mlanoue

It may take a second viewing of Dolls for Strangers in order to really get it. It moves pretty fast and doesn't always follow a chronological order. But, I mean it as a compliment to say after watching it the first time, I wanted to see it again. I wanted to revisit the characters and story to help me fill in what I missed. It's a clever idea--taking Vodoo far away from its African-Caribbean origins and moving it to what looks like a pretty standard American suburb. A young guy, Tony, has figured out how to run a business making dolls--kind of a Voodoo for Hire. He has a personal connection to this with his sister, too, whom he suspects was a victim of it.

Visually, I think it's flawless, and has a dark and dreamy quality to it--with a haunting piano theme that doesn't intrude over the images. Because it's so short, the whole thing plays out almost like a poem on film as opposed to a traditional narrative with dialog (although there is dialog). It raises a lot of questions, and after watching it, you're bound to come up with even more questions. Fortunately, writer-director Ken Cohen knew there was no point in trying to give any answers. Trying to explain anything you see in this film would just end up unsatisfying.

I think this was on TBS for a very brief period in the late 1980's. It ran in the afternoons once a week for a few weeks and that was about it. The show tried to create a new Our Gang series in its own right--without resorting to recreating Spanky, Alfalfa, Buckwheat, or the others. These were all new characters set in the present day and they spent a lot of time in a clubhouse, as I recall. I think there was a kid called "Oshay," and one episode featured the gang holding a Dog Wash for some sort of fund raiser.

It was a noble effort to carry on the tradition of the two-reel comedy, but I guess it didn't work out.

This is a movie that tries to be poppy and indie at the same time. There are lots of movies that do this, and they rarely hit the mark. There's enough quirkiness to keep you watching it, but not enough to really make you remember that you actually did watch it the day after. As amusing as the concept is of guys who buy black market cereal is, there's only so much you can do with the concept, and it ends up with a story line about a nice girl with a jerk boyfriend who really doesn't have the ambition to record his mediocre songs. It is nice to see New Orleans, and to see Christopher Lloyd dusting off his Jim-from-taxi persona one more time. It's the kind of movie you could recommend to your parents when they're trying to figure out how to set up their Netflix queue, unless they don't like swearing, that is. In the end, they probably should have just scrapped the whole idea of being edgy, and gone for the poppy movie thing.