Thanks for the memories!

Simply A Masterpiece

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

In NYC, Omri (Hal Scardino) gets a cupboard among other things on his 9th birthday. His friend Patrick gives him a plastic Indian. He puts the Indian in the cupboard and locks it overnight. The next morning, he finds the Indian figure actually alive. The Indian is an Iroquois named Little Bear who was fighting the French for the English in 1761. When Little Bear gets hurt, Omri reanimates WWI British Army medic Tommy Atkins (Steve Coogan) to treat him. Patrick figures out the secret and reanimates cowboy Boone (David Keith). This is a sweet kids movie. It has some fun stuff. Hal is really goofy looking and fits as a gawky kid. There isn't enough drama to interest the adults. This could be a good Twilight Zone episode. As a movie, it doesn't have the excitement or the adventure that this needs.

Even though I rated this plucky movie a 4, it doesn't mean I hate it, my dear friends. I liked it but it doesn't have the stuff to make it to my higher favoritism of movies. Frank Oz is imaginative, but I have to say that this film to me is not so Frank Oz, and movies that are adapted from books are quite impressive, but I can only say I was slightly impressed. For one thing, the cast is inadequate, I never heard of David Keith and Litefoot.This story follows Omri, an extremely childish youngster who, for his birthday, receives a MAGICAL (ooh!) cupboard. The Cupboard lacks its key so Omri's mother (actress Lindsay Crouse, never heard of her), gives him her collection of keys, and guess what…? He finds the certain key on his second try! That part always took me aback. He puts in an antique Iroquois figure in the cupboard, and later in the morning he opens it to find the figure alive as a small Iroquois man. The pair has many tedious adventures, some including an idiotic rat ball and a down-right scruffy cowboy who was a toy figure too. The cupboard MAGICALLY turns plastic (plaz-teck!) things into their real life counterparts, only smaller. The pair soon learns that every boy must become a man (a typical, yet true moral).Omri's character really is childish, yet endearing; his parents seem to pamper him, he's afraid of the dark, and he has lame 90's action figures; but he does mellow out in the end of the movie. I liked the acting, but it was no To Kill a Mocking Bird, even at moving parts. The Iroquois man was different from other Indian movies; he was a guru in a way. The music was just moderate and odd, though with one exception you'll know when you hear it.Be warned, my dear readers, this movie contains slight profanity (embarrassing really); simulative killing and some ladies do a loathsome dance on TV at one point (they call this a kid movie, how embarrassing. Let's hope Omri was sleeping at that adultish scene). And no the kid does not play God, its just a story, have fun. Other than the 3 points I pointed out, the movie is plucky and it has a rather moving ending. It's an poorish if okay movie.

The only redeeming part of this movie is after he rescues the Indian from under the floorboards with the key, and then the rat jumps out, as if from nowhere!! I always rewind it at least 4 times. But only that part. This movie is very strange though, because this would never happen. I did always like the movie box when i was a child though, because you could switch it from the picture of the little boy to the fake cupboard door, and i got a key with it. How delightful. All in all, I would not recommend this movie for you to watch, because there are many better movies available for your viewing pleasure. A movie that I would recommend that still has a magical feel to it would be the 1976 version of Freaky Friday. Because magical things happen in this movie as well as that movie, but the Freaky Friday movie is much more enjoyable.

I'm a sucker for nice kids, not those snotty ones seen so often in films from the '60s to the present. In here is a wonderful neat-looking little kid, Hal Sardino, who is unusual in that this is the only movie he ever starred in. To his credit, Scardino went on to live a "normal" life after this film, eventually going to college as a regular student like you and me with no celebrity status.The film is anything but "normal," a fantasy about a young boy who receives a cupboard that transforms little toy figurines - in this case, an Indian and then a cowboy. - into miniature real-life people. Each time he opens or closes the box with the figures in them, they change to either real or back to plastic.Scardino, who plays Omri," is fun to watch, if for no other reason than the great expressions on his face. He has to be one of the most likable children I've ever seen on film. Meanwhile, his best friend "Patrick" is the only villain, so to speak, only because he's a bit "defiant," as his mother labels him and he almost spoils everything for "Omri."It's a solid family film that is fun for both the parents and kids to watch at the same time. Both will get a lot of entertainment out of it. With just a bit of profanity early on and a bit of obvious political correctness, there is nothing in here which should offend viewers. Critics didn't seem to care for it, so you know it truly was a nice, wholesome film....and fun to watch.