By Gary Kirchherr
The calendar may say Christmas and New Year's, but the spirit is definitely April Fool's Day with the hype surrounding Hollywood's latest schmaltzfest, "You've Got Mail." This is just what the world needs - a ludicrously sterile glamorization of the America Online experience, and in one of Hollywood's unrealistic sappy love stories in the fine barfatrocious tradition of "Pretty Lady," "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle."
For the benefit of those who don't keep up with the continual Hollywood-based drivel known as "entertainment news," I'll summarize the plot. The latest in a series of Tom Hanks / Meg Ryan date flicks features a bookstore superstore-chain heir (Hanks) and a small-time bookseller (Ryan) who hate each other in real life, but discover they love each other through AOL without realizing their respective online sweetheart is their real-life nemesis. Isn't that sweet? And this special love is tied to AOL discreetly but undeniably with a movie title that matches what everyone knows is the annoying alert that AOL'ers hear when they get e-mail.
Why should I even care about a movie that focuses on an AOL romance? Call it my continuing disappointment with the deliberate dumbing-down of America. Bad enough that a two-hour-plus commercial passes itself off as a movie, but this is an outright snow job. A total misrepresentation of what it's like using the world's worst large Internet provider.
The deception starts with the reviewers and others who call it "an Internet romance" or some such thing. OK, clue time! AOL chat rooms, where the happy couple met, are not on or in any way a part of the Internet! I know it's attention-grabbing to write it that way, and I know AOL'ers like to talk about "chatting on the Internet" because they want to believe they are zipping along the Information Superhighway. Some undoubtedly believe they are. But that doesn't make it any less a lie. But then again, the mainstream media haven't figured out the distinction between AOL and the Internet for years; hence all the stories about young girls running away from home to meet a dirty old man they met "on the Internet." So the continuing ignorance doesn't surprise me.
If Hollywood's going to make a movie about an Internet romance, at least have some truth in advertising and have it an Internet romance, not an AOL romance. Have the couple meet via Internet Relay Chat instead of an AOL chat pit, where the dunderheads are. No Net-savvy person believes a couple of sharpies like Hanks' and Ryan's respective characters would be caught dead on AOL anyway.
If one absolutely has to make the movie an AOL romance, make it realistic. With the spirit of accuracy in mind, I submit the outline of "You've Got Spam":
Hanks and Ryan both have difficulty logging onto AOL, but by chance, they both get on in the same time and find each other in the chat room NYCm4f. Ryan is clicking away Instant Messages but stops when she sees Hanks'; she's intrigued that his is the first that doesn't ask for cybersex. They try chatting in the room, but find it's too much work to find the other's comments when everyone else is saying "Age/sex check!11!!!!1!!" and "Any ladies wanna talk to a hot 20/m???" They eventually try e-mail, but this proves frustrating too because they have to wade through piles of spam to find each other's messages, which take hours or days to travel back and forth. Soon, even this communication ends because AOL cancels Hanks' account; seems Hanks divulged his password to a lamer posing as an AOL staffer, and the lamer used Hanks' account to text-flood teen chat rooms. Meanwhile, Ryan becomes concerned when an AOL'er who has her on his Buddy List stalks her online relentlessly; she drops the service too. But AOL staffers won't cancel her account, so she continues to get billed for months while she fights AOL and her credit-card company. Much later, after both Hanks and Ryan have established accounts with real ISPs, they find each other in a DALnet chat channel, have a happy online reunion, and live happily ever after. (Well, Hollywood rules demand a neat and tidy happy ending.)
Am I being too harsh? I don't think so, but you can judge yourself. If you haven't already, check out my AOL information page. It doesn't paint as rosy a picture as "You've Got Mail," but that's because my Web page is real life, not a syrupy, predictable, feel-good movie of the year.
In my Oct. 28 column, I recommended against installing Mac OS 8.5 despite its whiz-bang features because a small percentage of users were having problems with lost data after installing it. Well, supposedly these problems have been fixed in the Mac OS 8.5.1 update; details are in a Dec. 7 article of The Mac Observer.
And what, you may be asking, is The Mac Observer? That's the new name of Webintosh, one of my favorite sources of Mac news. The Mac Observer's URL is www.macobserver.com.
As for 8.5.1 - fixed or no, at this point I figure I might as well wait for Mac OS 8.6, due out within the next couple of months.