Ephron collects human raindrops and rainbows

1998. A lifetime ago. 15 years. Nora Ephron had just discovered the joy of this newfangled email thing and had a eureka moment to blend it with "The Shop Around the Corner." She was at the height of her game. Seeing this again on cable after its release was a refreshing surprise. At the time, I recall loving it but, like the critics, I sense she had reached the point of having to hit the same high bar she raised with earlier smash hits. In retrospect, this remains a very high bar.

What you notice through the prism of today's zeitgeist is how she sprinkles each scene, each moment with what I call Nora Ephron fairy dust. Her writer's mind literally was a sponge, storing miniscule human moments -- the raindrops and the tiny rainbows -- like a bee collects pollen ... only to unleash them in a honey-sweet romantic bouquet.

She is so good at it, that you absolute forget these are actors performing the words. You are that butterfly in the subway that gets on and off at Bloomingdales to buy a hat watching and wondering what will happen next to these intelligent people with wants and needs just like yours. When you gaze at a Norman Rockwell painting, you recognize the beauty in life, the MOMENT ... knowing that real life is never that perfect, never that grand, but maybe, just maybe, sometimes ... it is.