90 Days of Oscar Nominees #81 – Doctor Dolittle (1967)

In my attempt to have a more prolific repertoire of Oscar Nominated Films, I have taken it upon myself to watch 90 new Best Picture Nominees that I’ve never seen before between 5 Dec 2017 and The 90th Annual Oscars on 4 Mar 2018.

Here is my 81st review of the 90 chosen Films…

–

“Did you know that an ant has more intelligence than a hippopotamus? And that a grasshopper, in relation to his size, has more power in his hind legs than a kangaroo. Absolutely, fascinating! There’s no doubt about it, animals are much more interesting than people.” – Dr. Doolittle

Number of Times Seen – Between 3-5 times (Video and cable in the 80’s and 22 Feb 2018)

Brief Synopsis – A veterinarian that can understand the language of animals goes on a quest to find a mythical creature.

My Take on it – This film has only one thing going for it and it’s the Oscar winning song Talk to the Animals.

The rest of this film is a complete mess.

The story is boring and uninteresting.

The characters are dull.

The rest of the songs don’t manage to raise the spirits because they aren’t fun to listen to.

and ultimately, the story drags on for way too long and doesn’t have an ounce of entertaining factors in it.

I am completely baffled how this film was able to actually get 9 (YES, 9!!!) Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison.

This film is far from enjoyable and I would even go so far as to say that it is painful to watch in certain scenes.

This film was remade with Eddie Murphy 30 yaers later and as much as I usually despise remakes, I prefer the newer version of it because it actually contains humor and a story like this is in desperate need of a few laughs along the way.

Bottom Line – Extremely boring film. The songs besides the main theme” Talk to the Animals” don’t work very well and the performances are very bland. I have no idea how this film managed to get nominated for 9…yes, 9 Oscars including Best Picture.  This is not enjoyable at all and I can’t understand how anyone could think it is.  As much as I despise remakes, Eddie Murphy’s 1998 remake of this is more enjoyable because it contains humor and doesn’t drag along for 2 and a half hours like this one does.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – “Doctor Dolittle” grew out of a massive attempt by Twentieth Century-Fox to duplicate its earlier success with The Sound of Music (1965) by producing three expensive, large-scale musicals over a period of three years, Star! (1968) and Hello, Dolly! (1969) being the others. All were released amidst massive pre-release publicity and all lost equally massive amounts of money for the studio. The result was that several top studio executives lost their jobs, and the studio itself went into such dire financial straits that it only produced one picture for the entire calendar year of 1970. In truth, it would never recoup its losses until a highly successful theatrical reissue of “The Sound of Music” in early 1973. (From IMDB)

Rating – Razzie Worthy (3/10)

_______________________________________

Check out my *updated* movie stats here

To see my reviews of Oscar Winning Performances check out this link

To see my reviews of all Oscar Best Picture Winners click here (now complete)

Here is a link to my movie index A-Z