John Lee Hancock | 120 mins | streaming (HD) | 2.35:1 | USA, UK & Australia / English | PG / PG-13
Tom Hanks is Walt Disney and Emma Thompson is author P.L. Travers in “The Making of Mary Poppins: The Movie”. Disney has been desperate to turn Travers’ fictional nanny into a movie for years after he made a promise to his daughter; Travers has resisted, but now needs the money. She’s brought to LA to consult on the script, and proceeds to make life miserable for screenwriter Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songsmiths Robert and Richard Sherman (B.J. Novak and Jason Schwartzman). At the same time, we see the story of a family in Australia from the eyes of a little girl Ginty (Annie Rose Buckley), as they struggle with the whims of her father (Colin Farrell), a bank manager who’s a little too fond of the bottle. Guess what the connection is!
There’s fun to be had seeing the creation of a classic movie — I’m sure it’s not 100% the honest truth of how it went, but it is based on the tapes Travers insisted were made of the meetings, so it would seem the spirit is faithful. This isn’t a dry “making of” narrative, however, but a lively romp, as the two sides clash over jaunty tunes, characterisation, casting, and made-up words. Whitford brings understated gravitas to the man essentially tasked with giving Travers what she wants while also making a suitably Disney movie. Paul Giamatti turns up as Travers’ LA chauffeur, a role that starts out as bafflingly insignificant before gradually unfurling as one of the film’s most affecting elements.
Similarly, Hanks’ part seems to be little more than a cameo at first, but he steadily appears often enough to make it a supporting role. Reportedly he has perfectly captured many of Disney’s real traits and idiosyncrasies, and who are we to doubt the word of people who knew the man? His performance is not just a shallow, simple impersonation, but there’s not that much meat to Disney’s character arc either.
Instead, the film completely belongs to Emma Thompson. Travers is a complicated woman, a veneer of strictness masking deeper issues. Beneath the comedy of who will win in the battle over the film, there’s an affecting personal drama about the troubled upbringing that led to this human being, and how she’s still dealing with it so many decades later. Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith’s screenplay holds back from being too explicit with regards to Travers’ internal life, but it’s all vividly brought to the screen by Thompson.
In the Australian segments, Colin Farrell’s accent has to be heard to be believed — his regular voice is completely lost inside the character. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the storyline, though it is fundamentally predictable and the intrusions are sometimes unwelcome, interrupting the flow of the main ’60s narrative. Would that story function without them? Is there a better way to structure the telling? I don’t think the answer to either of those questions is “yes”, but I don’t think it’s a “no” either.
Some will find the story lacking in dirt, particularly when it comes to the portrayal of Disney. But it’s not whitewashed either, and do you really think the Disney Corporation would have allowed a movie to go ahead that depicts their founding father in a negative light? For that, I don’t think it’s as twee as it could have been — there’s definite conflict over what’s being done with Poppins, and, even with the film having turned out to be a solid-gold classic, we often find ourselves sympathising with Travers.
With plenty of humour and fun, a solid emotional heart, a first-rate performance from Thompson, and an array of excellent supporting turns too, Saving Mr. Banks is both a worthy tribute to a classic movie and an enjoyable one in its own right.
This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2014. Read more here.
Originally produced for the 2010 FrightFest film festival, horror director Jake West’s feature-length documentary with the unwieldy title explores the ‘video nasty’ scare that gripped early-VHS-era Britain. Starting with a primer on the birth of home video, and what it was like to watch movies in those days (because, ladies and gents, we’ve now reached a point where even fans of that (second-)most adults-only of genres, the gory horror flick, are young enough to not recall a time before DVD), West uses archive news clips and a wide array of new talking head interviews to take the story from the UK’s first video recorders in 1978, through a newspaper-led panic, up to the infamous Video Recordings Act of 1984, which irrevocably (thus far, anyway) changed the face of home entertainment releasing in the UK.
Focusing on the scare rather than the films embroiled in it makes this less a “horror documentary” and more a social history/pop culture one, though the liberal use of extreme clips from the movies in question shuts out anyone without a hardened stomach. (If you did want more on the films themselves, the DVD set that contains the documentary — Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide — includes 7½ hours of special features discussing all 72 ‘official’ video nasties alongside their trailers.) There’s room for little asides amongst the main narrative, though. One of the highlights is the story of an interviewee who was invited on to Sky News in the wake of the James Bulger murder and asked if the film many were holding responsible, 
There was some counterargument, however, which leads us to the film’s best interviewee, and surely a new hero to many: Martin Baker. Baker was one of a few (certainly the first, and for a time the only) critical/intellectual-type voices to speak out in defence of the films that were outraging so many. He’s to be commended not only for his valiant defence of, essentially, free speech at a time when his views were immensely unpopular; but also because he remains one of the most lucid and fascinating commenters in the documentary. He makes the clearest points about the need to not forget both what happened and how it was allowed to happen, lest it occur again.
that force ISPs to attempt to censor what we can and can’t see on the internet, and just yesterday rushed through anti-privacy legislation without proper debate. Sad to say, many of the valuable lessons of the ‘video nasties’ brouhaha — lessons made explicit with superb clarity in Jake West’s excellent documentary — have not been heeded.
Cinematographers discuss cinematography in this AFI-produced documentary. Initially a whistlestop history of film photography, it segues into analysis of movies the interviewed DPs had shot. Unfortunately, casual film fans may judge it monotopical, while hardened cineastes may find it a haphazard, Hollywood-centric overview.
After leaving his New York base to investigate some 
Stand-out sequences include a bit where the police detectives move through a crowd of suspects, all relaxing near the pool on a location shoot, while outlining each one’s possible motivations, essentially to their face. It’s a simple sequence, not exactly high on drama or humour, but there’s a pleasant structural touch to it. Or the finale: the Falcon is, as ever, drawn into the case by a mysterious woman… but by the end he has four of them grouped around him!
However, Waking Sleeping Beauty is told from the inside: director Don Hahn started out as an assistant director at Disney animation in the ’80s, graduating to producer by the time of Beauty and the Beast. With him he brings behind-the-scenes home movies and access to a stunning array of interviewees. Almost everyone who was anyone at Disney during that time is interviewed, either through archive footage or new audio commentary. It was a tough time, and while Hahn’s portrait is probably not quite warts-and-all, it comes damn close; for example, we get to see some of the caricatures the animators drew in disgust at their new boss, Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Side by Side is a documentary on camera technology. No, wait, come back! It’s much more interesting than that sounds.
The significance of the debate is emphasised by the interviewees. Nearly every high-profile name who has at any time factored in the film vs. digital debate pops up, however briefly (renowned film advocate Christopher Nolan gets just a couple of comments; I think Peter Jackson is the only notable omission). Indeed, you can tell how significant the interviewees are just by looking at the poster — what more do you need to know? There are also others — producers, cinematographers, and so on — whose names you might not be familiar with, whose work you might not even know, but have insightful contributions to make. Presenter Keanu Reeves is not just a celebrity voiceover but also the primary (sole?) interviewer, and believe it or not he does a sterling job.
While making a horror movie in the woods, a group of friends hear news of the dead coming back to life. As they try to reach home, their aspiring documentary-maker director keeps his camera rolling, recording their encounters with the living dead…
so goodness knows how it’ll look after even ten. Thing is, despite all that, Diary still has one ace up its sleeve: it’s written and directed by George A. Romero.
That said, the thematic concerns feel less resonant than in Romero’s previous work. The found-footage has led him to frame this as a film-within-a-film — the first title card reads The Death of Death, followed by one noting it’s “a film by Jason Creed”, the aforementioned aspiring director — complete with montages of news footage and, at times, a voice over narration. This rather rams the point home at times, over-explaining features that previously Romero would have allowed us to spot for ourselves. In some respects you can’t blame him being more obvious in this day and age — it needs to be on the nose to get through to some people — but it’s less satisfying, the blunt information coming across as a statement rather than asking us for our own interpretation, which I feel can lead to a more insightful analysis.
Such folks, and even genuine Romero fans, seem to have two major problems with Diary (aside from arguments about the acting, the storyline, or even the entire concept). First, the gore: where Land added CGI to the traditional mix, Diary’s almost exclusively courtesy of computer wizardry. That’s the age we live in: computer effects are so commonplace that they’re now the cheap and easy thing to achieve, rather than men with buckets of red food colouring and entrails from the local butcher. For me, it’s a mixed bag. I don’t think this is the worst CGI I’ve ever seen (unlike some commentators), but I do think it lacks the distinctive Romero feel — there’s none of his trademark eating of intestines, for instance, or the tearing a human in half that’s become a key visual in every film since Dawn. Perhaps that’s because of the realism angle? No one would film that; they’d turn away. Of course, when zombies get shot/beaten/etc, that’s different; that we can watch.
The other problem bemoaned by fans is that this is a reboot, of sorts. Romero’s previous zombie films feature no recurring characters and don’t sit properly within the same timeline, but they nonetheless feature an evolution of the zombie epidemic: it spreads from a one-night issue in Night to a dragging problem in Dawn, to an all-consuming one by Day, in which we see the zombies gaining in intelligence, to the point where they consciously form an invading force in Land. But Diary scraps all that, going back to the start of the epidemic. It doesn’t remake Night — in fact, it handles a few things notably differently (in Night the radio and TV report factual and helpful information; in Diary, they obscure the fact the outbreak is even happening) — but it does disregard the development Romero had taken the undead through.
But, nonetheless, the epidemic did develop and evolve across Romero’s previous films, and that’s been lost here. Maybe there’s nowhere further to go with it? I’m not convinced of that. Perhaps Romero will have another idea and get to tell that story someday in the future, leaving Diary (and 
1956: global superstar Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) comes to England to star opposite Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) in his latest directorial effort, 
The supporting cast is a veritable who’s who of recognisable British faces, stars of screens both big and small. Barely a speaking part goes by without an actor you’re certain to recognise. I’d list them but, honestly, there are far, far too many. Despite Marilyn coming with a hefty entourage, Williams is the only American in the cast, meaning American accents are lumbered (to varying degrees of success) upon Zoe Wanamaker, Toby Jones, Dougray Scott, and Dominic Cooper. Hey, of course Dominic Cooper’s in it — is it even legal to make a mid-budget British movie without him now?
If you don’t know that name then you must be a young whippersnapper, because otherwise Ray Harryhausen needs no introduction.
Sometimes they’re a bit jerky, maybe, and the inevitable issues of scale show they’re models fighting or interacting with actors on set… but for all that they’re still not significantly less realistic than so many modern computer-based techniques, and they carry a charm and obvious level of skill that said renderings usually lack.
One thing I always wonder about ‘specialist’ documentaries is, do they have crossover appeal? Will someone with no interest in Harryhausen, or even in Cinema, get something out of this? Probably not, I guess. But that’s not a bad thing per se, because this is an informative overview of a man’s influential body of work that deserves all the appreciation it can muster. Even if, like me, you’re not that familiar with said work, this is a film that will show you why you should be.
Documentary about the life and work of Georges Méliès, with particular attention to 
The Extraordinary Voyage accompanies A Trip to the Moon on DVD (or, if you fancy spending a small fortune, Blu-ray), but arguments that it goes beyond a mere ‘special feature’ are worth hearing. It’s a worthy biography/tribute to a cinematic force whose influence is still felt today, coupled with the extraordinary story of how his supremacy is being preserved.
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