Go see this movie, folks. Log off right now and head to the theater.
This is a wonderful, wonderful movie.
I was waiting for the inevitable Mary Poppins lawsuits to work themselves out first.
That’s one thing that’s been puzzling me since the ads began for this movie…is Nanny McPhee an existing literary character, just so obscure that I’ve never heard of her before? Or was she created (or swiped, depending on your viewpoint) specifically for the new movie?
From Nanny McPhee : Based on the Collected Tales of Nurse Matilda (Paperback)
Clothahump: any details on why you liked it? The trailer was not overly informative.
Jim
Saw this with my kids yesterday, and we really enjoyed it. The plot is nothing special - a magical nanny straightens out the naughty children and helps them keep their father from marrying the wrong woman. Nanny McPhee won’t be confused with Mary Poppins, though. She’s downright scary at first. She had my kids slinking down in their seats.
The rest of the cast are a collection of caricatures performed by some great actors; mostly Emma Thompson’s friends, I would guess. The oldest kid is the boy from Love Actually, and he did a great job.
I pointed out to my son that Imelda Staunton, who plays the cook, would be Delores Umbridge in the next Harry Potter movie. She’s gonna be perfect.
Yeah the plot was a bit predictable, altho there was a thing or two I didn’t see coming. What i really appreciate about kids movie is when it is done in a way that adults can watch it too w/o squirming in embarassment or boredom. We all (wife, me, 7 yo) enjoyed it.
Emma Thompson said this was much harder to secure the rights to and bring to the screen than sense and sensibility was (which was also produced by Thompson and which she also wrote the script for – like she did with Nanny)
Here I beg to differ. Anyone who’s actually read the Mary Poppins books, as opposed to only watching the treacly, saccharine Julie Andrews movie abomination will be absolutely comfortable with Nanny McPhee as another version of Mary Poppins. The original was plain an ugly, scrawny, unfriendly, snotty, bitchy liar of a woman who set up her charges to get railed at for lying whenever they told the plain truth about what the nanny was up to. Quite frankly, if those books were written today we’d be marvelling about the horrifying abuse subtext with the “don’t tell, nobody will believe you” message.
“Spoonful of Sugar,” my butt–the REAL Mary Poppins will make you drink bitter medicine by reminding you she COULD make it MUCH WORSE for you and probably WILL if you don’t mind her straight away.
Plus, the recent editions are sanitized, but if the movie had been based on the originals–the dusty yellowing pages I read in Texas in the 60s–they’d make Birth of a Nation look like a Spike Lee Joint.
I suddenly want to read those books.
Me too!
I just finished reading two of the Mary Poppins books with my daughters, and I kind of disagree with that characterization. No, MP wasn’t in the least sweet; she was snappish and grumpy and vain. But the general idea was that they would turn a corner and something really neat and amazing would happen, like meeting the constellations or something, and then MP would deny everything afterwards. She never admitted or explained anything. But I would never call it ‘a subtext of abuse.’ That’s going too far.
And, the medicine MP made them drink was their favorite drink, each different, out of the same bottle.
But no, you can’t mix up Nanny McPhee with Mary Poppins. They’re quite different. I really enjoyed the movie and put a book on hold at the library. It was a weird movie, very fun.
Definitely a YMMV situation, but I recall reading the books when I was a kid and even then it just bugged me that she’d set those kids up for a fall every damned time! She’d outright imply the kids were lying and jump on the bandwagon with the parents–she struck me as a very nasty person. The upshot of it all was the kids figured out never to tell their parents what had happened with the nanny–and I just wondered, even as a kid, what would happen if something went horribly awry and one of them got hurt or killed? Would the kids get blamed? Or would old MP just take off on the next breeze to go terrify some other poor family? I never did manage to see the MP books as kid books–more like cautionary tales if anything.
I don’t know about jumping on the bandwagon with the parents; she had Mr. and Mrs. Banks terrified of her, and the final huffy non-explanation exchanges never happened with the parents around. MP stands alone and allows no one the familiarity of being on her side! Since there are tons of ‘secret-life’ things kids never tell their parents, it never bothered me–but then I didn’t really think the children would die, either.
I loved the books as a kid and my favorite story was the creepiest one (“Bad Wednesday,” in Mary Poppins comes back), where Jane is naughty and has to stay home alone while the others go off to a tea party. The pastoral picture on the Royal Doulton bowl comes alive, the children in the bowl invite her in, and they plan to keep her forever. MP drags Jane out. It’s really quite scary.
Has anyone ever read P. L. Travers’ other book, I go by sea, I go by land? It’s a wonderful book about evacuee children traveling to Canada, and it’s from her own life; she is/was the chaperone for the protagonists.
Oh crap, I’d forgotten that one! Yep, that was maximally creepy, and the crack in the bowl and the bandage on the kid’s leg… shudder Nope, never did strike me as books for kids, really… but then again the British have some very different viewpoints on what constitutes acceptable fare for the young–there seems to be a pervasive vein of “we’ll scare the hell out of you so you’ll BEHAVE” to British kid’s books that doesn’t usually carry over to their American counterparts.
Predictable, but well done and very sweet and funny. It isn’t like you don’t know what is going to happen from the moment each scene is set up, but that is part of the charm in something like this.
I never read the MP books (but will look for them now) but I loved Nanny McPhee. I am wondering if anyone knows why it was released in the US 3 months later than the UK release? Were there major re-shoots for US audiences or just an advertising campaign issue?
My seven year-old daughter loved the movie, but I walked out of the theater thinking “…meh.” Which I didn’t expect, because I was familiar with most of the cast and normally love Emma Thompson’s work. I suppose it just had this stifling ickiness to it that I couldn’t quite get past.