Posted on 01/03/2019 7:43:51 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Mary Poppins returns, we’re told, but only Baby Boomers will care. Roma offers the nanny Millennials can relate to. Who is this white British twit with a cinched overcoat and bumbershoot who goes about ordering around her betters and consorting with working-class inferiors? No one asked for Mary Poppins’s return to modern consciousness, but her reappearance unmistakably proves that Hollywood Boomers are desperate to justify their own mediocrity through nostalgic sentiment.
Emily Blunt in Mary Poppins Returns (Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.) Mary Poppins returns, we’re told, but only Baby Boomers will care. Roma offers the nanny Millennials can relate to. Who is this white British twit with a cinched overcoat and bumbershoot who goes about ordering around her betters and consorting with working-class inferiors? No one asked for Mary Poppins’s return to modern consciousness, but her reappearance unmistakably proves that Hollywood Boomers are desperate to justify their own mediocrity through nostalgic sentiment.
Also unmistakable is the nasty political undercurrent that prevents this reboot from being escapist fun. Take the new politically instructive songs in Mary Poppins Returns. Sure, they’re the usual Marc Shaiman pastiche — cliché Broadway compositions (from the composer of the lame musical Hairspray) that lack the memorable delight of Richard and Robert Sherman’s songs for the original Mary Poppins in 1964.
Incapable of a charming tongue twister, or relatable lyrics about medicine in sugary spoonfuls, Shaiman assimilates the #Resistance mood that has overtaken Broadway and Hollywood. Though pretending to be innocuous family entertainment, the knock-off tunes have a faintly repressive, pedantic note, especially in Shaiman’s balloon-song finale “Nowhere to Go but Up.” To careful listeners, it sounds like showbiz Stalinism: “The past is the past / It lives on as history / Let the past take a bow / Forever is now.” Why should a family-movie ditty recall the essence of Soviet erasure of history?
That erasure also reeducates memories of the first Mary Poppins film in which a subservient female nanny, who shows up weirdly out of nowhere, supports the bumbling male head of a stuffy British banking household. She sustained England’s class system almost supernaturally — or supercalifragilisticexpialidociously. Now Mary returns for no better purpose than commercial repackaging. (Meanwhile, minor characters play out a Socialist subtext, campaigning for underpaid workers.)
MPReturns rectifies dated gender notions by making the nanny inhumanly asexual — but enlightened. Actress Emily Blunt’s Mary charmlessly embodies inauthentic emotions. (A British accent works wonders on the inferiority complex of Americans.) Lacking Julie Andrews’s enigmatic blue-eyed calm and genuinely lovely soprano as the original Mary, Blunt (named after a truncheon?) seems little more than a schoolmarm martinet. She submits her prepubescent household charges to a bubble-bath fantasia — the film’s video-game visual peak — that neither individualizes them nor enchants us. She even trots up on the stage when the filmmakers can think of no forthright way she can rescue her employers.
Julie Andrews, for the only time in her career, conveyed magical strangeness as Mary, suggesting a maternal Peter Pan — a weird imp, encouraging helpful idiosyncrasy to a new generation. Blunt never rises above the diligence of an out-of-town try-out; she fits director Rob Marshall’s Chicago specialty casting of non-singers and non-dancers.
MPReturns hits rock bottom when Mary visits her cousin Topsy, played by Meryl Streep doing upside-down acrobatics and a fake Russian accent (to suggest some kind of unholy collusion?). The political overtones of Streep’s show-offy turn (everything is supposedly upside down in the era of Orange Man Bad) suggest that Trump Derangement Syndrome has damaged liberal showbiz. Like Blunt, Streep is a no-fun performer.
Dick Van Dyke’s appearance is a welcome surprise and reminder of the first film, just as Julie Andrews’s absence is not. (It’s easy to imagine Andrews telling Disney Corp.: “The only Return I care about is taxes.”) Sure, Van Dyke still shows talent, though not enough of it here to make Millennial viewers care about who this un-Scrooge-like stranger is. But more important, Van Dyke has warmth, unlike the rest of the spiritless cast doing happy-eunuch grimaces. In the original, Van Dyke played a chimney sweep — the role Lin-Manuel Miranda takes on here as street-lamp-lighter Jack. He’s one of the film’s many blatantly diverse ethnic Londoners (the change in occupation, from Van Dyke’s chimney sweep in the original, means that Miranda safely avoids any smudge of blackface).
Nothing in MPReturns matches the profound compassion of the original film’s ballad “Feed the Birds.” Everyone I know responds deeply to that song — even people I don’t know, such as the pop stars behind “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” the 1984 Band Aid telethon for the Ethiopian famine; their “Feed the World” refrain owes a debt to the Sherman brothers’ original Mary Poppins composition. The Shermans’ lullaby awakened listeners to charity, not PC self-righteousness.
It’s too bad the song “Nowhere to Go but Up” is not camp self-parody. Only take kids to Mary Poppins Returns if you want them to grow up aloof, uncharitable, and tone-deaf Antifa thugs.
I should be condemned to a lifetime of looking at cigars and declaring them to be casseroles.
Dick Van Dyke would be MY only reason to see it.
I watched it. Good, clean fun for a change. I guess you can see politics in anything....if you’ve a mind to. big shrug
We saw this over the weekend. I did find the Socialism blatant and embarrassing. Can you just imagine Jane becoming a Unionist organizer? No? Well, another subtext is Jane dressing in men’s clothes with the cook saying ‘Marriage? Jane says that ship has sailed’. Really Disney? We (in our 60’s) found this not at all entertaining. And if you want to see Dick Van Dyke dance, just look at the last 20 minutes and save yourself the political correctness of the movie. As an aside, my British husband has never heard the term ‘leary’ referring to the lamplighters. And the song about Cockney Rhyming Slang never uses the CNS term at all. And one more thing, the songs are completely forgettable. If we had realized how bad it was, we wouldn’t have wasted our money.
My strong aversion to this film is Emily Blunt’s ( Mary Poppins) strong aversion to our country and President Trump.....
.....EXCEPT when she can make tons of money and pay low taxes within our borders!
Not too long ago she was embarrassed she had just become a citizen.
Lin Manuel is another liberal antiTrump
That bothers me......I don’t want to add to their coffers
If you’re cool with that, whatever
My God, another wacko.
You must hate the conservative principle that children grow up to be something like their parents. How very socialist it is to have a mom guide her daughter. Mrs Banks, Jane’s mom, of the first film was a Women’s Rights activist, often and loudly.
But somehow having Jane be like her Mom is disgusting to you. I suppose this means you want children taken from their parents and put in re-education camps so that they can be taught correct attitude.
They remake these shows for propaganda reasons, and also they lack creativity to think of a new story.
“No kidding. Bastardized versions of Magnum, PI, MacGyver and Hawaii Five-O all currently airing.”
What I find interesting is in many of the crime shows today the good guys are all a diverse team that contribute equally to solving a crime. There is no individual achievement. No recognition of Price’s Law.
Who do you think you are to be so offensive and insulting to others
...
Well, you can deny money to talent with personal views you dislike. Or you can deny promotions to military officers who you learn over a few beers don’t have your political persuasion.
Suppose a truly great artist accepts a commission to paint a giant mural for NRA headquarters celebrating the history of guns in the development of the US. And he or she creates an absolute masterpiece. And then you discover he donates money now and then to the DNC. Gonna burn the mural? Gonna march down there with pitchforks and torches and deface it?
Think about it.
They went over to the dark side the minute Walt Disney died. I remember it.
How clever (not)
.....a straw man
Project much?
I suspected what you said.
Armand White is a black film critic who is known for very very unusual reviews
Let’s see if I can help you folks:
Here’s a clip from the film. I’m going to show you all the horrid left wing socialism in it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_sV7hm179Q
Scroll as follows:
0:15 see how she points at the dolphin WITH her LEFT hand? Horrible
0:16 the little girl looks to her LEFT at her brother. Did they really think this would get past us?
0:27 the popping of all economic bubbles created by evil capitalism. Any astute viewer would see this for what it is
0:45 the ship of conservatism thrown down the drain and then the audacity, the unmitigated gall to throw coins after it, demonstrating the utter contempt of Hollywood for money errrr for conservatism money, yeah, saved that
And we close with the social safety umbrella, showing how socialism will save failed capitalism with umbrellas, because of the compassion, yes, it’s all about compassion.
That’s what’s in this film. Stay away, it’s all meant to eat away at your Trump commitment
Only your children.
hahaha
Hey, people, here is a much more rational review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=904DUjtfeeI
I totally agree with you. I saw it on New Years Eve and I actually liked the mystique and special effects of the movie. I didn’t see all the stuff this person was talking about but, then I just wanted to be entertained. Everything is not political. sometimes it is just fun.
It’s pretty good, but not like the original.
American Sniper is the last movie I have gone to. Before that, the second Avengers Movie (which pretty much caused me to write off the Marvel movies)
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