Mary Poppins Returns

Set about 30 years after Poppins’ first visit with the Banks family, Mary Poppins Returns is another spoon full of sugar for a dark time in the Banks home. Michael (Ben Whishaw) is recently widowed with three young children, the family home and financial woes. His sister, Jane (Emily Mortimer) is an activist, much like their mother before her. And the three children, John, Anabel and Georgie, have had to grow up quickly since the loss of their mother. One day, as little Georgie is nearly carried off by a familiar kite, Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) blows in to help and change their lives.

I always carry my doubts with sequels, but here they were quickly blown away and I was happily engrossed in this sweet, magical film. The musical numbers were wonderful, catchy and best of all the lyrics move the story forward and teach lessons. The animated sequence, which is some of the first hand drawn animation out of Disney in years, was so well done, both in overall tone and visual technique and style. And Lin-Manuel Miranda is a great replacement/counterpart for Dick Van Dyke (who does make an appearance). There’s an immeasurable amount of pressure to create a deserving sequel to Mary Poppins over fifty years later and the filmmakers here really stepped up to the plate and delivered something to be cherished for generations.

There’s so much to compare and contrast between this film and the original, I only have time to scrape the surface here. I’d say the situation within the Banks house this time is darker, sadder and is in even more need of Poppins than ever. And by contrast, the film is visually more striking and imaginative than before, mostly thanks to half a century of technological advances. Instead of introducing the kids to magic by cleaning up the playroom with a snap, they take a literal dive into their bathtub and go on a musical undersea adventure. Instead of jumping into a chalk drawing, they go into their mother’s beloved China bowl. Rather than visiting uncle Albert and having a tea party on the ceiling, they visit Cousin Topsy (Meryl Streep) and learn about seeing things from a new perspective. And instead of a friendly chimney sweep, Jack (Miranda) is a leerie And we meet plenty of his friends armed with bikes and ladders.

This is the perfect film to see with children, however I’d suggest showing them the original beforehand. My four year old son loved this movie and it kept his attention better than the original. The musical numbers were spaced out well to keep kids interested but not overstimulated. Sure, some of the more somber moments didn’t land with him as they did with me, but that’s to be expected. Children are more resilient than we think, whereas I was a silently weeping as Poppins sang The Place Where Lost Things Go to the children when they woke from a collective nightmare.

Sadly, The Academy didn’t give Mary Poppins Returns as much praise as I would have. The film was only nominated for four awards: production design, costume design, original score and original song (The Place Where Lost Things Go). While I was disappointed that Mary Poppins was not nominated for best picture, I can understand why. It’s a movie made with children and families in mind, which I think doesn’t catch They Academy’s attention as well. It isn’t a reflection of our time, which is something most of the nominees have going for them. And while I loved it, I can understand how this sequel can never live up to the wonderful original for some people.

A film as magical, endearing and yet grounding as Mary Poppins Returns is a rare treat. Maybe Poppins films can only come around every 50 years. It’s sweet, but not overly so. It’s uplifting and yet reminds us that the grown ups will forget all about the magic by tomorrow. Best of all, it reminds us about the magic we knew in childhood that gets pushed aside throughout life. It ignites that inside us and lifts us up, if only for a while. My kid described it best on the car ride home, “That was like real magic!” It sure was, kid.

“We’re on the brink of adventure, children. Don’t spoil it with too many questions.”

The Help

I try to avoid other opinions of a movie until I have seen it myself, but it is much harder to avoid the advertisements.  By just glancing at commercials and posters for The Help, I got the idea that it would be a slightly quirky film about women, for women with some laughs and a lesson about racism.  When I finally saw it, I was shocked at what a great movie it was.  The drama and issues brought up were a lot heavier than that yellow poster can let on.

The film is set in Jackson Mississippi in the 1960s.  When Skeeter (Emma Stone), an aspiring writer, returns home from college, she notices more and more tension between white women and their black hired help.  She can tell that her ill mother (Allison Janney) is lying about their old maid, Constantine (Cicely Tyson), who raised Skeeter.  The girls she grew up with are all now married with their own help and finding new ways to deal with “the colored situation.”  Not realizing the full danger at first, Skeeter tries to recruit the black maids to provide testimonials about what it is like to work for these white women.  As Skeeter gets deeper into writing the book, racial tensions rise across Jackson, and the country.

The strongest things in this film are the acting, variety of full bodied characters and how they fit together.  Viola Davis provides a strong lead as Aibileen.  As an older woman, who has raised many white children, but hardly had time for her only son, now dead, she has become bitter.  That bitterness and loss helps her find the strength to tell her story to Skeeter.  Viola’s best friend is Minny (Octavia Spencer), a bold maid whose sassy mouth and defiant attitude gets her fired by Hilly Holbrook.  Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the queen bee of the white young women in Jackson.  What Hilly does, the rest do, which includes adding new outside toilets for the help, believing in racist propaganda about disease carried by black people, and shunning Celia Foote.  Celia (Jessica Chastain) is a sweet, ditzie young woman who lives outside of Jackson, whom all the white women think is white trash.  When she hires Minny as her first maid, boundaries are broken and big secrets are revealed.

There is a funny thing I have noticed about The Help, that I am not sure if it hinders or hurts the main idea about how real racism was within homes in the 1960s.  When characters like Hilly talk about ideas that the audience knows are backwards and outwardly racist, we tend to laugh at how absurd these women sound.  Thing is, Hilly is completely serious about “the colored situation” and other ignorant ideas.  To some degree I feel like she is being a comic character, a bit like George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove.  When she says, “They carry different diseases than we do. That’s why I’ve drafted the Home Health Sanitation Initiative.” we could compare it to when Scott says, “Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!”  On some level, that works fine since we are in a future perspective where her traits are laughable.  We clearly hear something that can be funny, but other characters in the film may not.  And later, some of the things that happen to Hilly are outright hilarious, so much so that I do not want to spoil the fun.  While we see Hilly as comical, she is still an obvious threat to our heroines.  Laughing at a villain can be a dangerous thing to do in film.

The Help is nominated for four Oscars.  Of those, three of them are well deserved acting nominations for Viola Davis for Lead Actress, Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain for Supporting Actress.   The other is for Best Picture.

I have seen The Help twice, simply because I enjoyed it so much the first time I knew I needed to see it again.  All the acting is wonderful, the whole cast creates a great ensemble.  While this is mainly a drama focusing on heavy racial issues from a perspective many of us may not have considered before, there are some wildly funny moments that help lighten the whole film.  And in the end, it feels like an inspiring film full of bravery and a heart of gold, without getting at all sappy.

“Minny don’t burn fried chicken.”

If the Academy wants to award a film with a perfect blend of drama, laughs and uplifting revolution, The Help will win the Oscar for Best Picture.

The Social Network

I’ve been anticipating Oscar Nominations day all year and I may have prepared a few reviews as I saw fit.  Anyway, back in October I had a good feeling about The Social Network:

You see us every day.  Twenty-somethings who don’t dress any better than a hoodie over a snarky t-shirt, and a vacant stare just refreshing a webpage over and over.  That is where our lives are, on the internet, like you’re reading right now.  In The Social Network we don’t see Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) drive a car, crack a sincere smile or eat anything more substantial than a Twizzler.  He’s surprisingly lacking in basic human functions.  And now he’s being sued, but can barely keep his eyes open.

The fact that a captivating narrative can be written about the humble origins of Facebook, from one heated night in a Harvard dorm blogging and coding, to exploding into a multi-billion dollar global corporation, is amazing.  It could have been dry and boring, like business.  It is anything but.  There’s a good mixture of high octane college life, cold and tense legal action and the thrill of creating a revolution in communication.

In the realm of young internet gods, Zuckerberg and Sean Parker (creator of Napster played by Justin Timberlake) are polar opposites.  While Zuck hacks, codes and bitterly blogs alone in his room, Parker is the type who parties with new girls every night and he’s charming about it too.  We first meet him the morning after he hooks up with a girl from Stanford and when asked if he even remembers her name, she’s pleasantly surprised how much he listened the night before.

Fading quickly into the past is the perfect yuppy Harvard boy, best personified by the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer) who have plenty of daddy’s money to throw around in a legal case against Zuckerberg.  This new millennium has been taken over by the computer nerd, the one who can code the fastest and who can make the next great idea to go viral.

Just like the Final clubs at Harvard, the Facebook founding team is a boys club.  In fact, the only role women play in the whole film is just what Facebook originally wanted to boil them down to: a pretty face on the screen.  They become ravenous over Zuck’s fame, help spread the word on Facebook and arrive by the busload to party with Harvard boys.

So here’s a fun way to think of it; Zuck originally created Facebook as a sexist way to rate and objectify women and every time your average college party girl puts on that low cut shirt, practices her pouty face in the mirror, extends her arm out to make a new profile picture, she’s just feeding the machine.  But sadly, today Facebook isn’t as cool as it used to be.  The exclusivity of a prestigious college email address is gone.  Now, our grandma’s send us Farmville requests, the ladies from church found us through someone and now our party pictures have to be untagged.  What was once a college student’s online club is now al the world’s play place, but The Social Network takes me back to when I joined Facebook in November of 2004.  I could have been that millionth member.

No one leaves the theater wanting to be Zuckerberg.  So many of us would kill for that billion dollar idea, but is this how you do it?  If it wasn’t backstabbing or just being a complete asshole that brought Zuck so much legal trouble it was just his complete lack of social skills.  He’s driven and dedicated but only loyal to his creation.  Sadly, that’s how Zuck is boiled down to in The Social Network.  A completely unsociable young man who’s mind operates like computer code: efficient and cold.

“Welcome to Facebook.”

If The Academy is looking to award the film that best paints a defining picture of this generation, the Oscar will go to The Social Network.