can't beat meg ryan faking an orgasm!!!!
If you're into romantic comedies, then you definitely should see this film. Even if you aren't really into the whole romantic part of it, the comedy is great and worth seeing.
Funny, clever, charming, sweet and touching, this film is absolutely wonderful!
The dialogues between Harry and Sally are very funny! Fantastic performances by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. The chemistry between the two is great.
Beautiful cinematography over New York City and perfect soundtrack for every scene.
When Harry Met Sally... is certainly one of the best romantic comedies ever! Loved it.
Harry is deeply unpleasant and personally, I would have killed him
I meet Harry and Sally every few years, and I fall in love with them all over again.
If this isn't #relashionship goals then I don't know what it is.
Absolutely my favourite romantic comedy movie, and maybe I'm biased but I don't see anything bad in this movie. It's funny, and it got a little bit of angst, and it's about a healthy relationship between people who respect each other, and took their time to get love each other in every way..
Aahh, I hope I met my Harry one day.
You know, it's funny. We started out like this, Helen and I. We had blank walls, we hung things, we picked out tiles together.... Then you know what happens? Six years later you find yourself singing surrey with the fringe on top IN FRONT OF IRA!!!
This was a funny, pretty charming classic movie.
super sweet and I love the way the story is built. idk why, though, I didn't feel the romantic chemistry between Crystal and Ryan, I cringed when they kissed - they really did work better as friends.
To my mind this is the spiritual successor to The Apartment. Great dialogue - very witty, brilliantly timed, honest and casts both he and she on equal planes.
Though it clearly wear its influences on its sleeves, it inspired a generation of rom-coms.
They struggle to have the same level of script that this film has, and the interspersed clips of couples are inspired. It's impossible to not have your heart melt with each one.
9/10
The script is perfect and they're both incredible. Now, THIS is a romantic comedy!
[7.6/10] There are two settings in When Harry Met Sally. One is full of cutesy lines and the most stereotypical gender politics. The other is full of the sort of honesty and vulnerability about life and love that we still don’t get in any of the hundreds of romantic comedies that emerged from this movie’s wake. I roll my eyes at the former, revel in the latter, and find myself uncertain about how to reconcile the two disparate modes of this movie.
I’m reminded of the notion that every movie is a magic trick. Even the most naturalistic, cinema verite approach to a film is inherently bending details and stitching together contrivances to make a compelling story. There are parts of When Harry Met Sally that are not remotely realistic, with writerly monologues and overly-manufactured sequences that don’t begin to graze reality.
But when the movie is clicking, you don’t notice. The interactions are charming. The back and forth between the title characters is cute and the observational humor is funny. It isn’t real, but it’s hyperreal -- a heightened version of what interactions between men and women, and conversations about relationships are like. That can be another way to capture truth, to magnify and escalate, to pack in years of developments in epiphanies and rapport in a scant ninety minutes. At its best, When Harry Met Sally performs that trick so well that you wouldn’t even care to examine Rob Reiner’s (who directed the film) or Nora Ephron’s (who wrote it) sleeves.
And yet, there’s times when that funhouse mirror version of men and women toeing that line between disdain and affection feels cartoony and pat. A certain leeway must be given to a film made more than three decades ago. The movie possesses a certain Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus quality to it, awash in gender and relationship stereotypes that seem quaint and even backwards these days. There’s superficial notions of men as hound dogs and women as “practical” which flatten the diversity and multiplicity of people and their attitudes and sensibilities, which renders the intended universality of the movie’s observations oversimplified and, in places, worthy of offense.
But at the same time there is an openness to When Harry Met Sally that gives it a resonance despite the distance in time and the societal changes we’ve undergone since 1989. As caricatured as Harry and Sally seem at times, the movie gives them layers. As sexually mercenary as Harry seems, the film allows him to be wounded by his divorce, to apologize, to grovel, to be a pest but also earnest. As persnickety as Sally can be, the film allows her to be steely, to crumble in weaker moments, to give as good as she gets and stand up for himself.
It’s as though Reiner and Ephron can’t decide whether to make its main duo cardboard cutouts out of a stand-up comedy routine or fully-realize, three dimensional characters. That seems to change from scene-to-scene, but when the movie hews toward the latter, it’s a delight and even moving.
Much of that owes to the performances of the two leads. Meg Ryan overdoes it in places, but also brings a steadiness to Salliness, with a particular expressiveness in her facial expressions and body language. Sally’s easily the more likable of the two main characters, but Ryan imbues a humanity into the role that helps ground her character even in the film’s larger than life interludes. Billy Crystal’s take all but saves Harry, who verges on being unlikable for a good chunk of the film and never fully recovers. Crystal’s everyman qualities and funnyman deliveries create a sense of good will for the character that isn’t necessarily in the script. The combination of the two performers’ talents makes for a pairing that is more endearing than it has any right to be, which is a boon to a film built around it.
The same goes for the movie’s setting. The backdrop is more of a bonus than anything, but I’m not sure New York City has ever looked so cozy and inviting as it does here. Director of Photography Barry Sonnenfeld captures an almost impossible splendor in the city, from autumnal stretches of orange leaves in Central Park to snowy sidewalks and brownstones whose interiors are covered with books. A comedy doesn’t have to look this good to pass muster, but it adds to the beauty and character of the piece that subtly makes the major relationship on display more welcoming by the aesthetic company it keeps.
Likewise, there’s a creativity to the presentation that helps liven up the proceedings and make the romantic developments more unique. The simple choice to jump years down the timeline marks a certain distinctiveness here, imbuing some greater truth to the “We fell in love over a couple of months” trajectory that most romcoms adopt. It allows the film to find humor and insight in the changes that occur over the passage of time and give the rocky road along the way to Harry and Sally’s happiness greater scope.
It also allows the opportunity to break up the time jumps with little vignettes of old married couples describing how they met, a fun device that shows the multiplicity of how attachments can form. Clever cinematic touches like a split screen to show our title characters watching Casablanca together convey an intimacy across city blocks, and the script pairs worried post-hook up phone calls to close confidantes that the audience experiences in stereo. There’s tons of unconventional choices in how this story is told which, for as much as this movie has become the ur-romantic comedy, signify that this is not just another love story.
That’s what ultimately won me over here. I’ll admit, about ten minutes into When Harry Met Sally, I was cringing and regretting that I’d cued it up. The instigating post-college road trip between the future couple seemed to portend an obvious slap-slap-kiss trajectory, where both Harry and Sally learn to soften their hard edges and change their ways thanks to love and any number of silly contrivances. It’s a formula scores of movie’s in this film’s shadow have followed.
But this film doesn’t go down that path. It shows Sally and Harry still tweaking and resenting one another years down the line. It shows them only softening toward one another when both are in a vulnerable position after the end of a long term relationship and in need of someone who understands. It turns their romance into a slow burn rather than a series of ups and downs, spending more time on the two of them having become friends and confidantes before it makes them lovers. The hints are always there, but this isn’t a conventional romance, instead about two people coming to love one another before they even realize it, let alone become a couple.
That’s a powerful idea. Sometimes When Harry Met Sally buries it in romance clichés and backwards notions about men and women. Sometimes Ephron’s dialogue veers away from the enjoyably stylized to the conspicuously overwritten. Sometimes you wish somebody would just punch Harry right in the kisser.
Still, if you can move past those artifacts, the film hits on some real truths, wrapped in an exaggerated but endearing package, about how the road to love is not always a direct or easy one, but that it can still lead to someplace wonderful.
A clever, unique and enjoyable rom com.
Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan star in the quirky romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally. The film follows two unlikely friends who keep running across each other and end up forming a unique relationship. Written by Nora Ephron, the comedy is really smart and includes some poignant, witty dialog. And, director Rob Reiner does an impressive job at giving the material a lighthearted tone that’s not overly melodramatic. However, the real charm of the film comes from the performances by Crystal and Ryan, who have great chemistry together and brilliant comedic timing. Insightful and funny, When Harry Met Sally is delightfully entertaining.
Harry and Sally are both very annoying, well maybe that's why they deserve each other.
What an awful waste of Kleenex BTW.
The only cute thing (thank goodness the movie isn't all that syrupy as I feared) was what Harry said to Sally in the New Year Eve's Ball in the end of the movie.
Well worth a watch, as anticipated.
'When Harry Met Sally…' is one of those films that I've heard a tonne about but without finding out anything tangible about the plot, the only thing in that regard that I knew was the Katz's Delicatessen location - not even the full scene, just the famous quote (out of context) from Estelle Reiner. Of course as a romcom drama you know mostly what you're gonna get, but this does have more to it in fairness; big fan of the time jumps, e.g.
Billy Crystal is great value throughout, amusing and even touching at moments. Same goes for Meg Ryan, naturally, who I know of only by name; I never remember her face for some odd reason. Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby, meanwhile, make for strong supports to the two leads.
Recommended as a great movie to watch on NYE, we decided to put it on tonight. We're both in our early 40s, but I don't remember ever seeing this front to back, just here and there when it was on in the background. Well it was fantastic. Rob Reiner had one of the all-time great runs from '84-92 and this up there for best of the bunch. Always had a crush on Meg Ryan growing up and she's outstanding in this. Crystal has great presence and timing. 8.5. An all around triumph that still holds up.
I cannot believe how this film is so popular... there is absolutely no chemistry between the leads and the story was lame af
This just proves that only Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Richard Linklater should be allowed to make movies like this. It’s just too superficial for me to get a lot out of; the characters and story are so banal. Platonic love is a thing, that’s not intriguing or subversive enough to build a story around. It has some cute and funny moments, other than that I found this really safe and predictable. The fake-an-orgasm scene was cringe as fuck (and in this case I don’t care if it’s intentional) and the Hollywood ending also doesn’t sit right with me, it kinda betrays what little this film had going for it in terms of ideas. I think the biggest compliment I can give it is that the relationship never really goes into that typical overly cheesy Nicholas Sparks territory, what Reiner captures here still feels truthful to me. That’s mostly a result of the good chemistry between Ryan and Crystal. It’s really their acting that saves a lot of the movie for me, even with Ryan occasionally overacting in her body language. The filmmaking is also nothing special, it feels like Reiner is consciously watering down his craft here compared to previous efforts. I wanted way more jazz and scenes set in seasonal New York. Again, it’s not awful, but to me Linklater’s Before trilogy is so much deeper, as well as more accomplished from an artistic perspective. Maybe it was more groundbreaking for its time, however now it just feels middlebrow and forgettable to me.
5/10
A very good romantic film about two friends slowly falling in love. Some parts didn't age well, but that doesn't take away from the whole movie. I understand why it's a classic.
As a new viewer to this classic, it was a surprisingly refreshing, contrarian-angled romantic comedy that really shows the virtue of best-friends-to-lovers style relationships. They're messy and difficult, but usually the most rewarding and deep bonds we can make with someone else. Falling in love with someone completely instead of superficially, from loving their flaws to being able to be your complete self around them first and foremost, before the messiness of sex and intimacy. Much like most of these types of movies, they leave me with a feeling of warmth but ultimately an unquenchable expectation as I realise that these relationships are increasingly rare and unique, sadly reserved for the lucky few and the silver screen. Also 80's Meg Ryan is just a completely different calibre of woman, I was absolutely smitten every time she was onscreen and fell in love with her idiosyncrasies right along side Harry. That doesn't help with the aforementioned unquenchable expectation, but I digress :sweat_smile:
This movie will stick with me like it seems to have with a whole generation of people, hoping to find our Sallys in this contemporary hell scape we call modern life.
An oldie… but definitely a goodie.
Do yourself a favor and watch this film.
The scene where Meg Ryan fakes her orgasm stands out.
It's a wonderful film, Both leads are incredibly funny and charming and they’re so memorable.
While not a my normal cup of tea, there’s a reason this movie is an 80’s classic. It’s got a bunch of typical rom-com tropes, but it’s also heartfelt, good leads, and executed well! I have always known of this movie, but never gotten around to watching it. I’m glad my Movie Club gave me an excuse to check it out. Even if I will likely not revisit much/often, I’m glad to finally know about how Harry met Sally and would definitely recommend this to many.
Rating: 3.5/5 - 8/10 - Would Recommend
"When Harry Met Sally" is a name I had heard before, but knew nothing about before I watched. A genre-defining romantic comedy, it follows a nuanced relationship between its leads with plenty of charming moments sprinkled throughout its length.
"When Harry Met Sally" isn't a particularly long film, yet it feels like a proper 2h+ picture. The plot takes place across many years as we see both Harry and Sally grow exponentially. As sweet as the movie was, there's a bit of sadness I could feel from it with the amazing manner in which it depicted aging and romance. It's all very comfy, which brings the viewer into a very intimate space with the protagonists.
The structure of the plot is quite interesting and is a part of what makes WHMS stand out from most entries in the genre - plain good filmmaking. The acting was mesmerising from the get-go, and while some have criticised Billy Crystal's performance for being unfitting for this role, I would say that is precisely what made it so good. There's something very genuine about the way he portrays a cynical, emotionally unavailable man who deep-down wishes for true love. And Meg Ryan is simply flawless as Sally. The script is ideal, knowing how to play off of Crystal and Ryan's on-screen chemistry.
"When Harry Met Sally" is a fantastic film and no doubt my favourite romantic comedy. It's still amazing to me that it is only an 1h30min long. It's so complete and well-paced, delivering well beyond its simple premise and giving us a character-driven tale we near become a part of. If you want a sincerely fun and down-to-earth romance, do watch it.
Premise - 13/20 - Going in, I knew it was a rom-com, but the premise doesn't seem very exciting.
Cast/characters - 17/20 - The two leads are splendid. I love Billy Crystal in this! Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher are also good.
Story - 18/20 - The "will they, won't they" tone never got too crazy, and I thought they actually may make the friendship last. Everything was believable, and everything led toward the conclusion.
Dialogue - 18/20 - The dialogue made the movie. There isn't any action; it's all based on the development of these characters through dialogue.
World-building - 12/20 - The setting wasn't very important, except that they kept running into each other in NYC, of all places.
78/100 - 4/5 stars - Finally got to see this in its entirety, and I was very happy that I did.
A little Meh! for me based on the hype, but nice.
A good and unique movie with great dialogues..Reccomend this for sure specially for romantic people 7.4/10
I am not a big fan of romantic comedy because a lot of them are always full of cheesy stuff but this one is great and as someone in his twenties, I must say that it beats a lot of the newer one, and is actually very funny. (Meg Ryan is also very beautiful in this movie)
Incredibly good movie. Love it.
Shout by elizabethVIP BlockedParent2022-01-01T08:20:53Z
it's about old friends <3