Touches You

Just what I expected

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Private Banjamin is an uneven film, but it is also an entertaining one. The first half is very focused, but the second half does get rather scatter-shot and dull. While most of it is funny, some of the laughs have a tendency to become sporadic, while the romance felt forced for my tastes. On the other hand, the film is at least nice to look at with good cinematography, editing and scenery, the story is decently paced and maintains interest and at its best the script is smart and snappy. Goldie Hawn is a very likable lead, and there is a sterling support cast including Eileen Brennan and Harry Dean Stanton. Overall, a very decent and entertaining film. 7/10 Bethany Cox

In "Private Benjamin" Goldie Hawn demonstrates what made her a star: blond hair, child's eyes, and an astounding ability to laugh at herself. Here she sends herself up as both a dumb blond AND a Jewish princess, and the formula would serve as the prototype for every film she made afterward. If this is Goldie at her best, why isn't the film considered a classic? You ask a good question, friend...The first hour of the movie is delightful. Fish-out-of-water Judy Benjamin joins the Army. Judy aggravates the tough-as-nails drill instructor (Eileen Brennan), develops as a soldier and a person, triumphs at war games and inevitably dances to Sister Sledge's "We Are Family" with her fellow cadets in the ultimate display of female bonding. (Sync cycles, anyone?) Hmmmm... that's odd. The movie's over. But according to the box there's still an hour left. What could possibly come next? A bizarre adventure in which Officer Judy gets stationed overseas, falls in love with a Frenchman, and has to decide whether to marry him or re-enlist in the army. I found my mind wandering during the second-half... I started making mental grocery lists, naming state capitals... it was very difficult to stay focused on a movie that had so clearly lost its focus. The scattershot second-half of the movie only serves to undo the good of the first half. Maybe this is why the movie fails to endure as a classic.Still, there's a lot of laughs here, with Goldie Hawn at her best.GRADE: B-

A harmless, cute movie that rests nearly entirely on the talents of two women: Goldie Hawn and Eileen Brennan.Hawn is an expert comedienne and her string of late 70s/early 80s comedies are nearly all perfectly watchable now. Brennan is a total hoot as a drill sergeant who you love to hate. The movie is basically an all-female version of "Police Academy" or "Stripes" (which would come out a year later).I don't have anything else to say about this movie but I have to have ten lines of text to get my comment approved.Grade: B+

One would believe, with the talents of Goldie Hawn, that Private Benjamin would be a comedy smash hit. While it has its moments, it falls short of the mark needed for a great movie.The first half is good. Goldie Hawn's Judy Benjamin lives a ritzy social life. Judy is the spoiled pampered princes who faces uncertainty and confusion about her future when her husband (in an all too brief occurrence by Albert Brooks) Yale dies on their wedding night.Depressed, downtrodden, and seeking self-fulfillment. Judy decides to join the Army after visiting her local recruiting office. She is told about how wonderful the Army is, and decides to try it. Judy is convinced that the Army is like it's advertised on TV, with yachts and exciting adventures.Predictably, Judy struggles through basic training with a mean drill sergeant. The other women in her platoon squad at first resent her, but gradually warm up to her, pulling pranks on the drill sergeant and laughing at Judy's jokes and campfire stories about her life. Goldie does a fine job with the material here. However, the script IS predictable, and strained. The last good part of the movie is the Thornbird's parachute training sequence to the song, "The Battle Hymn of The Republic." Than the movie falls apart in the second half. After basic training, Judy's squad is recruited to France where she reunites with family and friends at a bar. She quickly falls for a French man and the movie becomes a mess. It's never really explained why Judy would have feelings for such a man. At this point, the story almost becomes a totally different movie where the viewer no longer cares and just wants the movie to end. A rapid wedding is planned, but before the ceremony, Judy comes to the realization that the Frenchmen was just using her. He insults her, she responds by decking him, than says, "don't call me stupid" and walks out of the church, a liberated woman.It is as if the writers ran out of the good Army material in the first half of the movie. Than they sloppily tacked on Judy's relationship to the Frenchmen, because they needed to stretch the movie for another half hour. The lesson here is you can't just take what would have been a good movie had it focused on Goldie Hawn in the Army exclusively, and tack on a subplot that makes no sense and offers no explanation for why it's there, other than to add time to the picture.What could have been a 7/10 movie gets downgraded to a 5/10 because of this. There is not enough good story plot in Private Benjamin for it to succeed as a full-length movie.