such as Joe buying luggage). Add the daring, imaginative production design of Bo Welch (Edward Scissorhands), Hanks and Ryan's chemistry, and Georges Delerue's romantic music and you have a film to fall for. --Doug Thomas

Laughs erupt when Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan fall in love and fall in lava in Joe Versus the Volcano, a colorful, stylish laughquake written and directed by Moonstruck Oscar winner John Patrick Shanley. As Joe, Hanks adds to his phenomenal string of successes that includes, Splash, Big and Turner & Hooch. And Meg Ryan follows up her starmaking When Harry Met Sally...with three roles, playing each of the women in Joe's life. When we first meet Joe, he has the white-color blues. Every day is Monday, the boss is always in a bad mood and the cumulative stresses convince Joe he has a terminal condition called a "brain cloud." So when a zany jillionaire pops up and offers him a fleeting taste of the good life, Joe leaps at the chance. All he must do in return is leap into a volcano. But funny things happen on the way from the urban isle of Manhattan to the remote tropical isle of Waponi Woo... Out of the corporate frying pan. Into the fire. Is Joes doomed to be the last of the red-hot lovers? Not if the forces of courage, love and comedy have their way.

DVD Features:
Documentary
Filmographies
Interactive Menus
Music Video:Eric Burdon, "Sixteen Tons"
Other
Scene Access
Theatrical Trailer

When Harry Met Sally...

Nora Ephron wrote the brisk screenplay for this 1989 romantic comedy, director Rob Reiner made a nicely glossy New York story (very much in a Woody Allen vein) out of it, and Billy Crystal's unstoppable charm made it something really special. Crystal and Meg Ryan play longtime platonic friends who keep dancing around their deeper feelings for one another, and Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher are their respective pals who fall in love and get married. Ryan doesn't get a lot of funny material, but her performance is typically alive and intuitive, and she more than holds her own with Crystal's comic motor mouth and sweet sentimentality. Reiner is on comfortable ground, liberated from the burden of making serious statements in the lead-footed manner of subsequent features. --Tom Keogh

On the DVD
The Collector's Edition offers seven new featurettes (the previous Special Edition only had one documentary), beginning with a sit-down between director Rob Reiner and writer Nora Ephron waxing nostalgic on how the movie originated: He, recently divorced from Penny Marshall, was a miserable single man, while she was the screenwriter who rejected his initial pitch over lunch ("It was a shame," she remembers, "because we hadn't even eaten yet."). It's easy to see that Reiner is clearly Harry, and Ephron is clearly Sally: He's the squawking chatterbox and she's constantly corrects his memory (Sally's meticulous method of ordering food is also a direct rip-off of Ephron herself). Other featurettes show Billy Crystal's attempts to play Harry (or Reiner, as it were); location filming in New York; the love stories that served as interludes between scenes (again, the counselors-at-camp story is from Ephron's parents); the significance of the film over time; and more discussion on the film's famous question: "Can men and women really be friends?" Most of the stories from the featurettes are recycled in the new film commentary by Reiner, Ephron, and Crystal (Reiner mentions that the "I'll have what she's having" line, spoken by his mother, is in the top 10 of AFI's top 100 movie lines no less than five times overall), but the inclusion of Crystal, who contributed many improvised lines in the movie, makes for a nice easygoing repartee. Fans may be interested to know that Reiner originally thought Harry and Sally shouldn't get together, until he himself fell in love with his future wife on the set, but the most hilarious tidbit involves Reiner storming the production offices and polling all the women on whether or not they "fake it" because didn't believe that really happened. Seven deleted scenes--which were also included in the previous version--and original theatrical trailer round out the set, but Harry Connick Jr.'s "It Had to Be You" music video is missing. Still, the special features are a great look into a romantic comedy that clearly remains a meaningful experience for cast, crew, and audience alike. --Ellen A. Kim

"Brimming over with style, intelligence and flashing wit" (Rolling Stone), this "splendid and irresistible" (Los Angeles Times) film from director Rob Reiner(American President is one of the best-loved romantic comedies of all time. Featuring dazzling performances from Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal, Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby, exceptional music from Harry Connick Jr., and an OscarÂ(r)-nominated* screenplay by Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally is an "explosively funny" commentary on friendship, courtships - and other hardships - of the modern age (Newsweek)! Will sex ruin a perfect relationship between a man and a woman? that's what Harry (Crystal) and Sally (Ryan) debate during their travels from Chicago to New York. And eleven years and later, they're still no closer to finding the answer. Will these two best friends ever accept that they're meant for each other...or will they continue to deny the attraction that's existed since the first moment When Harry Met Sally? *1989

City of Angels

Some critics complained that City of Angels could never compare to Wim Wenders's exquisite German film Wings of Desire, which served as the later film's primary inspiration. The better argument to make is that any such comparisons are beside the point, because Wings of Desire was a much more deeply poetic, artfully contemplative film, whereas City of Angels is an enchanting product of mainstream Hollywood. Meg Ryan stars as Dr. Maggie Rice, a heart surgeon who is grieving over a lost patient when an angel named Seth (Nicolas Cage) appears to comfort her. She can see him despite the "rule" that angels are invisible, and Seth's love for Maggie forces him to choose between angelic immortality and a normal human existence on earth with her. Featuring heavenly roles for TV veterans Andre Braugher and Dennis Franz, the film liberally borrows imagery from Wings of Desire, but it also creates its own charming identity. Cage and Ryan give fine performances as lovers convinced they are soul mates, and although the plot relies on a last-minute twist that doesn't quite work, this earnest love story struck a chord with audiences and proved to be one of the surprise hits of 1998. The Special Edition widescreen DVD includes audio commentary by Nicolas Cage, producer Charles Roven, and director Brad Silberling in addition to deleted scenes, a behind-the-scenes documentary, a featurette about the film's special effects, and the theatrical trailer. --Jeff Shannon

Anastasia (Family Fun Edition w/Bartok the Magnificent)

The daughter of last Russian czar Anastasia is found by two young Russian men Dimitri and Vladimir who seek reward that her grandmother Marie promised to the ones who'll find her. But evil genius of czar family Rasputin who for some reason survived in this film still wants Romanovs family to be destroyed forever.DVD Features: Disc 1: Anastasia (widescreen) Director/Producer Commentary by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman Interactive Feature: Learn to Draw Anastasia "Anya" Interactive Feature: Learn to Draw Dimitri Interactive Feature: Learn to Draw Rasputin Interactive Feature: Learn to Draw Bartok Anastasia Music Box Favorites Disc 2: Bartok the Magnificent (Full Screen) The Making of Anastasia: Creating the Story Defining Characters Creating of Animation Music in the Air Sing Along: Once Upon a December Sing Along: Learn to Do It Interactive Feature Learn to Sing it in a Different Language: Once Upon a December Set Top Games Explore the Palace (3D Walk Through) Becoming a Princess (Interactive Paper Doll) Putting Rasputin Back Together Again (timed puzzle game) Ink and Paint to Help Anya Remember her Past (Interactive coloring book) Aaliyah: Journery to the Past music video/Making of System Requirements:Running Time 94 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: CHILDREN/FAMILY Rating: G UPC: 024543229131 Manufacturer No: 2232913

My Mom's New Boyfriend

The premise is delicious: A young, by-the-book FBI agent (Colin Hanks) is assigned his new highest-profile assignment yet--spying on his own mother (Meg Ryan). My Mom's New Boyfriend is a romantic comedy long on both romance and comedy, and gives Ryan her first film in a long time where she can take the laughs and run with them. Viewers will remember, with a grateful sigh, why she long reigned as the queen of American romantic comedy. Ryan plays Marty, devoted mom, who last saw her son, Henry (Hanks), three years ago when she was unhealthy, coarse, and overweight (looking like she might have borrowed Monica's fat suit from Friends). When Henry returns home from his secret op, fiancée in tow (Selma Blair), Marty's still coarse, but has become a babe with a healthy libido. ("Oh Henry, lighten up!" is Marty's oft-repeated refrain.) Henry is horrified, but his girlfriend, Emily, is entranced. In fact, some of the film's best chemistry is between these two gifted actresses, as they spark and feed off each other's energy. When Marty takes up with the sultry Tommy (Antonio Banderas), Henry gets the ultimate "TMI" assignment: spying on his mom and her honey, suspected in an art-theft ring. Hanks squirms convincingly, Banderas smolders, and Ryan truly sparkles, giving her wacky side free rein. If the plot has a few potholes, it doesn't matter, since the cast is so stellar and has such magnetism. By sheer determination and talent, the ensemble delivers laughs and poignancy, by turns. Extras include deleted scenes (and a few memorable bloopers), and a behind-the-scenes featurette on filming on location in northern Louisiana. --A.T. Hurley

After a three-year assignment in the field FBI agent Henry Durand (Colin Hanks) returns home with his fiance (Selma Blair) only to find his once-dowdy over weight mother Martha has transformed into the highly attractive enlightened Marty (Meg Ryan) who dates every night of the week. When Marty meets the mysterious Tommy (Antonio Banderas) Henry is ordered to spy on his mother after learning Tommy may be involved in an international art theft ring.

When a Man Loves a Woman

A woman's drinking problem puts her marriage and family life in danger.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-MAY-2003
Media Type: DVD

When a Man Loves a Woman is a dumb title (not another classic pop song, please) for a very smart movie. A kind of gender-switch take on The Lost Weekend, it's about a woman (Meg Ryan) whose alcoholism almost destroys her family. That may sound like just another TV movie, but When a Man Loves a Woman is so authentic in detail and emotion, that everything about it seems fresh, urgent, and engrossing. That's because the film is grounded in the actual experience of co-writer Al Franken (assisted by Rain Man scripter Ronald Bass). Franken is best known for his affiliation with Saturday Night Live and Politically Incorrect, and as the author of Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot, and Other Observations. You may recall that Franken is the creator of Stuart Smalley, 12-step programmer extraordinaire. Well, if you want to know how Stuart was born, you can start here. This is no comedy, however. In fact, one of the most painful realizations comes when attractive, "good-time girl" Alice Green (Ryan) and her husband (Andy Garcia) begin to realize how much of a role alcohol played in their marriage and in bringing them together in the first place. The issues and experiences confronted in this movie go far beyond the stuff you see on Oprah. --Jim Emerson