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sirclancelot
Reviews
Annie (1982)
Yuck
Now, I love musicals. Oliver! Calamity Jane, The Sound of Music; they're all great but this film has the same effect on me as sandpaper on a blackboard! This horribly ugly child, whining through the most irritating songs ever written, with the ever wooden Albert Finney (bald in this film, too - double sickener) playing the kindly (oh please) Daddy Warbucks (What kind of a name is that, anyway?), just five minutes makes you want to turn over to something less sugary. Nothing can make me gnash my teeth in (literal) pain (of the eardrums and brain) like that awful, awful signature tune "Tomorrow, Tomorrow!" God, it's making me wince, just typing it!
The Wonderful World of Disney: Oliver Twist (1997)
Bad Bad Bad
Why, Oh why did anyone agree to be in this movie? I can only assume they were either desperate for work or mad.
Aside from the usual argument that it wasn't even slightly faithful to the book, this film just wasn't thought out.
At the start as we see Oliver's mother wandering the moors a caption comes up stating that she is 'somewhere in the north of England.' Okay, if this is true, why is everybody at the workhouse a Londoner? I'm from the north of England and no one here talks like Michael Caine, believe me.
While we're still on the subject of accents, Elijah Wood performed his role well as he is a rather good actor but this was totally shadowed by bad voice work. At times it was like he was playing Scarlet O'Hara in a GONE WITH THE WIND remake! At others I thought I'd accidentally put the Crocodile Dundee video in by mistake. There was one part in towards the end where he didn't even try and delivered an entire line in his own American accent!
I suppose in its defence, this film is not the only one to have certain inaccuracies. Even the revered Oliver! musical has a line "you promised we could go and see the hangin'" when actually by this period, public hangings had been abolished.
I actually saw this film on DVD so it's not that I've been denied the opportunity to see this in all it's 'glory' by only seeing the edited TV version. This film is a Disney film and we all know that they can do miles better. This is the corporation that invented feature-length animated movies, they brought us Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, LAdy and the Tramp, Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. This movie is so amateur in comparison to most of Disney's other productions. It comes across as having been made by some errand boy while the studio bosses are on a tea break!
Mind Your Language (1977)
Why Mind Your Language is wonderful!
I first became a fan of this great show at the age of 13 , in the 1990s when it was being repeated on the Granada Plus Cable TV Channel. My Mum and Grandma had been huge fans in the 70s when it was originally aired.
The humour may be simple at times but that is part of it's charm. Jokes such as Juan, the Spanish character getting the words Fete and Feet confused are just easy for anyone to laugh at. I hate it when you miss five minutes of a comedy show because you're having to get someone to explain a joke to you that you didn't understand. That NEVER happens with this programme and although the characters are kind of stereotypical(Including the English ones), they're not racist and there really are people out there who conform to stereotyping. Everybody knows someone who conforms to a stereotype. Besides, some of the characters go against stereotyping. For example, Ali (PAkistani) and Jamila (Indian) get on really well. Ali has even stuck up for JAmila when she was being pestered by a man in one episode. ALi, instead, reserves his hatred for Ranjeet, a Punjabi, for religious reasons; Ali is Muslim and Ranjeet is a Sikh.
MIND YOUR LANGUAGE is basically just good, clean fun. It's not meant to be clever, it's not meant to have some big political message. It's just meant to make people laugh and it does.