Movie Reviews – April 2007

Here are the movies we saw this month:

Here are my reviews:

Shaft

John Shaft, a tough, cool, black private detective is hired by Bumpy the Gangster (as in Al Capone, not Gangsta) to find his kidnapped daughter. Enlisting the help of a local black power group, he goes up against the mafia which is trying to take over Bumpy’s territory and safely returns the girl. This movie holds up extremely well after 36 years. Shaft was the first of the blacksploitation films, but did not exhibit a lot of the other characteristics that later movies showed, pimps and criminals as the heroes for instance. The film is an intriguing time capsule. The characters are still using rotary dial phones and Shaft’s upscale apartment has a 7″ open reel tape deck. Other early 70’s furnishings are also a kick. But the best of all is that the mafiosi use Tommy guns, complete with round ammo magazines. The prerelease hype for this movie, back in 1971, played up the fact that a Black Panther type group was going to be featured. But I thought Shaft was a Black Panther himself. When the film finally hit the theaters, I thought I was going to miss it altogether because our whole family was in England at the time. These were the days before video tapes so I figured it was lost forever. Luckily, it came out as a second run shortly after we returned and I did get to see it.
Turner Classic Movies – 3 stars

The Skeleton Key

A hospice nurse from New Orleans accepts a private job to nurse a man who has had a stroke and is slowly dying at his remote plantation mansion. The wife gives the nurse a master key to the house, the skeleton key. She is asked to fetch something from the attic and discovers a locked room that the key won’t open. Intrigued, she returns later, fiddles with the lock and discovers something blocking the keyhole. She removes it, unlocks the room and enters. It is filled with voodoo stuff which she calls hoodoo. The man asks her to help him as best he can and the nurse returns to New Orleans where she consults someone in a voodoo shop. She describes the man’s symptons and is given a set of directions on how to make him better. After that, though only slightly recovered, he gestures that it’s his wife who is causing him his troubles. This is a mystery with some hints at the supernatural, the voodoo, but it is not a horror movie. There is a great twist at the end.
Netflix – 3 stars

Meet the Robinsons 3D

An orphan boy who loves inventing, is trying to create a machine that will help him find the mother that left him at the orphanage years before. When he enters it in a science fair, it starts a chain of events that takes him to the future where he meets a strangely familiar cast of characters. This is a great movie. The plot is better than normal for an animated feature. While I don’t particularly like Dreamworks’ style of animation it was ok. The way the villain is portrayed, complete with peg teeth and constant screw-ups is so over the top, you can’t help but like him. Pay the extra couple of bucks and see this in 3D, it’s worth every penny.
Theater – 4 stars

Aeon Flux

This is an action/adventure film set in the future with the heroine assigned to assassinate the leader of the government. It suffers a little bit from everything being so futuristic that the viewer sometimes has trouble placing the action in context and having a full understanding of what has just happened.
Netflix – 3 stars

Nanny McFee

When the last available nanny quits, a father of seven unruly kids is told by the employment service that what he needs is Nanny McFee. With his rich aunt threatening to cut off his absolutely critical allowance unless he marries by the end of the month, Nanny McFee couldn’t show up at a better time. She has five lessons to teach the children. When their efforts to drive her away are turned back on the children, the lessons are learned one by one. And, with each lesson learned, one of the blemishes on Nanny’s appearance disappears. Rather than doing battle with the chief prankster child, the oldest son, she enlists his aid in solving their problems. At the last moment, when the dad is about to marry the totally inappropriate stepmother-to-be, Nanny saves the day. The movie starts out a little slowly and you wonder if you have made a mistake by selecting it. But by about a third of the way in, the pace picks up nicely and by the end you find yourself cheering.
Netflix – 3 stars

Match Point

This movie is Woody Allen at his absolute worst. It has all of Allen’s tedious angst and none of the normal humor. The unlikable main character gets deeper and deeper into trouble with no satisfactory way out of any of it. You feel he deserves what he is getting. I did not like this movie.
Netflix – 2 stars

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio

An intelligent woman who gives up her promising career to be the stay-at-home mother of ten with an unpleasant drunk for a husband, does everything she can to help make the family’s finances stretch. She enters every contest she can and wins prize after prize which she mostly converts to cash to make ends meet. This is based on real life events and the kids in the movie were all born around the same time as my brother and sisters and me. So the nostalgia factor from the set properties and dressing (pop bottles, laundry soap, tv commercials playing in the background) was as fun as could be. It was nice to see the real life kids at the end. All of them turned out ok but one has to wonder why the one who was a state attorney general ended up as a licensed massage therapist.
Netflix – 3 stars

The Notorious Bettie Page

Bettie Page was a pinup girl in the 1950’s. For the most part she has been forgotten, but she has a special place in the 3D photography community because she posed for many photos in front of a Stereo Realist camera. In fact, in the movie there is an amateur photo shoot she is at and a Realist is shown in the hands of one of the shutterbugs. The problem is that he was holding the camera vertically which would totally ruin the 3D effect. The action is a straight line biography of Bettie. Not much plot at all. It goes from her teenage years, through her pinup days, to her finding Jesus and quitting the posing. If I didn’t like the real Bettie Page so much, I probably would have rated this movie lower.
Netflix – 3 stars