I saw “Mary Poppins Returns.”\u00a0 Sold out show.\u00a0 Herewith, my movie review.\u00a0 Don’t go.\u00a0 Wait for Netflix.\u00a0 SPOILER ALERT: Mary Poppins wins in the end.\u00a0 Sorry if I ruined it for you.
First off, let’s be clear.\u00a0 The original Mary Poppins movie is one of my childhood favorites.\u00a0 After 50 years of listening to the songs on my mother’s phonograph and watching the reruns on television, I know it by heart.\u00a0 The movie is better than the book, by the way.\u00a0 The theater was full of old people my age – it’s clearly a nostalgia movie, not targeted at kids like all the modern Disney princesses.
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mary Poppins Returns clearly was intended as an homage to the original.\u00a0 They rebuilt Cherry Tree Lane perfectly.\u00a0 It’s a musical: the singing and dancing is spectacular.\u00a0 It’s a Disney movie: the human-animated scenes are incredible.\u00a0 Emily Blunt as Poppins is excellent: not a Julie Andrews mimic, but believable.\u00a0 Stern and smart-alecky, but playful and softhearted, too.\u00a0 She slides up the banister, her parrot umbrella talks, her carpet-bag-of-holding is still bottomless, same shoes, same quips about Michael being stubborn, Jane inclined to giggle, Mary being practically perfect, same mirror trick, music from the first movie plays in the background at opportune moments.\u00a0 All scenes to bring a touch of the old into the new because the audience knows the inside jokes and expects to see them.\u00a0 In that, the movie does not disappoint. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The bankers in the first movie were starched shirt, upright, careful investors but they weren’t wicked, evil, cheats.\u00a0 They didn’t try to steal Michael’s tuppence, they wanted him to prudently invest the tuppence in railways to India instead of wasting his money feeding the birds.\u00a0 \u00a0The banker in this movie is a crook who intentionally tries to cheat Michael’s family to steal their house. At least they didn’t make Mary a lesbian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Er – they didn’t, did they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not that there’s anything wrong<\/em> with that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Joe Doakes from Como Park emails a movie review: I saw “Mary Poppins Returns.”\u00a0 Sold out show.\u00a0 Herewith, my movie review.\u00a0 Don’t go.\u00a0 Wait for Netflix.\u00a0 SPOILER ALERT: Mary Poppins wins in the end.\u00a0 Sorry if I ruined it for you. First off, let’s be clear.\u00a0 The original Mary Poppins movie is one of my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=69802"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69807,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69802\/revisions\/69807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=69802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=69802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=69802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/20190112_155405-1-1024x576.jpg\")
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Having said all that, this version isn’t as good as the original.\u00a0 Not just because sequels never are, but because the film makers misunderstood the first movie.\u00a0 They saw the elements and thought they could repeat the success by using the same elements.\u00a0 They forgot that the original story made fun of the parents for their human foibles (a classic Comedy).\u00a0 This story is a Comedy only in the sense that the Good Guys win in the end.\u00a0 The story itself is no fun.
In the original, Mr. and Mrs. Banks are so preoccupied with adult concerns, they have no time for the kids. The bankers are such a stiff bunch they can’t understand a simple joke. The whole theme of that movie is “lighten up, be more childlike.”\u00a0 Splurge on feeding the birds.\u00a0 Go fly a kite. Mary Poppins leaves the Banks family when the parents are focused on the family again, as they should be.
This movie is darker.\u00a0 Jane and Michael have grown up. Jane is modern feminist: unmarried, activist for labor unions.\u00a0 Michael is a pajama boy:\u00a0 works a meaningless day job to support his real life’s work as an artist whose pictures won’t sell.\u00a0 He lives in the family house with his three kids but no wife – she recently died – and he’s losing the house to foreclosure.
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The big difference between the films is the first was a Comedy but this is a modern Liberal movie.\u00a0 Crooked banker. Exploited workers.\u00a0 Dead Mom.\u00a0 Heartless lawyers.\u00a0 And, of course, the obligatory 18% Black characters and one Admiral in a wheelchair, historical accuracy be damned.\u00a0 Yes, Mary Poppins and the Banks family win in the end but even that is annoying [HERE’S THE SPOILER, SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH]: the tuppence the banker got from Michael in the first movie was indeed prudently invested which, with interest, is now worth enough to pay off the mortgage in the second movie.\u00a0 The bankers were right – adult prudence over childish frivolity – which destroys the theme of the first movie.\u00a0 Did the film makers even realize they were stabbing the first movie in the back?
The film makers dutifully included all the elements from the first film:\u00a0 animation, penguins, Dick Van Dyke, singing, strange words, dancing, a cannon, bankers, a country fair, a horse race, one of Mary’s weird relatives, flying a kite, even a shaggy dog.\u00a0 But the movie is a jumble as if it was made by cargo cultists who saw the images but didn’t understood what they stood for.\u00a0 The songs have nothing to do with the action.\u00a0 Crooked bankers and a dead Mom don’t make a lighthearted, uplifting story.\u00a0 The characters themselves don’t grow in wisdom, Mary Poppins swoops in to save the day. She’s not a nanny, she’s a superhero.
Mary Poppins Returns made me want to cry.\u00a0 No, not for the exploited workers or dead Mom Banks, couldn’t care less.\u00a0 I wanted to cry for what’s been lost.\u00a0 Disney didn’t understand why the first movie was beloved so their remake is a swing-and-a-miss.\u00a0 Not Jar Jar Binks bad, but certainly Ewoks bad.
A friend argues that the first movie was just as political as the second, but the first movie reinforced my political beliefs so I liked it.\u00a0 Feminists are air heads.\u00a0 Prudence is boring.\u00a0 Kids are the most important people in the family.\u00a0 This was the dogma of the 1950’s so it’s no wonder I liked the first movie but not the second. I’m a relic.\u00a0 Times have changed.\u00a0 Move On!
I wanted to cry because I miss London. Not the actual city but the London I know in my mind from Ebeneezer Scrooge, Constable Grant, Sherlock Holmes and especially, from Mary Poppins.\u00a0 I miss the London of my imagination.\u00a0 It’s dead and Liberals killed it.\u00a0 That, most of all, is their unforgivable sin.
Joe Doakes
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