I was very surprised how good it was. IMHO, I think it was just as good as the original. They did a lot to appeal to old fans, but with enough fresh material to keep it from being a total retread.
He had a pretty useless accent coach. He couldn’t hear his own resultant shortcomings, naturally, and everyone else was nice to him and didn’t mention it.
That said, the blame isn’t what we hear, it’s the voice, and the voice was wrong. It’s very apparent how wide of the mark he was, whoever may have been to blame.
A lot of weird choices made by the producer and director.
Filming in realistic and de-saturated stock as opposed to the original in technicolor. With the exception of the animated sequences. Not only did they do their big ‘Steppin-time-like number’ in desaturated color…they literally did it in the fog!!
Realistic acting from the leads opposed to theatrical acting. Which makes Poppins a bit jarring and narcissistic (Mary Poppins!! Mary Poppins as I live and breath! Look everyone its Mary Poppins!!) Right before the Bowles-like number I looked at my GF and asked. “IS Mary Poppins going to do a strip-tease? Are they sexualizing Mary Poppins???”
But overall I loved it. I was moved more than once. Just weird choices.
After some listening to the album while driving the kids about, I’d say the songs hold up. Kids’ favorite is “Turning Turtle”; they try to sing along, but too many words. Also, “Can You Imagine That?”, “A Cover is Not the Book”, and “Trip a Little Light Fantastic” get some sing-alongs, too.
Well, POPPINS 2 received four Oscar nominations today–a far cry from the original’s 13, but still decent enough for a very polished, reverential throwback to another age of filmmaking.
It’s competing in Production Design, Costumes, Score and Song. I think its best chances are in the first of these, but it will be a tough climb in any of them.
Nah, can’t agree. Michael’s problem isn’t pomposity and distant-fathering, admittedly, but he does have a problem: it’s grief and despair. He was hit so hard by the loss of his wife that he doesn’t really believe that things are going to be truly okay ever again.
He gave up making the art that he loved, and resigned himself to just slogging on and scraping by, with Ellen-the-housekeeper and the kids doing their best to carry their end of the constant stress and worry.
Yes, he loves his kids and isn’t demanding or judgemental with them, but children don’t just need love. They need happiness and joy, and they need their parents to be capable of feeling and sharing happiness and joy with them. It’s not clear if Michael would ever have climbed out of that pit, or at least not for a long time, if it weren’t for MP and her booster shots of magic and wonder.
Fair enough - thanks.
I saw it this evening.
It was horrid. There was one acceptable song, the one about where the lost things go. The rest were trite and derivative, like a Mad Magazine parody of the original. The one about trip the light fantastic was awful. If you listened to the words, they were all awful.
I can see the writer’s meetings now. "Instead of chimney sweeps dancing in silhouette, we’ll have lamplighters dancing in silhouette!
“And Meryl Streep as Mary’s Russian cousin can be just as funny as Ed Wynn’s Uncle Albert!”
Why was the villain/wolf in Mary’s fantasy world at all? That is not Mary Poppins.
The actor who played Michael Banks was wooden. Lin-Manuel Miranda was out of place. So many characters were just pasted in like place fillers with meaningless dialogue. The housekeeper. The sympathetic lawyer. Jane going on about the workers rally we never saw (just a transparent stand-in for her mother’s suffrage campaign).
Writing by marketing hacks to please lawyers and accountants with no imagination.
Uncle Walt is break dancing in his grave.
Ugh.
Finally got around to watching it this week, and, yeah, agreed. I’m honestly usually an easy audience for this sort of thing, but…woof.
I have a lot of complaints, but, at the core, I think the main story was just a waste. When Mary Poppins reintroduces herself, there’s a cute moment where she says she’s here to look after the “Banks children” and implies that she’s really there for Michael and Jane.
And that basically never pays off. She barely interacts with Jane and Michael for the rest of the movie. She doesn’t really teach them anything. Heck, she doesn’t really teach the kids anything, either – they just follow along and get up to generic highjinks while the movie coasts along to its “hey, the MacGuffin was under our noses the whole time” ending.
Blunt’s performance is very, very good, although I think the music hall scene in which she loses track of her charges while doing a strangely sexualized dance number felt pretty off the mark.
The music is fine, but completely forgettable.
Streep’s performance and scene were atrocious – a bad accent, a dumb song, and lousy VFX.
Lin Manuel Miranda was wasted, aside from his music hall number which at least played to his strengths. Otherwise, he was basically just there to mug at the camera, say “Mary Poppins!” repeatedly, and do some by-the-numbers hoofing.
Ben Whishaw and Emily Mortimer give very good performances to absolutely no effect. Their characters barely exist.
The best I can say is that Dick Van Dyke’s cameo was pretty charming, and the fairground ending was a fitting close.
All of this would bother me so much less if it didn’t feel like such a wasted opportunity. This was a good cast and the filmmakers made some decent choices visually. But the characters and story and songs were all just too, too thin and forgettable. If they’d given everything either one more pass (or, more likely, three fewer passes), they could have had a little masterpiece on their hands.