All These Women (1964) User Reviews

Not the Same & Quite Different...

[Xstal · 5/10 · 5 February 2023]

Felix is a very happy fellow, none more so when he's fiddling with his cello, of which he has a few, perpetually in a queue, makes Cornelius a little green, although he's yellow.

It's a bit of fun, but not funny and there's little pun, plus it hasn't aged well so move on, do not dwell.

Plenty of Bergman stalwarts, including the gorgeous Bibi Andersson, the engaging Harriet Andersson and the delightful Eva Dahlbeck however, even they can't save this, as the story's as daft as a brush and it soon becomes a bit of a chore, as the end seems to extend to a point where you stop caring, and start looking for the door.

Labored slapstick farce

[gridoon2024 · 5/10 · 26 January 2020]

Ingmar Bergman cuts loose with this atypical homage to bedroom farce and (sometimes silent) slapstick comedy, a lark for one of the most serious filmmakers around the globe. There are fun moments, especially when Bergman breaks the fouth wall and winks at the audience ("these fireworks are not meant to be symbolic"!), but overall the film is stilted, static, and rather tiresome. The women are dazzling, but mostly wasted; despite the title, the central character is a man, and he occupies something like 90% of the running time. ** out of 4.

All These Women Did Not Save It

[Galina_movie_fan · 4/10 · 21 March 2006]

I never thought that I would have to say that but I did not like the Ingmar Bergman's film "All These Women". In spite the very pretty and delicate pink and blue cinematography and the presence of the charming and talented actresses, the movie was a mess of an attempt to create a comedy. Everything that was subtle, sensual, and charming in B/W "Smiles of a Summer Night" (1955) was missing here. First of all - the Jarl Kulle's performance as a music critic - biographer, Cornelius. Kulle was very effective and funny in "Smiles...", in "Women..." - he plays an irritating, annoying, and the worst - absolutely not funny (which is a crime for a comedy) character. If in "Smiles... the writing was a first class and sparkled, I got the impression that in "Women.." Bergman did not care or did not want to work on the script and was more interested in experimenting with colors and music. The movie looks and sounds fine - it is Bergman, after all, but that's the only redeeming qualities that I found.

4/10

Only for the faithful

[rwilson-7 · 4/10 · 23 September 2005]

Amazing that this film is on DVD. I saw it in 1967 (in suburban Sacramento of all places) and have never seen a trace of it since.

It is a fairly terrible movie, but it does have its place in Bergman's movies. Swedish reviewers at this point in his career were among his severest critics, and this movie was his response. It should have been deft and ironic but, as I think we're all aware by now, Bergman is not exactly over-burdened with a sense of humor. I suppose he also thought color as something of a joke at that time, which might explain some of the very ugly effects.

I can't really recommend the movie but it does give some insight into Bergman, so I rank it a little higher than the other reviewers.

P.S. And I thank Anders, the foreign exchange student from Stockholm at my high school, for making me see this movie and who filled me in on the info about Bergman and the critics. He too thought it a lousy movie.

A bit of a goof intended to be unpopular

[jimi99 · 7/10 · 18 March 2013]

I agree that "All These Women" is misunderstood, especially if you look at it in the context of Bergman's filmography. He had just completed the "Silence of God" trilogy, one of the deepest, most serious works in the history of cinema. So, cut the man some slack and allow him his lark, his goof, his chance to riff on fans and critics and the illusion of the exalted artist (himself), before returning to his true work with his next film, the universally praised "Persona."

I also think he was a little influenced by "8 1/2" which had come out the year before, appreciating Fellini's playfulness as well as his insight into the creative process and, of course, "all these women." Bergman will always be thought of as a somewhat austere and oft despairing artist, but thankfully we have several films that belie that, like "Smiles of a Summer Night," "The Magician," and this little oddball gem.

A Comedy

[boblipton · 4/10 · 19 March 2020]

You can tell this is a comedy. It's not simply the jazzy version of "Yes, We Have No Bananas" they play at scene changes. It begins with a funeral, and that's a rule: comedies start with funerals, tragedies start with peasants dancing around singing "Oh, We are happy peasants!" -- preferably in Italian. It also looks like Ingmar Bergman was tired of being called a grim symbolic genius, so he included titles noting that various things are not symbolic.

My personal interpretation is that he had one movie left on his contract and was angry with the front office for some reason, so he decided to make a Jerry Lewis movie and in color to boot, because he was tired of dealing with the critics.

Anyway, after the half dozen or so Bergman leading ladies come up and say the same thing over the unseen corpse -- translated as "So like him and so unlike him" -- we drop back five days to witness Carl Bilquist show up as the home of the great cellist to write his stuffy biography and deal with his mistresses -- the Great Man never appears. I think Bergman was fooling everyone and wanted to get back to the theater for a while.

Not as bad as I'd heard

[zetes · 7/10 · 27 April 2014]

This comedy, most notable for being Bergman's first film in color, is often considered one of his worst. I went into it with very low expectations, glad that it was just 80 minutes long. Thankfully, it's not nearly as bad as its reputation. It's minor Bergman, for sure. It's main crime is that it thinks it's much funnier than it ever is. That can be annoying, but, really, the film isn't exactly unfunny. Personally, I think Bergman only did comedy right once, with Smiles of a Summer Night, and even that one I don't think is amongst his best work. Simply put, Bergman excels at tragedy, and his comedy can feel forced. This film revolves around an art critic (Jarl Kulle, Bergman's most mugging actor) who comes to write a biography of a famous cellist at his palatial estate. The cellist (whose face never appears on screen) is a philanderer, surrounding himself with women of various ages (including Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson and Eva Dahlbeck). Kulle starts a fling with Bibi Andersson, and soon discovers that one of the wives or mistresses is attempting to murder the cellist. The Bergman film this reminds me most of is The Devil's Eye, which also stars Kulle (if I recall correctly, that one is slightly less comic). The color cinematography is actually quite excellent. Bergman didn't film again in color until Cries and Whispers. This is available on Hulu Plus.

A Lemon

[ian_harris · 4/10 · 31 December 2002]

It's taken a few goes, but I have finally discovered that I can dislike a Bergman film. Perhaps Swedish humour shares some characteristics with Danish humour which tends to leave me cold and perplexed.

Several years on, I still cannot get the cheesy, syncopated version of "Yes, We Have No Bananas" out of my head.

The cast try their best but the material is beyond redemption. in fact, this cast does not include the best Bergman people anyhow.

This film simply is not at all funny nor is it interesting once you get 10 minutes in.

It is merely irritating.

This film is a lemon.

Good minor Bergman. Surprising and entertaining.

[Falkner1976 · 6/10 · 22 June 2022]

Comedy without laughs? Certainly. Anyone looking for clever retorts and hilarious situations will be frankly disappointed. Actually, comedy here is nothing more than a style adopted by Bergman for his usual speech. It is the tone that interests him, the tone of farce, of slapstick.

Also Bergman's taste for the theater, for the comedians who appear so many times in his films, for the professionals who repeat the learned and inherited routines, knowing that an actor who knows his job can always make them fun again.

And Bergman when it comes to comedians has the best, not only extraordinary actors but disciplined workers capable of adapting to what the director asks of them at all times. And they indulge in the tired comic routines with absolute conviction and immeasurable talent: above all Jarl Kulle as Cornelius, the critic who goes to visit the master in his summer villa to write the biography of the musician; and of course, the cast of great actresses: Gertrude Frigh (the great theater actress who would be her Hedda Gabler on stage, in addition to appearing in important roles in several of her most famous films), Bibi Andersson (one of the great actresses in Bergman's work), or the wonderful Eva Dahlbeck (even more beautiful than in Smiles) and Harriet Andersson.

The scenes are often amazingly choreographed, with a markedly theatrical nature, and one cannot help but think about the repetitions, the hours of rehearsals necessary for the gear to work with that perfection and that rapport between the actors and the director.

Visually it is a highly sophisticated work, with wonderful color photography by Sven Nykvist and spectacular production design by another regular from the director, P. A. Lundgren, who creates a kind of Hadrian's Villa spiced up with decorations between Rococo and Neo-Gothic, where each room is like a stage of marble and stucco barely occupied by the minimum props required by the scene and white Roman sculptures.

The work is funny, extremely agile, consciously ridiculous, the problem is that Bergman's speech is not as rich as in other works of his (as an advantage it must be said that he does not fall into the pedantry that ruins so many scenes of his work) and no real depth. It is an assumedly minor work, a harmless game about the relationships and mutual dependence of the critic and the artist, about the exposure of the artist in his work and the public's desire to investigate the life and mind of the artist, about the need that artists have for critics who explain them and by studying them places the artists in history. The critic is a vain, selfish, indiscreet, amoral being, but he is at the same time humiliated, used, deceived, ignored. The artist is a mysterious figure, distant, somewhat repulsive from the outside, and elusive, who speaks only through his art.

The direction, as always, is masterful. The work moves away from the gloomy and expressionist style of his previous films (the famous trilogy) and shows that Bergman was looking for new directions, new cinematographic resources. His next films are his two great masterpieces: Persona and The Hour of the Wolf.

Those Women is a far cry from Bergman's great works, but it is by no means the worst of his films. Taking it on its own terms, it's a risky step taken by a director who wanted to present his discourse in a totally new way, with a radically different aesthetic and approach than the one that had so much critical acclaim. The problem is that the movie doesn't tell us too much either. For some it may be the extreme case of the emptiness of content in the background of so many Bergman films, I personally agree that the ultimate value of the director is more often in his expressive abilities in the medium than in the content of his sometimes pedantic and anguished scripts.

Naked emperor or masterpiece in disguise?

[ElMaruecan82 · 5/10 · 7 May 2019]

Boy, I'm so upset right now. Two days ago, you would ask me about the directors who had never disappointed me and the name of Ingmar Bergman would have immediately sprung to mind. But it was before I watched "All These Women".

Two years ago, I wrote a review of "Pierrot le Fou" and I used Bergman's negative statement against Godard as an alibi to my own hostility, if even the director who was the epitome of intellectual and artistic cinema found Godard to be an empty shell, I could rest my case. Yet, "All These Women" makes "Pierrot le Fou" look like "The Seventh Seal" and I couldn't believe the man who used such a bold critic against Godard could indulge to the same farcical tendencies than his rival, but failing as miserably. No matter how good the intentions were.

Finally, many many years ago, I wanted to discover Fellini and started with "8 ½" an unwise choice that made me postpone my exploration of the Italian director's work for one year and a half and made me discover Bergman instead. It's not until I saw the neo-realist films of Fellini that I could appreciate his slow evolution to poetic realism and then surrealism in the 60s. But if the first Bergman movie I saw was that one, I guess I wouldn't be the fan I am today, any film would do for a discovery but "All These Women" is a film that transcends my perception of a bad movie, quite a disturbing experience for someone who built such a high esteem on Bergman. It's not that it's bad, I just don't get how he could make something that bad.

Obviously, the film is meant to be a farce. The little inter-titles carry a certain edge and even mention the censorship that still prevailed, Bergman dodges them with fun artistic licenses, it's funny though because one of the reasons I wanted to watch a Bergman film is that I had just enjoyed the film "Tom Jones" and I've had enough laughs, I wanted to forget about its zany tone and its slight overuse of comical tricks, I wouldn't have thought that Bergman, of all the directors, would have kept me on the same scenery. Somewhat I was amused and even thrilled during the first five minutes, yes, I was determined to enjoy the film.

"All These Women" opens with the funeral of a famous cellist and seven of his women, mistresses and concubines come to pay their respect, each one delivering the same line with a tone that reveals something of her personality, but the camera is so far and the tone so detached that I'm not sure they wanted to know who is who or even that we're supposed to care. Three women would have been enough but seven?! I was glad I could spot the two Andersson, Harriett and Bibi, who had just left us... but I couldn't care much for the others.

It's even more incongruous since the main character is a critic named Cornelius, and not the cellist himself. Cornelius hovers from one room to another, each sequence being the sorry excuse for a gag that supposedly imitates the type of silent comedy used in Benny Hill sketches: jazzy music, fast-paced chases and all, but none of them really work. The first visual essay is the scene involving Cornelius's struggle with a statue and no mater how hard he tired, it didn't get one single laugh from me.

And I guess it's pretty normal since I never expected Bergman to make me laugh, it's one thing to imitate Fellini, but the film doesn't come close to anything the Maestro had done before. Maybe after a streak of existential movies questioning God, Bergman felt the use to loosen up a bit and he's quite entitled to operate a change of tone and style, no matter how disconcerting it can be to the fans, but the result is so disapprovingly disjointed and bizarre. At the end, the film is aesthetically interesting, I suspect it inspired François Ozon's "8 Women" but in the Bergmanian canon, the best thing you can ay about it is that it's an oddity, a curiosity.

There are certainly areas where we're tempted to dig a little and find some statements about the relationships between art and criticism, or the necessity of separating the art from the artist by showing both sides of the same man, from different perspective but his. Maybe the film is deeper than it seems to be or maybe Bergman, like a deliberate hack, wanted to challenge critics' opinions and created this cinematic "trap for idiots". Maybe we'd be stupid to miss the point or to praise it... Maybe.

Still, Bergman is such a heavy director, so intellectually challenging that many of his movies demand several watching to be examined and appreciated, that I'm not sure this one is worth the time even if it's a masterpiece in disguise. I guess it takes a Bergman fan to be able to reach that film and the same Bergmanian fan to be wise enough to forget it.

Yes, sometimes, it's not about separating the Art from an artist, but at least some pieces of it...

So far, this is the only Bergman film I didn't like

[TheLittleSongbird · 4/10 · 28 November 2012]

I do say this with a heavy heart as I love and admire Ingmar Bergman and many of his films and thought I'd never see a film of his I didn't like. Until now. By all means it has its good points, the cinematography, settings and music are beautiful and the female cast(with three of Sweden's finest ever actresses) look splendid and really try their best. Unfortunately, Jarl Kulle does nothing to make his annoying character remotely likable. Cornelius isn't the only bad character here though, I didn't care for any of them and none are interesting, for a Bergman film that is unusual. Bergman I love as a director, but he too seems out of his depth with a lack of momentum. The writing seems forced and unfunny, while the story tries to do much but does so in a clumsy and stilted manner.

Overall, I really wanted to love All These Women considering the talent involved, but I found it a really disappointing miscalculation.

4/10 Bethany Cox

Eventually, It Does End

[SpaaceMonkee · 2/10 · 12 September 2021]

A forced, unfunny movie where Ingmar Bergman attempts to make a slapstick comedy set to something approaching the soundtrack from the Looney Tunes. It has the distinction of making you check your watch to see how much is left, notwithstanding clocking in at a mere 80 minutes.

Bergman is capable of comedy, and clever moments are peppered throughout even his more serious works, like Seventh Seal. In The Devil's Eye, most of the film was set as a comedy, and it worked. What went wrong here, I do not know. The cast is highly talented, but the material is terrible and the execution is just as bad. This is not some undiscovered Bergman masterpiece; it's your movie night wasted.

I would recommend this film only to those looking for the Bergman completionist trophy, to say you've watched them all. For those people, it's a box-checking exercise. For everyone else, skip this film.

An unsuccessful and unfunny farce

[davidmvining · 3/10 · 22 November 2019]

I'm going to have to align with the consensus on this one. It's a farce that's simply not terribly funny and doesn't work dramatically.

Bergman obviously loved farce. He returned to it time and time again, and after his Silence Trilogy, he needed something light. To solve his sense of foreboding from questioning God's silence for a few years, he pumped out a slight sex comedy in the vein of Federico Fellini without really understanding how Fellini dramatized his own issues with women.

We start at a funeral where a man gives a small eulogy and then five women come out and say the exact same thing about the body on display. "He's so different, but the same," the all say (save one, who reverses it). Already, there's something wrong, and it has to do with the women. The camera is placed far away, so we have a hard time seeing the women. They act differently (one is a maid and immediately begins dusting the space around her when she arrives), but they all end up saying the same thing making their differences surface deep. I suppose there's supposed to be an emphasis on the actor's interpretation of the characters, but since we can't really see who they are since the camera is so far away, that effect is diminished.

When we move on to the action of the movie, from several days before, it becomes obvious what the other major problem is, there's nothing grounding the experience in any realm of reality for the audience to cling onto. The main character is a critic come to the soon to be dead man's country estate populated with his assortment of women in order to collect information on the composer for blackmail purposes. The critic is also a biography working on the composer's biography, but he's been stymied in getting to know the real artist. Being exposed to the harem of women (ranging from the young maid to the old wife) gives him a bevy of material to expose to the world unless the composer plays a piece that the critic wrote himself.

The problem is that the critic, aside from being a terrible person, is played in a manic style, while the issue of never distinguishing meaningfully between most of the women means that we never get a good idea of what any of them want. It's all exacerbated by the fact that the movie is a very quick 80 minutes, which keeps the action moving at a nice clip, but never gives us enough time with any character (especially since there are so many) for any kind of connection.

What we get instead are a series of sketches or bits that would feel appropriate as filler in a silent comedy. The sort of gags that eat up three minutes until we get to the real bit of comic mastery, but we never get to those heights. There's a scene early when the critic first arrives when he knocks a large bust of the composer off a pedestal and then tries to get it back on. The motions indicate that the action is supposed to be funny, but it oddly falls flat.

Not to say that there's nothing funny in the movie at all. There's an opening title that says, "Every similarity between this film and the so-called reality has to be a misunderstanding." That, on its own, is a fine piece of wit, especially once you realize that it's also patently false. The movie's all about Bergman as the artist, his women that he loved, and the fact that the critical world wouldn't leave his personal life alone. There are other moments, but they're shockingly rare in a movie that's nonstop farce.

Still, comedy is pretty subjective. The person who wrote the article about the movie in the Criterion Collection's large book found the movie hilarious while most of the rest of the movie going world that has been exposed to All These Women found it leaden and unfunny. Count me in the latter group.

Only Because I'm Trying to See as Much of the Bergman Canon as I Can

[Hitchcoc · 4/10 · 16 March 2015]

I have now watched two lesser pieces in a row ("A Lesson in Love" being the first), each of which is a comedy. The former had that fifties kind of feel to it with some cleverness and some unique banter. This is simply a mess. A music critic is writing a biographer of a famous cellist named Felix. As he researches this he becomes embroiled in the dalliances of the maestro. Like so many Amrican comedies of the sixties it is constant physical humor for it's own sake. The problem is that it is not very funny. There are beautiful women running around, each having a sexual connection to Felix. They all know each other and have even set up a schedule. I wonder if Bergman skipped some more valuable work to do this. Don't bother.

The Dream of the Fish

[richardchatten · 3/10 · 1 April 2024]

The pleasures afforded by films of the sixties are many and various, not least the quality of the black & white photography when it was the cinema's default setting; and if a film had been made in colour it was the result of a conscious decision on the part of the makers.

In this context an eminent director's first film in colour was a major event; the catch being that it was a novelty that it could only take place the once. Within months of each other in 1964 the first colour films emerged from both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, the former taking a (very) temporary break from austere drama. Easily Bergman's worst film - castigated by Peter Cowie for its "embarrassing witlessness" - it just wasn't funny (Bergman himself later dismissing it as "a putrid film", while Billy Wilder had made much better use of 'Yes, We Have No Bananas' for comic effect a couple of years earlier in 'One, Two, Three'), swiftly outstays its welcome and it took nearly twenty more years before 'Fanny and Alexander' finally showed that Bergman's capacity for warmth and humour had merely been dormant, not extinct.

But Sven Nykvist's Eastman Color photography and P. A. Ludgren's sets (which look as good to eat as icing sugar) ensure that visually you certainly get your money's worth, while the women are gorgeous, Allan Edwall amusing in a a supporting role, and it offers the not inconsiderable pleasure of seeing a major talent totally crash and burn.

Awful

[gbill-74877 · 3/10 · 7 January 2018]

A pretty bad miss from Bergman. It's somewhat interesting to see him try his hand at a goofy comedy that doesn't take itself seriously and pokes at fame self-referentially, but he fails miserably. Said to be a parody of Fellini's 8½, the film may remind you more of the early Woody Allen films to come, with zany music jazzing up scenes in fast motion, attempts at slapstick, and actors breaking the fourth wall. Unfortunately, it's awkward and not funny in the slightest. The film is also rather ugly, with simple sets, fading color, and 'bawdy' scenes shot so poorly they're unappealing.

You can read allegory into the artist who gets lost amidst everything surrounding him, as indeed we never see the face of the master cellist. Instead we see his mansion and all of the zaniness that takes place in it, the women who surround him and fight over him, and a critic who wishes to write his biography and pressures him to use his arrangements. The critic warms him that one day he will be forgotten, as another will come along. That's the main point of this farce, but it's too buried in silliness. I revere Bergman but have to call this for what it is, awful. If you want to watch a 'lighter' Bergman movie, I would recommend "A Lesson in Love" (1954) instead, which was excellent.

It doesn't work

[steiner-sam · 3/10 · 29 May 2021]

"All these women" was Bergman's attempt at comedy farce. It doesn't work. The story is a visit of a biographer (Cornelius) to the mansion lived in by a great cellist (Felix). It open's after the cellist's death, as we see the cellist's wife and six mistresses visit his casket and say the same thing. The film then jumps back four days when the biographer began his visit and follows his interactions with all the women and others, though he never gets to talk to the cellist.

This was Bergman's first color film, but he never liked it. There is occasional language in the film that sounds like Bergman, but the whole thing jumps around with nothing to sustain it. Some writers suggest that Bergman is represented by Felix, and that the women in the film represent the many women in Bergman's life. Could be, but it doesn't really matter.

It doesn't work.

Unfunny, boring and too long

[jordondave-28085 · 4/10 · 25 March 2024]

(1964) All These Women (In Swedish with English subtitles) COMEDY DRAMA FANTASY

Co-written and directed by Ingmar Bergman that has several ladies attending at a funeral of an infamous cello maestro artist, Villa Tremolo. At this point, viewers were never shown what he actually looked like other than he was an known person. Next we're then introduced to his biographer, Cornelius (Jarl Kulle) who's obviously there as comic relief. As we find out more about all the women in his life before his unfortunate passing from his mistresses, his multiple wives and the maids and butlers to which if anyone were to find the humor in this, there is nothing like that here.

Bergman's first color film and is the seventh of thirteen movies Bibi Anderson worked with Ingmar Bergman!

Slapstick Bergman is fun for a while, but too one-note for a feature film's length

[Jeremy_Urquhart · 5/10 · 2 July 2022]

So the plot of this one (I think) involves a biographer going to the estate of a famous and enigmatic musician, and while there, he fails to meet the musician and clashes with his numerous wives and mistresses. Chaos, slapstick, and farcical shenanigans ensue.

Ingmar Bergman is best known for character-focused films, existential tragedies, and intensely psychological dramas. All These Women is not his only comedy, but he made very few films with notable comedic elements, and while I haven't seen all his films, I doubt there are any others as intentionally silly as this.

The absurd humour and ridiculousness of it all is fun for a while, but it wears out its welcome after 30-40 minutes. And the film's only about 80 minutes long, so for it to run out of steam so quickly is extra disappointing. I don't think it's been the toughest Bergman film to get through, and there's a couple of his philosophy-heavy movies I might even like less in general, but overall I can see why it's considered one of his weakest efforts.

But it's worth it for anyone curious to see Bergman do something that has a similar tone to a Pink Panther movie- it's that silly.

1.22.2024

[EasonVonn · 1/10 · 21 January 2024]

Bergman what do you think you are Godard? What a complete and utter failure the first time you used color.

If I had the same epileptic laugh disorder as the Joker played by Jacquen Phoenix, oh no, not me, but a human being, my Bergman style neuro-comedy might just make people laugh, I guess.

The inserted silent-movie textual exposition seems like grandfather's crappy Parkinson's finger, welcoming the age of color with utter ridiculousness. Not to mention the "purely coincidental" and "censorship cover-up scenes" (if theater has its own norms, unlike film, which can say everything but can't show everything, then Bergman here is a paradoxical amalgam of the theatrical style and the cinematic form. Bergman here is like a paradoxical synthesis of theatrical style with cinematic form, culminating in the abstraction of the sex scene) as if it were a bad treatment imagined by high school students who want to paste symbols into their own decaying work, or is it because they are infected by Godard's energy? Over and over again, the pretense and the reliance on the old, the breaking of the fourth wall and the narrative continuity are completely bungled.

It's as if Bergman's style is akin to the fast-food hamburgers sold in front of elementary schools, pumped up to a dull crust by insatiable manufacturers. The "humor" of "Lessons in Love" and "Smiles of a Summer Night," which is in the vein of "The Fertilized Egg" and "A Summer Night's Smile," comes to a screeching halt, and the audience is left with a woman who performs with great energy and a group of empty, disingenuous actors in front of the audience for 80 minutes of cinematic catastrophe.

Bergman's worst movie, worse than The Magic Flute, could have been made better by a pre-kindergarten kid.