Grace Shafor

***“Most of life is just junk. It’s filler. And then, There’s these moments when all the randomness turns into something perfect.”*** I walked into this movie thinking it would be a simple watch and I was gonna say something along the lines of how Mark reminded me of *Ferris Bueller *and how it’s just another take on the “person stuck in a time loop” scenario. But I decided to rewatch it again the next day and give it another try. **The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things **does something I feel like I haven’t truly seen in recent films in quite awhile. Instead of them both just reliving the same day and using it to their advantage (which they do partially). They actually use the day to like the title insists collect every little “perfect” thing that they can experience. The message gives a bombardment of hope about how you are only given so long on this planet and to not only use your time wisely in how you measure it but also wisely with who you spend it with. But also you have to accept life moves on and you can’t just relive the same day over and over again to cover up the truth that you are scared of the future.

I do believe there is something magical with stories about two people meeting not in the typical fashion. If that is because I watch too many Rom-Coms or I have too much optimism in the world so be it. Honestly I do truly love this movie for so many reasons. The way it is unapologetically itself by romanticizing 1990s technology, celebrating intellectual snobbery, and how it is a love letter to the Upper West Side in which they never seem to leave. The amount of running jokes only makes this movie even better in my opinion. Like the amount of times you hear spellings of words like F-O-X or how Joe says how *New York reminds him of school supplies. and when they talk about the children’s section of the book store he says how everyone who writes children’s books has PhD’s.* Or the way it rings in nostalgia with it making jokes about the style of classic boy meets girl films like how it spoofs the “meet-cute interaction” and instead starts with a mutually disgusted dilemma. There is a harm to this that with not meeting in person they experience also, both characters had incredible expectations of what the other would be. Both also painted themselves in different lights of what they were. So, with rain checking them meeting they both participated in the so-called poisoning of their starting relationship. But this movie does have its ways of fitting simple background music tracks with the stereotypical “Songs in movies that include love stories and New York in autumn”. And with that, the dire message instead of portraying that *“The Godfather is the I Ching. The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather is the answer to any question.” *It instead reveals that sometimes you have to give love another try even if it started off on the wrong foot or page.

as a D1 *You’ve Got Mail *Fan, I think Netflix has FINALLY upgraded from mostly stupid ai slop films to a select few movies that are surprisingly goated?