#this book endeared me to mrs travers

[one-strugling-bean]

Some quotes from "Much Obliged, Jeeves" that i adore:

«[...]but whereas I sang a good deal as we buzzed along, he [Jeeves] maintained, as is his custom, the silent reserve of a stuffed frog, never joining in the chorus, though cordially invited to.»

«'I'm sorry to say I do,' said Spode, speaking like Sherlock Holmes asked if he knew Professor Moriarty.» «Mingled with the ecstasy which the sight of him aroused in my bosom was a certain surprise that he should be acting as cup-bearer.»

(more under the cut)

«'Euphoria.' 'I what?' 'That's what it's called, Jeeves tells me, feeling like that.' 'Oh, I see. I just call it being happy, happy, happy.'»

«Bertie, are you going straight now?' 'I beg your pardon?'»

«Pardon me, your tie.' 'What's wrong with it?' 'Everything, sir. If you will allow me.' 'All right, go ahead. But I can't help asking myself if ties really matter at a time like this.' There is no time when ties do not matter, sir.'»

«Especially as a few moments before this person appeared I had been interrupted by an extraordinary young man who gave me the impression of being half-witted.' 'That would have been my nephew, Bertram Wooster.' «Oh, I beg your pardon.' 'Quite all right.'»

«How about Jeeves?' 'What about him?' '[...] up till now Jeeves has always been right. His agony on finding that he has at last made a floater will be frightful. I shouldn't wonder if he might not swoon. I can't face him. You'll have to tell him.' 'Yes, I'll do it.' 'Try to break it gently.' 'I will.»

«He would have risen at my approach, but I begged him to remain seated, for I knew that Augustus, like L. P. Runkle, resented being woken suddenly, and one always wants to consider a cat's feelings.»

«No joke for a girl who thinks she's going to be the Countess of Sidcup to have the fellow say «April fool, my little chickadee. What you're going to be is Mrs Spode.»

«'Had bad news, has she?' 'No, sir, she was struck by a turnip.'»

«Her greeting could not have been more cordial. An aunt's love oozed out from every syllable. 'Hullo, you revolting object,' she said. 'So you're back.'»

«Getting hit in the eye with that potato changed his plans completely.»

Ngl, i had a few more cat-related quotes, but this post is already big enough sooo yea

#some of these are so silly #bertie really likes the cat augustus #this book endeared me to mrs travers #reginald jeeves #bertie wooster #jeeves and wooster #much obliged jeeves #jeeves and the tie that binds

[moviemunchies]

Disney made a movie about the making of Mary Poppins.

The story goes like this: P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, is broke. She needs money. And for the past twenty years Walt Disney has been desperately trying to buy the rights to adapt one of the books into a movie. Travers, however, being a stuffy English woman who doesn’t want her works adapted into a “silly cartoon” and thinks that Disney will butcher the material, doesn’t want to. But as her attorney points out, she needs the money, so she agrees to go to Los Angeles for a couple of weeks and negotiate. There the scriptwriter and lyricists attempt to work with her on how the movie will go, but Travers proves difficult to work with, and refuses to budge on what seem to be very minor points.

All the while, the audience (and P.L. Travers, it’s implied) are receiving flashbacks to her childhood in Australia, which seems to start as a somewhat idyllic life in the Australian countryside, but quickly shifts as her father’s alcoholism becomes more and more obvious to the audience.

It is a bit of a difficult movie to really wrap my head around. It’s not a complicated Plot or anything, but it’s a movie that’s essentially about trying to convince an author to sell out to Disney. And in a world in which Disney owns an absurd amount of the entertainment industry, trying to frame a story about Disney being a nice company just trying to share good stories with the world… well, it’s a bit of a hard sell. And this movie did come out in 2013, when it wasn’t quite as obvious to all of us that Disney was taking over EVERYTHING yet--although it should have been, considering they bought Lucasfilm and Marvel at that point, but we all just kind of joked about it--so it’s a bit lighter of a blow, but it still hits very weirdly. I like this movie, but I don’t know if I should feel bad about it because it’s so obviously Disney making a movie about how it’s okay that absorbing all these properties and twisting them into something with their brand stomped on it.

...I did also rewatch Lindsay Ellis’s video on this, yes, if you were wondering. And to be clear, her video is probably better than anything I’m about to say.

It is a fascinating movie about the process of adaptation though. Because I feel as if people of my generation were very much of the opinion, back when our favorite books like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were being adapted, that a good adaptation was one that was an exact translation from the book onto screen, all with the smiling approval of the book’s author. And even in very good adaptations or I don’t think that’s how it works at all. I think most people think that Mary Poppins is a good movie, but that doesn’t change that it’s not a very accurate representation of the book it’s adapted from. 

In a way, we have that on full display here. P.L. Travers never really loved the movie of her book; but at the end of her life she’d made peace with it as a well-made film, although she didn’t consider it related to her own work. In the film we watch her desperately try to exert more control over the movie 

Travers demanding that the entire process be recorded on tape was a real thing, BTW. You might have figured that out from the bits of audio played during the credits.

It’s also all tied up in her memories of her father--hence the title. Because (in-film) Travers identified the fictional Mr. Banks she created with her own father, and her acceptance of Disney’s adaptation is tied up with that--making sure that they understand that even if he wasn’t perfect, Mr. Banks wasn’t a monster, and he needs saving more so than his children. Hence the resolution of _Mary Poppins_ is about the redemption of Mr. Banks, rather than just about his children (hence the movie’s title).

I have no idea if this is remotely true or not; after all, while P.L. Travers is a pen name that she took from her father (his first name was Travers), the first Mary Poppins book was dedicated to her mother. But it’s an interesting conjecture and I, who knows next to nothing about the subject matter, think it works.

Emma Thompson manages to make Travers both kind of terrible but also very likable in her performance. No, her being rude to everyone doesn’t endear her, but the frustrations she’s being rude over are relatable, if just expressed in a way that would make you very exhausted with her in real life. Which is why her more emotional moments in the film stand out and make them that much more heartbreaking.

Tom Hanks as Walt Disney is pretty much… well, it’s what you expect. It’s good casting. The movie paints Disney a lot lighter than he probably was in real life, but it doesn’t lose the fact that he’s very much out to make money--the film just also balances that with him trying to make people happy with it.

Apparently Tom Hanks campaigned to show Disney smoking on screen, but this was overruled, so you just hear him coughing and he mentions it at one point, and that he doesn’t like to smoke in public for fear of being a bad influence (which was true).

Paul Giamatti plays Ralph, Travers’s driver while she’s in Los Angeles. And he’s cool. Basically he’s there to show Travers becoming less harsh.

Bradley Whitford plays Don Dagradi, the scriptwriter of Mary Poppins, and B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman play the Sherman Brothers, the lyricists for the movie. They're kind of just there to have Walt be nice to and Travers be mean to. They don’t get that much to do other than shuffle about and awkwardly try to do their jobs. Novak, as Robert Sherman, gets a little more to do, in that he actually snarks back a few times, but overall these actors are underused. And I get that it’s hard to use them more and give them more material, because this isn’t their story, but they basically do one thing the entire movie and that’s it.

In the backstory, we have a very good performance from Colin Farrell as Travers Goff, Travers’s father, who is able to portray a man who is both a charming father but also kind of a massive jerk as his alcoholism and illness takes over his life.

Annie Rose Buckley plays young P.L. Travers, Ginty Goff, and she does a great job? I’m not usually critical of child actors, I suppose, but I think she did a phenomenal job of a girl who just has no idea what’s going on with her dad until it’s far too late.

It’s a good movie. I enjoy watching it. Yes, it’s whitewashing the history of the company, and presenting the ending to be a lot happier than it probably was in real life. And that’s not bad! A lot of good movies are like that! But I have really mixed feelings about it nowadays with Disney’s business practices and the way it dominates the entertainment industry. A movie that tells it’s perfectly fine for Disney to eat up and profit off of all fiction is a harder sell for me nowadays. Maybe that’s a ‘me’ thing though.

#Saving Mr. Banks #Marry Poppins #Emma Thompson #Tom Hanks #P.L. Travers #Walt Disney #Movie Munchies

[mrmichaelchadler]

Why Mary Poppins Returns is Disney’s Best Reimagining to Date

“Can’t put me finger / on what lies in store / But I feel what’s to happen / all happened before.”—Bert (Dick Van Dyke) in “Mary Poppins”

Fifty-four years after its release, “Mary Poppins” remains the greatest Disney film of all time. Had “Mary Poppins Returns” been a mere remake of Robert Stevenson’s 1964 Oscar-winning classic, it would rightly be labeled a work of heresy. But what director Rob Marshall has pulled off here is more akin to James Bobin’s “The Muppets” or J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Both of these gems achieved the seemingly impossible task of recapturing the appeal of the landmark crowd-pleasers from which they spawned, and that had evaded numerous imitators. Viewers who criticized Abrams for hewing too close to the formula of “A New Hope” failed to take into account just how monumental an achievement it was to make a film that felt like “Star Wars.” Even George Lucas couldn’t replicate his own signature blend of space opera and Saturday morning serials in his enervated prequel trilogy. With “Mary Poppins Returns,” Marshall has triumphed in making a film that—with the exception of its technological flourishes—feels like it could’ve been released in the 1960s, preferably as the first half of a double bill with this year’s similarly goofy “Christopher Robin.” No attempt is made to modernize the source material of P.L. Travers’ books or the Vaudevillian charm that characterized Stevenson’s film. On an aesthetic level, it is as transporting a throwback as Todd Haynes’ “Far from Heaven,” with every cobblestone of the Banks family’s street, Cherry Tree Lane, meticulously recreated in an indoor set, courtesy of ace production designer John Myhre.

“Finding Neverland” scribe David Magee loosely mirrors the beats of the original film in his screenplay, just as composer Marc Shaiman and his “Hairspray” co-lyricist Scott Wittman have created nine new songs that pay homage, in one way or another, to the unforgettable numbers by Robert and Richard Sherman—the melodies of which are interwoven throughout the score. So immortal were the songs in “Mary Poppins” that the Sherman Brothers themselves couldn’t equal them in either “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” or “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” though both films went on to become widely beloved as well. How extraordinary it is to see, in 2018, a brand new old-fashioned musical, complete with an overture accompanied by paintings evocative of legendary matte artist Peter Ellenshaw. “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda channels the exuberance of Dick Van Dyke’s jack-of-all-trades Bert as lamplighter Jack, who opens the film with “(Underneath the) Lovely London Sky,” a stirring spin on “Chim Chim Cher-ee.” Playing the adult version of Matthew Garber’s Michael Banks, Ben Whishaw sings “A Conversation,” a poignant remembrance of his late wife, in the speak-singing style of Michael’s father (David Tomlinson), who once expounded about “The Life I Lead.” 

No actor in the history of cinema has possessed the indelible screen persona, let alone the pipes, of Julie Andrews, and a “Mary Poppins” film featuring her in any role other than the titular one would feel profoundly wrong. Andrews was entirely correct in turning down a cameo role, providing Emily Blunt the space needed to create her own version of the character. She is a complete delight—sweet, sardonic and more zesty than deadpan. Her singing voice may not hit Andrews’ high notes, but it is more than capable of belting “Can You Imagine That?” (the equivalent to “A Spoonful of Sugar” that kicks off the enchantment), “The Royal Doulton Music Hall” (an abbreviated “Jolly Holiday”), “A Cover Is Not the Book” (Mary and Jack’s irreverent tongue-twisting duet that tips its hat to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”) and “The Place Where Lost Things Go” (a lullaby reminiscent of both “Stay Awake” and “Feed the Birds”). 

Meryl Streep delivers her best musical performance in ages as Topsy, Mary’s dotty cousin who, like Uncle Albert, has a supernatural conundrum in need of fixing, as detailed in “Turning Turtle” (a much more urgent number than “I Love to Laugh”). Jack and his fellow lamplighters’ big dance routine, “Trip a Little Light Fantastic,” is being pushed as an Oscar contender, though it’s not nearly as acrobatic or catchy as “Step in Time,” which was itself inspired by the British music hall anthem, “Knees Up Mother Brown.” My favorite song of them all is saved for last: “Nowhere to Go But Up,” a joyous companion piece to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite,” performed by living legend Angela Lansbury (who might as well be playing the grandmother of Eglantine Price, the benevolent witch she brought to life in “Bedknobs and Broomsticks”). 

By the time Lansbury materialized for the grand finale, I was already levitating in my seat. Had my critical faculties been rendered useless by the glorious imagery drawn frame-by-frame, thanks to a team of veteran animators who were brought out of retirement solely for the occasion? (The fact animated flowers initially leap from a bowl, after Mary’s spinning of it causes the designs on its rim to coalesce as in a zoetrope, is a brilliant touch.) Or was it the peerless casting of Julie Walters as Ellen, the Banks clan’s longtime maid who nails the accent of Hermione Baddeley, and David Warner as Admiral Boom, a hilarious yet less surly version of Jane and Michael’s delusional neighbor? Or perhaps it was the cameo by Karen Dotrice (the original Jane Banks), who shows up just long enough to utter her trademark line, “Many thanks, sincerely.” I have no doubt my love of the picture was increased exponentially by the marvelous appearance of Dick Van Dyke as Mr. Dawes Jr., the son of the banker he played incognito in “Mary Poppins.” Inhabiting that role in the original film was Arthur Malet, who went on to play Tootles in Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” where he received his own opportunity to defy gravity just like Mr. Dawes, Sr. The 92-year-old Van Dyke does not soar through the air on wires in “Mary Poppins Returns,” but he does leap atop a desk and dance, a euphoric sight that had the crowd at my preview screening applauding. 

I’m reminded of a priceless story Van Dyke shared on the 40th anniversary DVD of “Mary Poppins.” “When I was playing the old man,” he recalled, “we would break for lunch, and on my way to the commissary, I liked to wait for the buses with the tourists to come along. Then I would start to cross the street. The bus would stop, and I would take forever to cross the road, turning toward the driver to say, ‘Thank you!’ Once the bus began moving on, I’d let it get 20 yards away before I’d pass it in a dead sprint, as fast as I could run.” That’s the same sort of childlike spirit that appears to have informed Marshall’s approach to this movie. It has the same kinetic pacing as the director’s sensational stage-to-screen adaptation, “Chicago,” and it could likely be transferred onto the stage without much alteration. What I admire most about the picture is its refusal to simply recycle what came before. It puts forth the effort to come up with new songs, set-pieces and emotional payoffs, rather than go through the motions of what had already been perfected. In an era where shot-for-shot duplicates are the new norm at Disney, “Mary Poppins Returns” stands as a definitive example of how to honor a masterpiece. “Mary Poppins” will always be irreplaceable, but this endearing tribute succeeded in making me feel like a kid again.

Header Photo Credit: Jay Maidment - © 2017 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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