Holiday Shuffle: Saving Mr. Banks

Quick, the wind chill's going to drop to -40 by the end of the weekend! I have to see something and then shut myself in my room until the cold goes away… or until I have to go to my real job. Um, uh, let's see… the making of Mary Poppins one. Sure!

Up front, I should tell you that I have little connection to the movie Mary Poppins. I watched it a long time ago and I sang "Chim-Chim-Cheree" as part of a choir in grade school, but other than that, I don't have memories of it, fond or otherwise. I don't have a particular reason why and I'm not about to psychologically prod myself, but I don't have the same sense of nostalgia from Disney's live-action movies other people do. The best I can say is I grew up when Disney flooded the market with some truly horrifying live-action features (Jungle 2 Jungle, anyone?) and then started remaking the ones that weren't that great to begin with and then made them worse (That Darn Cat), so perhaps that put me off them which also had the side effect of pushing aside the great ones.

Hey, you need views from all sides, right? I'm sure there are plenty cinema who people who know Mary Poppins by heart who've chimed in already, so why not from this angle? At its heart, it's still one of those behind-the-scenes things that talks about how much trouble went into the making of a beloved classic and yet things all came together and we have what we have now. People who love Mary Poppins will get all the in-jokes and references and will enjoy tremendously talented actors taking on the roles of the creators. On the other end, people who come from that perspective tend to dislike the "second" movie within it that explains the real story of what inspired the novel, which is told through flashbacks. What struck me was how absolutely necessary this part of the story is to the rest of it working.

Saving Mr. Banks tells the story from mostly the perspective of Poppins author P.L. Travers (Emma Thompson). After 20 years of being courted for the film right by Walt Disney (Tom Hanks), she has to force herself to fly to Los Angeles to finally discuss the matter when her royalties have dried up and she has no new novels on the horizon. Aghast at the what the filmmakers are planning, she records all their conversations during the development and makes heavy, sweeping demands (No musical numbers, Mr. Banks must not have a mustache, no use of the color red, etc.).

While this plays out, we get flashbacks to Travers' childhood in rural Australia. They mostly revolve around her father (Colin Farrell), the inspiration for Mr. Banks in the novel. There are the little touches that inspired the movie, but they have a much different feel with a distinct lack of whimsy and magic. It is an almost cold reality even as the father tries to be as charming  as he can be. Why it's important is to give real weight to the reason Travers finds this whole idea of a Disney version so appalling. At one point, they play out the "Fidelity Fiduciary Bank" song as Travers remembers the events that inspired it, and they're so wrenchingly different that it shows why the last thing Travers would want is her work to become a "cartoon." At least in the movie. This is a dramatization, after all.

The person who inspired Mary Poppins doesn't even show up until 85% into the movie, prompting questions as to why, and the answer is really the emotional anchor that drives this movie home. I cannot begin to disagree with the people who think it should've been excised and dealt with via monologue because its tone doesn't jive with the rest of the movie. That's the point. Through the film, Walt tries to appeal to Travers as he was a penniless artist who once faced the prospect of selling his characters to a very rich man and refused, but it's dealt with in monologue and it's not as effective. I think there's a greater film that adds flashbacks to a young Disney dealing with that situation and then turns around to him as an adult on the other end of the table. However, I can see why reducing someone as larger-than-life as Walt Disney to this as a defining moment would seem short-sighted. Also, this is pretty much Travers' story.

So, yeah, the rest of the movie that makes up most of the ACTUAL runtime? You know, the movie everyone's going to see? It's mostly fine. It's not Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (Thank you, IMDb!), but it delivers the movie most people are expecting. Emma Thompson is pretty much perfect, Tom Hanks is a very solid Walt Disney, and the craftsmanship is very workmanlike from the reliable director Johnny Lee Hancock (The Blind Side). Really, the only big flaw is composer Thomas Newman seems to take awhile to get the right blend between the score inspired by Mary Poppins, sixties jazz, and the score's main theme. Some parts of the score seem to stop midway and switch to something else entirely. It settles down eventually.

Delivering on what people expect can work against a film, though. It's almost like going into a movie after seeing the trailer that explains the whole thing without actually seeing the trailer. There's a big checklist of things movies like this handle and sometimes it feels like it's just going down that list. Cover all the trivia on IMDb, check, make silly in-jokes the characters don't know about yet, check. The one genuine surprise is a small subplot involving a driver played by Paul Giamatti. I won't say anything else, but just keep watching it. It's surprisingly one of the most touching things here.

It probably won't get a lot of award hype just because it mostly hangs out at a "good" level, but I don't see why this shouldn't affect an audience's enjoyment. Sometimes, things aren't a competition. Good is good, bad is bad, and this is pretty dang good.

Holiday Shuffle: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

There are a little over a half-a-dozen movies I've been needing to see over the holiday season that I haven't been able to catch up to thanks to a busy job schedule and well, you know the saying, "Life happens?" Life has happened a lot to me. So now, with my schedule looking to be somewhat clear in January, it's time to knock out all these movies I need to see (NEED, dammit!). So, while I tend to ramble to extreme amounts, I'll probably have to cut it down to get all these movies covered. I ain't got time to bleed… well, except when I have extremely chapped lips in this winter weather. Then I apparently have plenty of time to bleed.

First up: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, an adaptation from a James Thurber short story that's been in development hell so long, the logo for Samuel Goldwyn Films-a company that used to grace many a late 80's low-budget title featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000-helps open the movie. I can say I can understand why Ben Stiller's directorial comedies have more than a decent following, but as much as I can credit Stiller for being the rare comedic director who can make his movies look fantastic, I don't really like them. There are parts of Zoolander and Tropic Thunder that are brilliant and if you showed me certain clips or shared certain lines, I'd laugh. But even as much as they are extremely out-there satires, they have to be grounded in some reality, and well, let's just say the central conceit of Tropic Thunder falls apart if you actually think about it. The footage from randomly putting film cameras in the jungle would look more like horribly-framed hold-up footage from a Circle K than something for Roger Deakins to put on his demo reel. I know I know, it probably doesn't bother you. It bothers me.

Maybe Walter Mitty is the most logical step for Stiller. Directing and starring as the title character, Stiller's film covers the life of a man so isolated by the doldrums of a working life as a Life magazine photo negative manager, he often "zones out" into extreme fantasies where he dives into exploding buildings to save the three-legged dog of his co-worker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig). Think Doug from Doug as a working stiff. When the negative for the final cover of Life magazine is apparently missing and his job is threatened by a nasty downsizing manager (Adam Scott), Mitty has to take the plunge into the unknown and follow the elusive photographer (Sean Penn) who took the shot to Greenland and beyond.

So, we have a character who goes from outrageously and comedically overblown caricatures of life to something deeply real and tangible. Sound like a good transitional movie for Stiller, and for the most part, it is a very worthy title I can see a lot of people picking up out of the blue and getting a lot out of. Stiller's visual sensibility is taken up a notch with beautiful surroundings and heavy inspirations from the world of photography (One particularly nice shot is even framed so it looks like it's on a negative roll). Stiller himself provides an understated but still human vibe in his performance and aside from the mustache-twirling villain (Or in this case, hipster beard twirling villain), everybody has a lovely, down-to-earth charm. The main coupling between Walter and Cheryl, despite some trimmings of a cutesy Hollywood romance, has some large chunks of a real relationship, which is less typical of a movie than you'd think.

It IS a transitional movie, which means there are hiccups. The biggest problem probably lies in the ways the movie got financed. There is annoying product placement in movies, there is the distracting plastering of Fed Ex all over the otherwise superb Cast Away, and then there is the product placement in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. One of the big flaws is the early fantasies of Walter Mitty are more like Family Guy non sequiturs because we know so little about Walter starting out that it doesn't resonate to much more than using a lot of money to portray a guy spacing out. There is information about Walter given at one point that he was an ace skateboarder as a child and then he transitioned into a more normal life after his father died. The reason we don't get more about what happens is that his father's death is immediately linked to the time Walter worked at Papa John's Pizza. Papa John's pizza is heavily worked into the character's backstory. I am not making this up.

The movie doesn't stop there. A supporting character is a customer assistance operator at eharmony.com (Patton Oswalt) who is trying to help Walter fill out his dating profile, and it makes the site sound like the most helpful dating stop in the world. It's not enough that this movie had to feature products, but it has to make them sound like the most awesome thing ever. The characters don't just have to have Cinnabon, they have to make comments about how it's the next best thing to heaven. If you're going to pleasure your sponsors so much, can you at least hide your kneepads?

Even if you took out the product placement, there would still be some issues. Mitty's journey into the world seems far too easy. Yes, Mitty jumps from a helicopter into shark-infested waters and other fish stories, but it's the mundane stuff they simply don't address. Mitty travels overseas for the first time in his life and has no problem with jet lag? How does he have a passport or how does he get one so quickly since he has only traveled to Phoenix in his life? How does he know exactly where to go with no problems the moment he gets to Greenland? He has to pass along three Arabic words to someone over the phone, and yet the person in New York can spell these odd foreign words without any guidance? And how is he talking so easily on the cell phone, anyway? He doesn't get another cell phone that's more Euro-friendly, yet it has perfect signal his entire journey, even when he's deep in the Himalayas? It's a good thing this movie doesn't have a major cell phone carrier as a sponsor, or there'd be an extra 3 minutes tacked onto the narrative spouting the wonders of whomever's handy mobile devices and unparalleled signal strength helped him.

It sounds nitpicky, but when your movie's about finding the wonder of life by living in the real world, it would help if the journey felt a little more real. It's not just the little things. At one point, Walter has to escape an Icelandic village after he realizes a volcano is erupting near it. The climax of the scene would fit right in with Dante's Peak and it gets shrugged off with surprising casualness. Even without the fantasy world, Stiller can't resist some extra flourish at times.

The core of the films works, though. Its heart is so much in the right place despite being wrapped in promotional consideration. There are things to enjoy and even LOVE out of this movie. A magical moment occurs when Walter has to convince himself to jump onto the helicopter with a drunken pilot as his only chance at finding the negative when he imagines Cheryl grabbing a guitar and singing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" to motivate him. it's the moment where his fantasies become the engine to move his life forward rather than his roadblock. It is not a thoughtless movie being churned out by a factory. It simply has trimmings that make it feel that way. Unfortunately, because they are rather large trimmings, I only like you, Walter Mitty. LIKE.

Also, random detail only people like me would notice: José González is one of the composer and his song "Far Away" is featured twice in the movie. Why does this matter? Because it was also used prominently in Rockstar's critically-acclaimed and brutal Red Dead Redemption. I was waiting for Ben Stiller to start blasting away at some banditos.