hillary1

This is an OK movie for kids, but the story is clumsy (the car doesn't even appear until the movie is nearly half over) and the songs are absolutely horrible, especially when compared to Dick Van Dyke's masterpiece of a few years earlier, "Mary Poppins." I never could figure out why the studios of the '60s thought he could sing-clearly he's well suited to play parts like this but his voice is awful!! Sally Ann Howes-did I ever see her do anything else?-is serviceable if wooden in the Barbie doll character of a the local rich girl who falls in love with the pauper and becomes a mother figure for his two porcelain children. It isn't great but it's fun for the kids.

If you liked this movie, then that tells me things about you I really don't want to know. Man, there's no good horror anymore. What most directors don't seem to understand is that gore in and of itself is not scary-AT ALL. It is usually only revolting. Scary is a mood, a foreboding sense of menace. This can be achieved a lot of ways in a movie, but not usually by screams or buckets of blood. It certainly isn't achieved by dulling your senses to the point of coma over the first half of a movie, and then by completely overstimulating them the second. I was so completely disgusted I walked out before the end, which is apparently a good thing as I'm reading here. I'm upset I lost over an hour of my life watching this celluloid garbage. But then I don't like Quentin Tarantino either. I think every director who aspires to make REAL horror should have to memorize "The Exorcist," "Hallowe'en," and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" before putting themselves on a movie set.

You surely can count on Mel Brooks for a good time! Much of this movie is very stereotypical, completely over the top and very, very funny. The actors-especially Wil Ferrell in an inspired performance as a neo Nazi playwright-have been given free reign to do whatever they want and they make the most of it. The biggest problem with this movie is-it's a Broadway play on film. You felt like breaking into applause after the lavish song-and-dance numbers, as you would were you at the theater. Not that this is bad per se, but it just works better in live theater than it does in a movie. Nathan Lane stares into a silent camera at the end of his big number and it seems lonely. I enjoyed the movie and would recommend it, but I think the director needs to know next time to translate these things a little bit better for the screen.