Catholic girls love it.

Rating: Null/10 (9 April 2001)

The nuns took us fifth graders on a long bus ride into downtown D.C. to see this film when it first came out. The movie was so popular it stayed at that theater (The Ontario) for at least a year, so they took us again as sixth graders. While other posters on this site have complained about a lack of conflict until the Nazis show up, we Catholic girls completely understood the conflict in wanting to be a nun, but not passing muster. So the first minutes of the film, where we discover as she almost forgets to pick up her veil from the mountaintop that she is a nun and is late for chapel, we Catholic girls were entranced. I think I paid to see this movie 30 times before it came out on videotape and I immediately bought it. My kids were raised on it, watched it a dozen times, and we used the songs as lullabies. I'm pretty sated on it now, and a few things I find irritating, like the obviously pasted on wig the baroness wore and the silhouetted kissing scene between the captain and Maria that makes their mouths look like trumpets. And some of the incredibly bad acting by the children who appropriately ended up as real estate agents and small business owners.

Nonetheless, it's an experience all people should have. It is a fine musical. I'd watch it again any day over the Rocky Horror Picture Show.