A Spoonful Of…Doakes?

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails a movie review:

I saw “Mary Poppins Returns.”  Sold out show.  Herewith, my movie review.  Don’t go.  Wait for Netflix.  SPOILER ALERT: Mary Poppins wins in the end.  Sorry if I ruined it for you.

First off, let’s be clear.  The original Mary Poppins movie is one of my childhood favorites.  After 50 years of listening to the songs on my mother’s phonograph and watching the reruns on television, I know it by heart.  The movie is better than the book, by the way.  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.

Mary Poppins Returns clearly was intended as an homage to the original.  They rebuilt Cherry Tree Lane perfectly.  It’s a musical: the singing and dancing is spectacular.  It’s a Disney movie: the human-animated scenes are incredible.  Emily Blunt as Poppins is excellent: not a Julie Andrews mimic, but believable.  Stern and smart-alecky, but playful and softhearted, too.  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.  All scenes to bring a touch of the old into the new because the audience knows the inside jokes and expects to see them.  In that, the movie does not disappoint.

Having said all that, this version isn’t as good as the original.  Not just because sequels never are, but because the film makers misunderstood the first movie.  They saw the elements and thought they could repeat the success by using the same elements.  They forgot that the original story made fun of the parents for their human foibles (a classic Comedy).  This story is a Comedy only in the sense that the Good Guys win in the end.  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.”  Splurge on feeding the birds.  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.  Jane and Michael have grown up. Jane is modern feminist: unmarried, activist for labor unions.  Michael is a pajama boy:  works a meaningless day job to support his real life’s work as an artist whose pictures won’t sell.  He lives in the family house with his three kids but no wife – she recently died – and he’s losing the house to foreclosure.

The bankers in the first movie were starched shirt, upright, careful investors but they weren’t wicked, evil, cheats.  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.   The banker in this movie is a crook who intentionally tries to cheat Michael’s family to steal their house.

The big difference between the films is the first was a Comedy but this is a modern Liberal movie.  Crooked banker. Exploited workers.  Dead Mom.  Heartless lawyers.  And, of course, the obligatory 18% Black characters and one Admiral in a wheelchair, historical accuracy be damned.  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.  The bankers were right – adult prudence over childish frivolity – which destroys the theme of the first movie.  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:  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.  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.  The songs have nothing to do with the action.  Crooked bankers and a dead Mom don’t make a lighthearted, uplifting story.  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.  No, not for the exploited workers or dead Mom Banks, couldn’t care less.  I wanted to cry for what’s been lost.  Disney didn’t understand why the first movie was beloved so their remake is a swing-and-a-miss.  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.  Feminists are air heads.  Prudence is boring.  Kids are the most important people in the family.  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.  Times have changed.  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.  I miss the London of my imagination.  It’s dead and Liberals killed it.  That, most of all, is their unforgivable sin.

Joe Doakes

At least they didn’t make Mary a lesbian.

Er – they didn’t, did they?

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

23 thoughts on “A Spoonful Of…Doakes?”

  1. Knowing what we know about the Disney of the current year (homo day at the park, homo Beast, phallic symbols in Little Mermaid), it seems implausible anyone would go to any Disney production and not expect some leftist propaganda.

    After all, Disney has always been focused towards kids, and their films have always had an underlying moral theme.

    The problem is, people of a certain age just don’t want to admit the theme has changed with the times.

    Self discipline is old and busted; family as the center of importance is nothing but a sop to the patriarchy; Capitalists are evil to their rotten hearts, and must be crushed.

    Morality crushes the free spirit human beings are born to play out. There is no right and wrong, there is only what you want in the moment.

    Kurt Russel, perhaps the most long lasting and prolific product of Old, Corrosive Disney never curses, appears naked or kisses men in films. Hell, after 35 years of a perfectly acceptable shack-up, he screwed everything up by marrying Goldie Hawn…he’s a menace and must be destroyed with fire.

  2. Actually it is a satire of England’s Edwardian society, where children were raised distantly—or as afterthoughts.

  5. The books were set in England as was the Disney movie. They aren’t about about American society. Mary Poppins creator, PL Travers, hated the first movie.

    I’ve read all of Mary Travers’s “Mary Poppins” books, and I know she hated what Disney did to her books. The books are a complete joy. No one should miss reading these books.

  6. On a related tangent, Saving Mr Banks is a great movie. While I was born after Disney died and I really have no idea what he was like, I think the movie and Tom Hanks did an amazing job recreating the Disney company from that era and Disney himself.

  8. Sorry JD; Dunning_Kruger no-can-do.

    What, you think he keeps track of where he cuts and pastes his puerile twaddle? You think he remembers anything from yesterday, at all? Pffft.

    I’m guessing a thought has about a 10mSec lifespan in the vacuum between his ears…unless someone has handed him a juice box; he can focus on a juice box to the bottom…right DK?

  9. I’ve read all of Mary Travers’s “Mary Poppins” books…

    I bet the back of DK’s cargo van is littered with children’s books, toys, big sacks of candy, orphaned little socks, the occasional sneaker….

  12. There’s nothing Dunning_Kruger hates worse than kids who’s parents have wherewithal to protect them from reprobates…throws him off his game, big time.

    “Entitled little bastards”, he calls ’em as he empties his bottle, fires the Free Candy van up and drives off.

  14. The white man’s assault smirk?
    These days,there are crimes that only white people can be guilty of and be punished for, just like in the bad old days, there were crimes that only black people could be guilty of and be punished for.

  16. I can’t wait for the remake of Blazing Saddles! I hope it is as good as the Ghostbusters remix!

  18. “They aren’t about about American society.”
    A shallow analysis. Disney was an American .The screenwriter was an American. Dick van Dyke is an American. The movie was filmed entirely in the United States. The Brit actors used were/are expats (including Julie Andrews).
    The Edwardian Britain which Disney presented was an American fantasy. Disney was a more complicated fellow than his detractors will admit. Disney was put to hard work by his parents when he was a child & teen in Kansas City. His experience of the Edwardian Age in the US was miserable. He was raised poor by a strict father who failed in a number of get-rich-quick schemes (newspaper delivery, soda-bottling plants).

  19. I suspect Woolly was a phrenologist in a previous life.

    Both “Mary Poppins” films are in the great tradition of taking beloved novels for children and improving them until the original is lost. Witness the Shirley Temple version of “A Little Princess,” or the recent “The Hobbit,” or “City of Ember,” with its giant insects that aren’t in the original novel. Even “Lord of the Rings” was done without including Tom Bombadil or the events in the last 300 pages of the novels.)Hollywood and Disney and others take children’s books and rewrite them, thinking that no one will notice the changes.

  20. Maybe you would be happier if an actor just read the book into the camera, Emery? You seem to know as little about the arts as the other subjects you comment on.

  21. Emery is correct that all too many Hollyweird writers seem to be kids coming in with a C GPA in creative writing, but who think they’re better storytellers than Twain or the Bard, and the result is indeed that many great stories don’t survive to hit celluloid. However, having actually read the book, I’ve got to note that Mary Poppins is one book that benefited immensely from this process.

  22. bikebubba, Disney’s genius was that he considered the experience of reality to be a creation of the imagination. Disney, raised out in the middle of nowhere, somehow keyed in on the ideas of the British Idealist philosophers. He was an amazing guy.
    Disney had a weird obsession with the time period 1901-1915 in Britain (cf. Mary Poppins and Peter Pan), possibly a result of his own ugly childhood in the US during this time.

  23. “Hollywood and Disney and others take children’s books and rewrite them, thinking that no one will notice the changes.”

    Terry Bean, Joe Biden and Michael Jackson’s mummified corpse all share Dunning_Kruger’s outrage.

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