Harry and Sally meet and eventually all in love.

I just watched this movie again after not seeing it for a long
time. It’s funny how much a movie like this can parallel aspects of your
own life.

##Back in College

Harry met Sally just after they finished college. Sally had a car and was
going to New York, and so was Harry. Harry was dating a friend of Sally’s,
so she agreed to give him a ride. They hated each other from the start.

During a dinner on the road, they have a conversation about the nature of
relationships between men and women. Harry states that “men and women can
never be friends because sex always gets in the way. Even if they never
have sex, he wants to so it’s already in the way.” She doesn’t agree, and
they argue a while. Eventually they agree to disagree. They arrive in New
York and go their separate ways.

##A few years later

A few years later they run into each other. They still don’t really like
each other, but they sit and talk a while. Harry decides to amend his
previous statement by saying that “men and women can never be friends
unless they’re both involved with someone else. That way the pressure is
taken off of them about the sex thing. But even then, everyone around them
will still think that something is going on, so sex gets in the way even
when it isn’t in the way. So we have to revert to the original statement
that men and women can’t be friends.”

In [[A Note to a Friend]] I talked about this exact situation. I made a
friend that’s a women. We were just friends, but we got pressure from all
sides from people that wondered what was going on between us. Nobody could
believe that we were very close, but just friends at the same time.

##A few more years later

Harry and Sally met again, and this time they became wonderful friends.
But their friends couldn’t understand it. Here’s the way a conversation
went with Harry’s friend:

Friend: You find her attractive right?

Harry: Yes.

Friend: And you can talk to her about anything?

Harry: Yes.

Friend: And you don’t want to have sex with her?

Harry: Nope.

Friend: I just don’t understand this.

Harry: What’s to understand. I don’t need to have sex with her. She’s

my best friend.

This is where art imitated my life. I heard stuff like this from all sides
including from my wife. And no matter how much I tried to explain that we
were just friends, people couldn’t believe it.

##And so, they get married

This is what my wife always points out when we have this discussion. At
the end, Harry and Sally finally get together and get married. So, whe
wouldn’t it happen with me and my friend.

##Universality

Rob Reiner (the director) and whoever the writer was did something that
was absolutely brilliant. They used interviews from various people about
how they met and fell in love interjected during the movie to tie the
universal ideas in the story together. Each of their stories is different,
but they all have one thing in common: there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme
or reason to why people fall in love and get together. It just happens
(sometimes easier than others). The movie ends with Harry and Sally
finising their story with the interviewer, and what you realize is that
you’ve been watching their story as told by them to the interviewer.

Passable thriller in which a husband tries to have his wife killed for the two oldest reasons.

##Dial M

This movie is a remake of “Dial M for Murder,” a much more effective movie.
In any case, the story revolves around man whose going broke and whose
wife is worth millions to him, if she’s dead.

He decides he needs to killer, and making it even easier for him is the
fact that she’s been having a red hot affair on him. And he knows who the
guy is.

From his point of view this is perfect. He hires the guy that’s having an
affair with his wife to kill her.

##For a thriller to work

For a thriller to really work, the audience can never be quite sure what’s
coming next. Alfred Hitchcock is the acknowledged master of this. Remember
in “North by Nortwest” when, near the end of the movie, Cary Grant needs to
get a message to the woman that she’s in trouble. He writes the message on
a matchbook cover and throws it towards her hoping that she’ll see it
before the other people in the room. Tremendous suspense was created
because nobody in the audience quite knew if should actually would see it
first.

The problem for me with this movie is that too many times I turned to my
wife and said “I bet that…” or “She’s going to…”, and I was right.
There was just no suspense.