HobbitHole's reviews

Straight to DVD is usually done for films studios don't think will make it in the theater and so they dump it off (like some of Disney's animated sequels).

However, in this case, the strategy was to involve people who already were searching for a good romance story (not the usual sex comedy that gets called a romance story these days) and also people of faith who would like to show it in groups as well as own a copy themselves and used outlets such as people connector websites, etc. to get buzz going and then released it so people could get it via retailers (like Wal- Mart, Target, etc )and online providers (Amazon.com,etc. which had it as number 1 in both family films and Christian films in terms of sales).

It's not the typical 'hit you over the head' type 'message' film that we've seen so many of or the ones where the actors could barely pass for low budget TV actors.

This was a well thought out and directed story.

In the opinion of a friend who repaired film projectors both military and private for a living and thus has also gotten to watch a lot of films, quite possibly the best made film by Christians that even non- believers will see and not be turned off in the first 10 minutes.

Give it a watch.

I rated it maybe higher than I would just because the early voting (if you can call 15 votes voting) seemed to only be the pessimistic.

Those that watched it and enjoyed it have families with kids and have more to do that write reviews for online sites. I hope many will get to it soon so that even more will seek it out.

People who are putting down this film as not good enough to 'show it's face in the theater' are showing their extreme ignorance.

These movies were made for family audiences and rebroadcast on Walt Disney's television program which highlighted family oriented movies with cast members that even signed morals clauses that they wouldn't act up (see Lindsey Lohan, etc. in these days) and trash the Disney image as being a family movie business.

Early on Disney had just made shorts and TV shows. In the late fifties they started making full-length films like 'The Shaggy Dog' with Fred MacMurray. It was so successful, it started something. Fred MacMurray was asked to do more films.

The Absent-Minded Professor (remade later with Robin Williams in the lead role in 'Flubber') was one of the successful movies made by Disney that was then edited for their TV audience.

It not only spawned a sequel, "Son of Flubber", but many more family films and comedies that were designed to help people forget their problems, while at the same time the commercials advertised Disneyland.

Disney was ahead of his time in providing programming in what were essentially well-made advertisements for families to enjoy and be reminded about visiting Disneyland, his 'family fun park'.

This light-hearted, fun comedy featured Kurt Russell in the early days of computers (pre-internet)getting the computer's full knowledge into his head.

In the remake (with Kirk Cameron) they updated it to the Internet infiltrating the student's mind and a 'super-hacker' from the opposing school (who's dean ironically is past Disney star Dean Jones) who seeks to hack Cameron's brain and stop his 'brilliance'.

The first of the three films that revolve around Dexter Riley (Russell), the dean (Joe E. Flynn), and friends is also the best done, though the others are enjoyable too. ('Now You See Him, Now You Don't' and 'Strongest Man In the World' are part of this three movie series)

It also teaches the value of humility. Riley did nothing to gain his knowledge, yet he became proud of how smart he was. He had to learn humility and how to treat his friends if he wanted to keep them. Good lessons to learn.

The Disney television films were made for families and are much better than the stuff made today for 'families' including politically correct films, sexually explicit, nasty language and all the other things that supposedly makes them more 'modern'.

Disney TV temporarily stopped around 1975. They have made some films since then that were still family oriented, though people that followed Walt and then Roy Disney didn't have the same ideas about films and the value of good stories.

Enter the Michael Eisner era...remaking classics and making part 2 stories of classics that have no basis in classic books and WERE released direct to video or DVD. Even marginal animated hits got sequels made. Actual hits like Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, got several (part 2 of Aladdin was a real turkey).

Several of the older Disney films were remade for a 'revived' TV program. The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes was one of the better attempts. I would say only a handful were watchable in their 'updated' form. They made kids have to act like adults while the adults act like kids (this might be a clever plot line in 'Freaky Friday', but when it enters into other stories, it's hard to make out who is supposed to be adult and who are kids.

No wonder kids today are forced to face problems beyond their years. They can't even escape it in the so-called 'escape films' on TV or in the movies these days (with rare exceptions).

It takes exceptions like Pirates of the Caribbean or The Chronicles of Narnia to remind Disney that people still like well-made escape films that are wholesome and uplifting for the whole family.

I rated it higher than I normally would because it is a film that deserves to be watched.

Anyone who had the benefit of seeing insider comments from the classic film network I taped it from would know that Grover Cleveland Alexander suffered from seizures do to epilepsy.

Ronald Reagan was quite disappointed at the film company not including that in the film and not naming the disease, though implying some physical problem was involved in Alexander's problems.

The drinking was due to fear (which the film touches on) from NOT UNDERSTANDING EPILEPSY and the seizures that he had.

I think Reagan gave the character life and those who point out his deficiencies as an athlete don't mention that he was an athlete himself, playing football and eventually got a job as a sports announcer. That job helped him land his first role in Hollywood as a sports announcer on screen.

No actor is going to play baseball as well as an actual baseball player. It is a skill that many have tried and few succeed at. 'Knowing' the sport is not the same as being able to play it to the level of a big leaguer.

So, forgiving an actor for not being able to pitch like a real big leaguer is not hard when the main story here is his life, his marriage and his service to his country and to baseball between his very real struggles of epilepsy and drinking.

The film is actually quite ground breaking, covering something from an era where these things were often covered up and if they did make the news, they were public scandals. In this case, Mrs. Alexander (who was played brilliantly by Doris Day here), protected her husband's image at the time by omitting (apparently) some divorces that were designed to help him come to his senses.

Perhaps it was to help protect her as well. She probably felt she made mistakes too in trying to help him the wrong way. It's hard to know how to handle when someone's whole personality changes due to an illness.

The way the media is today, an athlete's whole career could be railroaded with no second chance by an episode of making a bad choice due to pain of getting intoxicated. This doesn't excuse Alexander's bad choices. He should have been honest with his wife and got help (also should have been honest with his baseball team(s)).

But the fact is, Babe Ruth would likely have had a tough time getting in the Hall of Fame in this age when Mark McGuire was overlooked because some people BELIEVE he used illegal steroids. It has yet to be proved and he never admitted it, only to the use of legal vitamin supplements, yet he isn't in the Hall of Fame.

Pete Rose is not forgiven to this day for the gambling which didn't occur as a player, but apparently as a manager.

Yes, baseball as in all of life should have standards. I just see that there have been many double standards as in not giving people a second chance and trying to build up heroes just to knock them down and ruin their lives.

Enough of them do it on their own (i.e. Ken Caminiti, Jose Conseco, etc.) without having to have people who aren't even in the know judging men who have the same weaknesses as us, yet have sought to inspire us to rise above those weaknesses and excel at something to give young people encouragement.

One unguarded moment or comment off the record to a reporter these days is enough to ruin a guy's life and career. Some guys are truly bad characters and deserve it.

Others, like Grover Cleveland Alexander, seem to deserve some understanding and compassion.

Would he have received it in today's journalistic environment?

For those who wondered if the 'Boy With the Green Hair' could act as an adult, look no further than this fine episode of Bonanza. Stockwell plays a man who is on the skids, but he was a Congressional Medal of Honor winner. The narrative tells us most of the people awarded this medal had it awarded posthumously and it is the highest award that could be bestowed for bravery above and beyond the call of duty.

Some of Ben Cartwright's neighbors lost brothers, their stock, had their house burned down and lost their wife/mother according to the husband/father(Harry Townes) because of 'Sherman's men'. He takes a particular disliking to the man who won the 'Yankee's highest killing medal'.

He does everything he can to try to get Stockwell's character out of town, but his daughter likes Stockwell (played by later "Dallas" star Susan Howard) and that makes him even madder.

It comes out in the end that Stockwell was a former ordained minister and Ben invites him to build a church on part of the Cartwright property where some others had a tragedy happen that destroyed their building there. To symbolically 'build out of the ashes' something new and decent and go on with life, not still divided 'north' versus 'south'.

The Cartwright's neighbor and sons are ready to tar and feather Stockwell until the daughter, who has brought Ben along, arrives. Ben reads them a telegram he received including a letter from Abraham Lincoln as to just how he got the medal....it's a shocker and a tear jerker to be sure at the end.

Key line from Stockwell "I want to be liked for who I am, a human being, not for what I did (in the war)".

Don't miss this gem. A fine outing by Lorne Greene as Ben as well.

This film shows it's character's decency in his behavior towards his boss and in the fact that he isn't already hooked up with another girl, playing a game of toying with someone's heart by sending her love letters.

The same is true for the female lead's character who imagines the letter writer as different from who he turns out to be, but isn't with another guy and looking for 'love on the side' Great give and take in the dialog back and forth between the two in this romantic comedy. It even dealt with issues that were ahead of it's time, such as attempted suicide.

Sadly, the remake of this movie (trying to put it in the modern era) of "You Got Mail", the characters are about as different from the originals as you can get. Any similarity to this fine movie is purely coincidental.

Would be interesting to read the play/book this was based on.

I'm amazed that someone would be so naive as to think that a movie trying to present the good news of the gospel to a world that is already saturated with the polluted wells of mass profanity, immorality and violence for violence's sake would criticize a film for NOT having these features in it.

In case the reviewer is interested, the Bible presents many accounts of people who sinned for our learning and instruction so that we wouldn't repeat the same errors without giving pornographic or explicit depictions that do more to encourage people to seek drinks from polluted wells of ignorance than direct them to the water of life, found only in Jesus Christ, who stated that once a person truly drank of the water of eternal life He gives will never thirst again.

I agree that not all the acting in these films is "A list Hollywood acting". Much of what is in Oscar winning movies these days is not "A list Hollywood acting" either.

People are entitled to their opinion that perhaps these filmmakers are relying too much on the message and not on the acting. I think many films rely too much on filthy language, big effects, and sensuality with much less plot and storyline than is shown in the "Left Behind" movies.

So if you want more raunchy supposedly 'realistic' language and sin depicted, there are plenty of other movies out there to choose from. There is less and less originality in film today and more and more depending on moving the emotions or visceral than on reaching the mind of someone.

I also wish the movies had stuck more to the original story. The same as I wished that the Lord of the Rings stuck more to the story and Oscar winners such as Chariots of Fire and Ghandi which also deviated from the stories. None of John Gresham's novels transferred to film stick to the story either. (Runaway Jury changed cigarette industry into the gun industry for example).

Show me a film that is entirely sticking to the story and I'll show you an author that wrote a screenplay and not a book. :-) They are two different mediums and very rarely is the screenplay also written by the book's author.

I rated this highly for what it attempted to do. I think the first part did not do very well in the first half and improved in the second half. This movie wasn't perfectly even either, but it did attempt to get a message that was in the book out in a way that was entertaining. Apparently even to those who thought it was funny.

For the one that found it funny: did you equally laugh and find funny Tom Hanks in "Castaway" for performing the longest known commercial for FedEx in it's history?

How about "Million Dollar Baby" for it's showing a 32 year old woman who can't box a lick and then supposedly becomes a one round wonder only to be taken out by a dirty boxer and left as a vegetable who no longer has an ounce of fight in her? She has the guts to tell her no good family to take a flying leap and then has no guts to live?

These were hit movies, perhaps with better acting, but equally funny because the message outshone any script or plot and many people came away with the impression of "That Fed Ex movie" or "that Right to Die" flick.

I guess these "Left Behind" films aren't alone in being funny or having script and other errors that for some can overwhelm the message, eh?