Customer Rating: 
Summary: From My world I send these thoughts...
Comment: Movies like this are so remarkable.
For one thing they aren't violent, there isn't danger, things don't blow up, you aren't chased, no ones getting murdered. I really myself won't go to that again in this life. Sorry. Over it... They might not even be beautiful physically to watch in the unfolding of the story line, another wonderful feature, altho here they are. It's a deceptively real kind of story that feels like a life you might want to look into, vicariously try.
Perhaps a relating that wraps you in the love these two shared through a lifetime of letters wouldn't appeal to everyone, but watching two physically attractive, vapid stars careen around in current love stories with houses and background settings costing several million if "in" the real world seems too vacuous for a love setting to me. It doesn't appeal to much of anything in me. This really isn't the Enquirer come to life with a script.
Three of the most important relationships in my life evolved through writing. The most important one was written there. Not to be self involved, so the tenderness of this bookshop owner in England and the writer in New York, their writing and their unfolding what surely is a love, surely of a kind, that resonated. As did the times of their lives, seasons. Heck I loved the apartment and the bookshop ( loved that as much as any of it ) never failing to be thrilled by how the settings figured in the movie. It was such an intimate reality almost a play. Almost.
I will admit that I've watched this quite a few times over the years and after once or twice cannot go all the way (to the end), it's beautiful and I'm like that. It's poignant, I'm aware to speak to it is a spoiler though quite oddly the etiquettes here seem to deny and demand analysis. But of that ending how interesting that the characters were written in such a way that neither in the length of their relating ever hurt the other, they valued one another so highly. How rare and to be treasured is that kind of knowing.
Letter writing has been replaced by the e world. Faster, glibber, more corrective, snappier, more unkind, disposable relations, meeting a need, finding faults, weighing another, it can feel frenzied, characterized by telling another how you either have to go or cannot continue to actually put effort into some thoughts to share over how you are pulled there from the difficulties of life to share, it isn't what relating in letters once was....no...many won't supply the correct name or an address to get a letter or card because while writing and sharing is ok, I suppose the idea is they can't "risk" that with "you", a strangeness not of this movie. No. This was more of what price we've paid, the loss of truly getting to know another over knowing your own snapping judgment.
Anyway a simple story of two friends that shared a love of books, one ordering, one selling, suggesting tto one another works that were delightful to observe for a book lover, a continent away enduring the changes through time building over many years such strong mutual understandings and respect for each other that their roles in each others life became inconceivably gift like.
A very lovely piece to watch.
Customer Rating: Summary: NO SEX, NO VIOLENCE YET STILL COMPELLING & DRAMATIC
Comment: This is a deeply touching movie about a long-term frienship between booklovers stunningly enacted by the gifted Anne Bancroft and the amazingly young and handsome Anthony Hopkins. Anne Bancroft can really make an audience appreciate the writer's craft and how beautiful and spiritual poetic words are to her or him.
There is not one sex scene; not one scene involving nudity. There are no scenes of violence, intentional or arbitrary. It's a booklover's Platonic dream and romance.
That two people can grippingly hold an audience's attention while (only) discussing books makes this movie endearing and special and rare.
