The Village Barbershop

I started this year off on a streak of seeing really bad movies, thankfully I seem to have turned a corner and am watching a nice mix of decent and good flicks(even a couple of excellent ones). Chris J. Ford's The Village Barbershop is a good movie, not a great one, but it's full of enough charm, heart, and warmth that you really don't care.

John Ratzenberger plays Art, a cantankerous barber reeling from his wife's death years before, receives another shock--his partner dies suddenly as well. Leaving an increasingly isolated, bitter man without anything but his struggling shop. Naturally, his landlord is looking for an excuse to boot him out and replace him with someone he can make more money from--and Art's giving him plenty of excuses, but is trying to cling to the one thing he has.

Enter Gloria, a thirty-something mess of a woman, who happens to know a thing or two about accounting, cutting hair, straight-razor use, and how to connect with the all-male clientele of the shop. She needs something stable, Art needs help with the money and the customers, even if it's from a woman (ending the all-male enclave that is his shop).

Wow, a match made in heaven--it's like someone scripted it. Er, wait, someone did. Okay, so the movie is 98.5% predictable, I'll grant that. But what makes this one a winner in my book is the execution--Ratenberger's Art has a humanity (even if it is broken) that is so far beyond the iconic Cliff Clavin that it's hard to imagine that it's the same actor, and Gloria's charm is so effortless that she wins the viewer over as she does the customers and her grumpy boss.

Some real laughs, a lotta charm, and some great acting make this small little film shine like the neon of the casinos the action takes place under.