Jane Eyre - A non musical review

Hey there fellow bloggers. Here I am again with a review of the latest Jane Eyre movie directed by Cary Fukunaga. First of all I’ve looked at other reviews of this movie who’ve said Jane Eyre was my favorite book and I’ve seen every adaption there is. I can’t claim that level of expertise but I have read the book and I saw the 2006 version with Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens both of these I liked quite a lot. So I knew I had to see this film just so I could compare to the 2006 version to see if the story could have been done better. However this film seems like a pale ghost in comparison which was quite disappointing.

The plot of Jane Eyre is quite simple girl has crappy life. Girl falls in love with boy. Boy has dark secret past. Girl leaves boy. Girl goes back to boy and they live happily ever after and this film doesn’t mess with that premise and hits the majority of plot points that the novel has. This is actually a bit disappointing, the film doesn’t do anything new with the plot when I first heard that the film was starting at the point where Jane is found by Mr Rivers. I thought great, they’re going to tell the story in a different way. But they didn’t do anything interesting with it. Jane just flashbacks the story as she’s staying at rivers’ house and this really takes a lot of drive out of the narrative because we keep cutting back to her with the rivers and to be honest that wasn’t the most exciting moment of the book. It takes a lot of energy out of the narrative to have to cut back to Jane having an awkward dinner conversation with the Rivers. It also doesn’t help that because this film is only 90 minutes so they had to cut a lot from the novel, to the point where the film seems almost skeletal. This is especially apparent with the ending, this film doesn't end it stops abruptly. I remember, my sister going to me "Is that it?." Unfortunately that was it and 

The direction of this film was quite disappointing to. Now I’d never heard of Cary Fukunaga before this movie but apparently he’s an award wining director. This was why I was disappointing that this film wasn’t that visually interesting. Now don’t get me wrong, there were a couple of visually interesting shots and the costumes and locations were very good but so was the 2006 version which was made for television. On the whole the film felt  very washed out and dull. Also another funny flaw with the directing I found was the scene where Mr Mason played by Harry Lloyd has been injured by his sister and Jane is looking after him except, she gets up and goes to listen at the tapestry. Now i’m sure this scene was meant to be creepy but all I was thinking was what’s Mr Mason doing right now. “Come back, I’m bleeding, I’m in incredible pain.” I don’t know it just seems a bit silly to me to get up and leave your patient after such a grievous wound. I don’t know maybe the wound wasn’t that bad and she was trying to protect him but I don’t know it just came across like she had a very short attention span.

Now the couple, let’s start with Jane both of them. Firstly young Jane played by Amelia Clarkson. Now then the bit with child Jane as far as I know has never been cut out of an adaptation because despite this seemingly being a love story, it’s also a rocky type movie in that we see someone down and out realize their true potential. So the bits with child Jane are really important to get right this is where we emphasize with Jane and become invested in her story. We want her to do well. We want her to escape. Which is why I don’t understand why they got an actress who was just so wooden, she didn’t seem like a child. She seemed like a robot and I couldn’t bring myself to care about her which is a big failing because it takes a lot of the driving force out of the movie. Now grown up Jane who’s played by Mia Wasikowska and I feel a little bad criticizing her performance because she’s not in the best of positions. She’s got to make up for the flaws of young Jane and make me care but mostly she doesn’t. She gives such a low key and passionless performance throughout this film that it’s hard to understand why anyone would fall in love with her. She just plays it so bland that it made me pine for Ruth Wilson. I will be fair that at various points of the film. There is a faint glimmer of a spark that made me fall in love with the character of Jane Eyre. But these moments are few and far between and it doesn’t carry the movie. 

Now the Mr Rochester played by Michael Fassbender and I’ll admit when I heard that he was playing Rochester I was pumped. But largely he didn’t deliver now then he was a lot better than Mia Wasikowska but then again that might be because he was consistently showing signs of life and he played the rough, dark side of Rochester quite well but not the charming lovable side, he reminded me of Edward Cullen always moping about how dark and dangerous he is. What a  prima dona. This is especially frustrating because I saw him in X men First class and there he had that charming roguishness needed for this part. Finally the chemistry between Jane and Mr Rochester which was severely lacking throughout this film, there was only one moment where I felt any heat and that was after the wedding. But the rest of the film I didn’t get the feeling of two people falling in love just two people being polite to each other. Considering this is meant to be a love story, it really drags down the movie.

I feel I should give a shout out to some of the other actors in this movie but only two really stood out for me. One Judi Dench who plays Miss Fairfax, I had to comment on this performance just because it’s Judi Dench. To be honest I’m kind of surprised she accepted this role. Now the film took great pains to expand her character to make it worth her effort and she does have some good moments. My personal favorite being her standing on the staircase as she watches Jane and Mr Rochester. But the problem is with Mrs Fairfax is she’s not an important character. They tried to mould her into a mother figure for Jane and it just doesn’t work.The other part is Sally Hawkins played by Mrs Reed. It’s a huge testament to her that she stood out after being on screen for 2 minutes tops but she does really well playing the strained Mrs Reed. It’s restrained but she lets you see the subtle cracks behind her mask of her propriety. To be honest it’s a real shame that her part got cut down so much to the point where she really just serves to move the plot but she did manage to shine for her few brief scenes and i was grateful for that.

To conclude this film is boring, it does occasionally show flickers of promise but they quickly subside and leave you with a bore of a film where you don’t care about Jane, you don't care about the love story and after that there’s nothing left. So if you’re a fan of Jane Eyre watch the 2006 version, the acting is better, the story is more developed and the character development feels more organic. For me it’s the definitive adaptation.

Gentlemen prefer Blondes

So this is a film that when I picked it up. I had a subconscious reaction, I vaguely knew of its existence but I knew had never watched it. I had pretty much the same reaction to everyone on the cover Howard Hawks, Jane Russell and Charles Coburn. They were people I knew existed but I couldn’t have named anything they’d done. The exception to this is Marilyn Monroe and even today around 50 years later is still the ultimate blonde style icon. So one of the things I was asking when watching this film was can Marilyn Monroe actually act, I only really knew her for being an icon and although I was aware of her being an actress, I’d never seen her act so this was interesting in that respect.

Let’s start with the plot, Lorelai Lee and Dorothy Shaw are two presumably successful showgirls who are looking to find love and get married. So Lorelai’s fiancée pay for them to go to Europe unfortunately for him. Lorelai was born with the most advanced diamond tracking system in the world and ends up being attracted by Piggy, who owns the 2^nd biggest diamond mine in Africa. He’s probably set up at least two military coups and caused the death of thousands but stuff like this doesn’t bother Lorelai.   Because to Lorelai, love is great and all but diamonds are a girl’s best friend.  Dorothy who having no luck with the Olympic team falls for private detective Ernie Malone but unfortunately for her, he’s been hired by Lorelai’s fiancé’s father to keep an eye on Lorelai and tell him of any scandal. Unfortunately for Lorelai it seems that letting a guy grab you as he pretends to be a python and flirting with the same man to get a tiara cputns as a scandal. So he decides to cut her off, so both girls, betrayed by the men they love, decide to sing their ticket home in a nice Parisian club presumably that’s their goal, it’s not actually made clear. Piggy’s wife however wants her tiara back but it’s been stolen back by Piggy. The race is on to get the money, whilst Dorothy tries to sort this out in court. Ernie Malone decides to help her because money’s great and all but he’s got a chance of checking out her rocks, so he switches sides. The tiara is returned and we end on a double wedding. There are plenty of funny moments throughout this movie but at the same time there are a few jokes that just don’t work for example “sometimes I think there’s only one of you in the whole world”. But the plot does deliver some good laughs and the movie manages a quite relaxed pace despite it’s running time of 87 minutes.

But let’s not forget that this is a musical so let’s look at the songs in this film, first we have “two little girls from Littlerock”, a catchy little number and sung brilliantly by our two stars. The song does a good job of establishing the friendship but also the immense differences between the two leads. Jane Russell sings in a way that she knows she’s entertaining and she doesn’t take what she’s singing seriously meanwhile Marilyn Monroe sings a lot more seductively and while she’s having fun, she’s still actively working her assets to impress Gus Esmond. “Bye Bye baby” is even catchier than “two little girls from Littlerock” and again emphasises the differences between the two leads Dorothy is just flirting meanwhile Lorelai is trying to comfort Gus and convince him that she won’t cheat. Then we have "ain’t there anyone here for love" which is a very funny song with the Olympic team dancing in flesh coloured swimming trunks ahhhhh, the homo eroticism. But Russell dominates this song with her amazing comedic expressions and plain voice and pretty much set up her character’s motivations throughout the rest of the movie. Then we have “when love goes wrong, nothing goes right” which is unique throughout this movie because it’s the only song that doesn’t try and be funny again it’s sung beautifully but whereas the other songs Dorothy and Lorelai sing together emphasise how different they are. This one focuses on how similar they are. Lorelai’s not trying to impress anyone and Dorothy’s not having fun anymore. They’ve both been hurt by love but as the song goes on there is an air of hope even if they don’t have engagement rings they have a love for entertaining and ironically as they start to sing things start to go right for them. Love may go wrong but music never does. God that was corny. Last but certainly not least is diamonds are a girl’s best friend which is without a doubt the most well known song in this movie. It is fantastically staged and costumed with a great pink and black theme to which I really have to nod my head to the director. "Ain’t there anyone here for love" gave us a look into Dorothy’s character and this song does the same for Lorelai. It’s basically her whole philosophy, why should she bother with love when she can have diamonds and love, she’s not going to live forever and she just wants to enjoy life while she can and you can’t blame her. Later on Jane Russell reprises the song brilliantly and it makes fun of this philosophy that Lorelai is basically ok to sell herself to the highest bidder. So there is no song that I dislike and each song and adds great emotional depth to the plight of our stars

So let’s talk about the two main stars Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe. According to IMDB when Marilyn was told she wasn’t the star of this film she said “Well whatever I am, I’m still the blonde” and that pretty much sums up her character. She’s extremely blonde from her simpering voice; her doe eyed expression and her quite generous curves. By all rights, I should hate this character, I’ve grew up in an age where the blonde bimbo was nothing but an object of ridicule in most movies especially when the blonde is only after money, which but I don’t hate this character. You can’t hate Lorelai in this film, what she says throughout makes sense; I especially love her honesty at the end “I want your money.” She also delivers all her lines in this soft simpering voice and while it should be annoying it just isn’t, it adds a whole extra layer of comedy to her already funny lines and she is just so iconic throughout this film, she also emotes quite well and she has little expressions that add something to her performance like how she tries to smile when Dorothy invites the Olympic team to her room. However I preferred Jane Russell’s character Dorothy, She just has a no nonsense attitude and she delivers her lines brilliantly, one of my personal favourites is “no one chaperones the chaperone” and she’s such a perfect contrast to Lorelai. She’s not trying to find a rich husband she just wants to fall in love and have fun and she’s quite successful at doing this although they are a few mishaps. I just fell in love with her care free attitude but also her fierce determination to look after her friend. Russell and Monroe have a great chemistry together and you really believe these two are really good friends which really sells the movie.

The supporting cast is also brilliant, the two love interests do a brilliant job of being more than bland love interests, and Elliot Reis plays the wisecracking private dick Ernie Malone with such style that you can’t help but love him. Yes he’s here to bring down Lorelai but he’s only doing his job and his down to earth attitude and dry wit makes him a perfect match for Dorothy because they just want love. On the other hand we have 

Tom Noonan playing Gus Esmond who gets the amazing fortune to play opposite Marilyn Monroe. He does a pretty good job and unlike everyone else it never seems like he’s lusting after her but that he’s just madly in love and his reactions during "bye bye baby" are just brilliant and he manages to convey that he is genuinely worried about her. He doesn’t want anything to happen to her. Charles Coburn didn’t really impress me in this film, he does an ok job but he’s really only there as a plot device and isn’t very interesting. The real scene stealer is George Winslow as Henry Spoford the 3^rd. This kid is amazing, I love his dead pan voice, his dead pan expression and just about everything this kid does. He’s only in two scenes but he just steals them completely. The way he says you’ve got a lot of animal magnetism with no passion just makes the line all the more funny. This kid is either a comedic genius or a really crap actor. I really can’t figure this kid out.

Lastly special features, well we’ve got the trailer which is good. A film of Monroe and Russell signing their names in cement which is good if you like watching celebrities write their name in cement. We also have a small feature about the restoration of this movie which I don’t recommend unless you’re really interested in film restoration. Lastly we have two pictures which I assume were movie posters and they look quite nice. So yeah, the special features really aren’t worth buying the DVD.

To conclude Gentlemen prefer blondes satirises high society and also points out the hypocrisy in a system that looks down on women for only wanting money, when there are men that want women because of their looks. But first and foremost, this is a comedy about love, how much it hurts, how much fun it is. But if this film had a message I think it would be figure out what you want and go for it. But this film is mainly about fun and you’ll be humming the songs for weeks and that’s what it’s all about.

The Pirate

So here we have the pirate, me being a musical dunce finds it strange that it’s a pirate film without Jack Sparrow. It’s also weird for me to see Judy Garland not following a yellow brick road. So this was a weird experience for me. It’s also weird to see how this was promoted as an MGM musical. It strange to see how much punch a studio name has, I mean today the only studio that is really distinctive in what it puts out is Pixar but according to my research when this film was made MGM symbolised the best of what Hollywood could offer and I think it’s a shame that along the way studios have lost their identities and are concerned only about making money and not being creative or different from each other. But this film was made at the height of creative fervour at MGM and this would help and hinder the film.

So first the songs which were all written by the great Cole Porter and another weird thing when I researched this guy it turned out he’d written a lot of songs I genuinely like but when this film was coming out he’d had several Broadway flops and wanted to create some musical hits. Unfortunately for him the only one that was a hit was be a clown which when I listened to it, I immediately thought of make em laugh from Gene Kelly’s much more well known singin in the rain. It’s so similar that you almost suspect plagiarism but apparently sometimes in show business two people end up writing the same song entirely independent of each other. I ‘m not entirely sure I buy this but it’s a catchy tune and Gene Kelly and Judy Garland perform it well. My personal favourite song was Mack the black, it really shows Judy Garland’s vocal talent and it’s catchy and upbeat. The same could be said for Nina but the song is overshadowed by the great comedic routine Gene Kelly puts together when he manages to seduce every girl in this town in moments. Talking about dancing although not technically a song I have to mention the pirate ballet which is probably the best dance sequence I’ve ever seen. It’s weird to say for a dance sequence but it’s just so manly, it’s got explosions, some cool acrobatics, swords, guns and also Gene Kelly’s legs which are supremely sexy.  You can do no wrong and love of my life were the only songs I didn’t care for not because they were bad it was just average, Judy Garland sings them well but they’re just two more love song with nothing distinguishing about them. They’re songs that you instantly forget. Overall the soundtrack isn’t spectacular but it does what it needs to do.

I have to talk about the star power behind this film because they both do such a wonderful job. Firstly Judy Garland who I just loved during this whole film as I’ve mentioned before the only thing I’ve seen her in is the Wizard of Oz so it was weird seeing her all grown up. But she looks glamorous throughout this film wearing the most gorgeous costumes and just being such a thrill to watch. Also she’s actually quite funny, she has great comedic timing throughout this film, I think this shows through most when she’s trying to seduce Gene Kelly and in the brawl immediately after that but my personal favourite bit was the “he asked for me” bit. She is truly hilarious, weirdly people blame her for this movie being a flop and while she had a lot of sick days, and her personal life wasn’t great at the time, I don't see it in the final product and I think that’s what counts. Gene Kelly dances marvellously throughout this film and his performance of Serafin is just so funny. From him tricking his troupe and “You can hardly call it sneaking, I walked across a tightrope.” He is the epitome of the loveable rogue and oh those magnificent legs.

The plot of this film is simple Manuela (Judy Garland) has been engaged by her aunt Inez to Don Pedro, a fat rotund man who’s mayor. Manuela not exactly thrilled with this prospect wants to take one last trip to port Sebastian to pick up her wedding dress. Upon arriving, the enigmatic Serafin(Gene Kelly) immediately falls in love with her and invites her to his show. She goes but is hypnotised by Serafin and admits she’s in love with Jack sparrow, just kidding; she’s in love with Macoco the black. This displeases our plucky actor so he goes to where she lives and pretends to be the great Macoco to win her over and get her to join his troupe. So she goes to him and finds out he’s been lying, messes with him for a bit and then throws everything she can find at him. In fairness at this point, he’s harassed her, hypnotised her, kissed her, tricked her, stalked her and lied, so it is all justified. She accidentally hurts him and realises that she loves him but he is taken away and Manuela discovers that Don Pedro is Mac the black which is a nice twist of irony. So she saves her new love by exposing Don Pedro by pretending to be hypnotised and it ends with a reprise of be a clown. This musical certainly has some very good lines like “try underplaying” and the plot does works in a way that expands on their stars talents and takes them out of their personas a little. It's also quite clever in how it subverssively mocks what it's portraying. It could be seen as too clever for it's own considering it flopped.

One of the problems with this movie is that the side characters aren’t given that much to do Walter Slezak is an average villain in this but he should be more interesting, this is someone who’s trying to reform his life but can’t get over his own bullying and evil nature. So much more should have been done with his character but Walter Slezak does ok but he never intrigued me the way a good villain should. Aunt Inez played by Gladys Cooper has a few good lines but in the end she comes across as the stereotypical guardian. I think the biggest shame was that Gene Kelly’s troupe wasn’t given much to do apart from a scene at the beginning which is quite funny. As Serafin becomes more and more ridiculous, I kept wondering what his troupe were thinking about all this and why they were going along with it with little comment, apparently they were meant to have scenes which were cut for time which is a great shame. But the standout members of the troupe were the Nicholas brothers who dance with Gene Kelly near the end of the movie. They’re dancing is amazing and it was definitely worth the effort Gene Kelly went through to get them in this film.

Let’s talk about the director Vincente Minnelli who did a great job during this film. He really helped punctuate the choreography of the dances with the scenery and camera movements and this film is just so pretty. Now then there’s no getting past that this is a set but I think that’s the point this world isn’t real, because the real world could never be so bright and picturesque.  Someone said that you could take any shot from this film blow it up and hang it in your house and it’s largely true. Nearly every single shot of this film looks magnificent and huge props have to go to the costumes, scenery and all the other behind the scenes staff that made it possible. They really took advantage of the Technicolor and the result is glorious to behold. Everything looks good from Judy Garland's dresses to the cover art on my dvd box.

This DVD actually has a lot of special features and if you’re a fan of this movie I recommend buying it. First of all there’s a commentary by John Fricke who to be honest sounds like a robot the whole way through but has some interesting facts about the film and its stars. A featurette about the making of this film which is very interesting and a little more enthused than the commentary. There are two shorts, one is called you can’t win and has an omnipotent narrator determined to torture the poor schmuck as he does the simplest of tasks. The other is a classic Tom and Jerry cartoon “cat fishing” and I don’t think I need to add to that. There’s a  stereo remix of Mack the black song outtakes and guide tracks of the songs by Rodger Edens who is very good. There are also promotional radio interviews from Gene Kelly and Judy Garland, Gene Kelly’s is good and I never noticed how much charm there was in his voice. Judy Garland is also charming and while I said you can’t really tell about her personal problems watching this film, I think you can tell in this interview that she’s struggling a little bit. Lastly there’s the trailer which to me illustrates why this film wasn’t successful.

To conclude critics from across the world have debated about the merits and faults of this film. Was it good? Was it bad? Could it have been better? So here’s my two cents I really liked this film but for me the reason this film didn’t do well was because of how it’s advertised. The tag line is the “MGM musical romance” and the trailer really hammers the point about these two stars falling in love in this movie. But this movie isn’t a romance, don’t get me wrong it has romantic elements and Gene and Judy had a great chemistry but that doesn’t make it a romance. It’s a comedy, you’re primarily meant to laugh at how absurd the situation is not oooh and ahhh at the romance it’s just not that kind of movie and I think that’s one of the reasons why this film didn’t do well when it first came out. The audience were expecting a star struck romance with songs and swashbuckling thrown in but instead they got a parody of those things. As Gene Kelly said the joke just went over everyone’s head.

Three Smart Girls

It feels weird to start with this musical because it doesn’t feel like a musical because there are only three songs in the whole movie all performed by Deanna Durbin and with a running time of only 80 minutes it doesn’t feel like a film either. So why pick this, I guess because I was intrigued by the cover which loudly proclaims that it’s part of the Deanna Durbin collection who I didn’t know until I brought this DVD. Also it’s age also intrigues me if I’m going to learn more about musicals, I suppose I better start at the beginning and while 1936 doesn’t make it the first musical, it does show the beginnings of the musical and hopefully over time I’ll see how this genre evolved.

Firstly I’m going to talk about Deanna Durbin, normally I would talk about the plot or the songs first but since both seem to be an excuse to promote Deanna Durbin, I suppose it’s a good place to start. Deanna who was 14 at time plays Penny a young girl who’s not pig headed, she’s just strong willed. Her character in this movie does seem strangely realistically, she plays everything so gloriously over the top, that it reminds me of a lot of 14 year old girls and she is strangely loveable or maybe I’m just relieved to see a 14year old girl without a Bieber fixation. This leads me to her voice as I was watching this film I was constantly amazed that such a small girl could have such a powerful voice, if this movie was made today, I’d suspect auto tune but these guys had only just got used to filming people singing, it would be a few years before they mastered filming someone to look like they can sing as I’ve already said she only has three songs but she performs them all well and with such passion and gusto and her whole performance is filled with this that she truly lights up each scene she’s in.

So the plot of this film, we start in Switzerland, Penny has 2 sisters who make up the three smart girls Joan and Mae both played by Nan Grey and Barbara Read. It turns out her father has divorced her mum and it doesn’t seem she’s quite over him which is a bit of an understatement because it seems that she’s dangerously close to becoming Miss Havisham from Great Expectations. Luckily for her she has three plucky daughters who decide to go to New York to stop him from remarrying. They plan to sabotage the delightful bitch Miss Lyons and her Mother by tricking her into leaving her father from a richer man. At first the enigmatic Bill Evans puts his hilarious drunk and broke friend Count something to the task but things go awry and Lord Michael Stewart the smoothest man to ever grace New York is confused for the count and promptly falls in love with Mae.  Mae reciprocates but this means there’s no one to tempt Miss Lyons away and this makes her angry. However when Penny runs away her Father realising the fool he’s been decided to break it off and she ends up on a cruise ship with her mother and Count what’s his name for company. The father and mother get back together and everyone is happy.

I suppose I should talk about the songs, unfortunately i'm not a big opera fan and she sings very operatically which is distancing for me. It's also weird to watch a musical where I feel bad if I try and sing along. Deanna's voice is so beautiful that I know if I was singing along, I'd ruin her song if I tried. My personal favourite was il bacio just because I love the way the policeman reacted to it.

 

The stand out performance for me was Ray Milland as Lord Stewart, I just love his brisk air of confidence and how he just seems to breeze in and out with every scene, he should be irritating but the guy just radiates charm. He’s decided that he’s going to get Mae at the end of this movie and he’ll go along with any pretence he think is necessary to achieve that. The Dad played by Charles Winniger is just so loveable yet so clueless, it’s impossible not to gravitate towards him instantly. Count what’s his face played by Mischa Auer also has quite a few good laughs considering how few scenes he’s in. Miss Lyons and Mrs. Lyons both make wonderfully effective villains. From the very first shot where you see Miss Lyons wearing leopard print you know she’s evil and she doesn’t disappoint and Mrs Lyons does a good job at being the mastermind behind her plan to marry her daughter off to the richest man she could fine. Both Nan Grey and Barbara Read do a good job  but despite theoretically  being title characters they have surprisingly little to do, Barbara Read has it a little luckier because she get to be seduced by Ray Milland but Nan Grey’s romance with Bill Evans happens so fast and has so little impact on anything that it doesn’t seem worth mentioning. In fairness to Nan Grey though in the gymnasium scene, she seems to be on a strange piece of gym equipment and it’s hilarious.

One of the things this movie suffers from is pacing the only time it ever stops is when Deanna Durbin decides it’s time for a song at which point the plot comes to a complete halt. But the rest of the film goes by so fast that sometimes it’s hard to make out what people are saying and you’ll have these 5 second scenes just to indicate that time has passed. This is ok for the screwball comedy scenes but it really hurts the two romances in this film since they’re not given any time to develop naturally, it’s just bang you’re in love, the only relationship the film seems to have any patience for is the scenes with penny and her father which are truly heart-warming although a bit incredulous because they haven’t seen each other in 10 years so she must have been 4 when he left and it’s hard to buy why they have such a meaningful connection, it would make more sense for Joan to have the strongest connection because she’s the only one who had a chance to know him but since when has making sense stop anyone in Hollywood.

Lastly the special features, this paragraph's going to be short because the special features were a bit sparse but hey I spent 13 quid on this DVD so may as well get the most out of it. There's a picture galerry with some quite good screen shots of the film and some good promotinal pics. If you've got the DVD check them out, it'll only take a couple of minutes.

All in all this is a fun film and the moment I finished watching it, I wanted to watch it again. Is it flawless? No but I think the main reason for that was it didn’t know what it wanted to be, a family comedy, a romantic comedy or a straight up musical and it struggles to fit all that into 80 minutes. But it is a good film managing to take advantage of the great pool of talent they had available especially Deanna Durbin who despite her youth has a great presence and you immediately warm and care for her even though her performance can be a bit over the top and annoying at times and I can see why she had all this hype generated for her. So all in all a good experience and I hope to see Deanna Durbin again