A Woman's Touch

« Liquid Assets | Main | A Monkey's Mind »

James Parker narrates his favorite scenes from When Harry Met Sally and What Women Want.

"Fairytale Hollywood glitters distantly over the movies of both Meyers and Ephron, for whom the secrets of men versus women were engraved upon the heart of Ernst Lubitsch, and the fabulous maidens were not Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty but Ingrid Bergman and Deborah Kerr. Harry and Sally bicker over Casablanca; for the women of Sleepless in Seattle, the emotional touchstone is An Affair to Remember ('Men never get this movie!'). In Meyers’s The Holiday, Kate Winslet gets tips from an authentic Golden Age geezer, a creaky Oscar-toting screenwriter who instructs her in the technicalities of the Lubitschean 'meet-cute.' Hanging Up (directed by Keaton, from a script by Ephron and her sister Delia) features Walter Matthau as the dying father, the crumbling Hollywood lion, his mind dimming behind hospital screens as he rambles about the smallness of John Wayne’s penis."

File Under: Pursuits, Video