# Love Letter, The (1999)

### reviewed by
Jon Popick

PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com

The curtain goes up. A single woman jogs on the beach. She finds an incredibly romantic letter that changes her life and then ships her kid off so that she can concentrate on the note. No, it's not the eagerly awaited re-release of Kevin Costner's Message in a Bottle – it's The Love Letter, Dreamworks' counter-programming for the Star Wars phenomenon.

The woman is Helen MacFarquhar (Kate Capshaw, Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom), the owner of a small used bookstore in a quaint Massachusetts burg - you know, the kind of shop that can afford to have several employees, but not one customer. She doesn't know who wrote the letter, but eventually decides that it must be Johnny (Tom Everett Scott, Dead Man on Campus), a college student working at the shop during the summer. Dopey Helen just leaves the life-changing letter out, and it is discovered by Johnny, who thinks that Helen wrote it for him, and also by co-worker Janet (Ellen DeGeneres, Goodbye Lover), who thinks that George (Tom Selleck, In & Out), the hunky town fireman, wrote it for her.

More disturbing than the asinine story is the fact that Capshaw, for the second movie in a row, gets to bump uglies with a boy half her age (it was David Arquette in The Alarmist). Plus, she also served as a producer for The Love Letter, so that means that real-life hubby Steven Spielberg had to shell out his own dough to watch his wife run around with younger, better-looking guys. Anybody have Amy Irving's phone number? (1:28 – R for adult language and an out-of-focus ass-shot of Capshaw)

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