onsdag 24 juni 2015

Jolly holiday

Ah, the Swedish summer holiday – the best reason not to emigrate. I don’t think many other countries would tolerate four weeks’ holiday in a row, but it’s standard in Sweden, and exactly what’s needed after months of hard labour. In fact, four weeks can seem a bit short, especially when you’re back at work and can’t get hold of anyone because they’re on holiday.

My blogging ambitions during summer times are modest, but in view of the catchy song “Jolly holiday” from the Disney film Mary Poppins, it might be fitting to write about the film Saving Mr Banks which I caught up with on DVD a few weeks back.

My mother read the Mary Poppins books to us when we were children: I don’t remember much about them except the feeling of magic, all the more powerful because it contrasted with the dour personality of Mary Poppins herself. Consequently, I grew up despising the Disney film, which I’ve only seen once and that ages ago, because it showed a young, pretty and accommodating Mary Poppins in the shape of sweet-singing Julie Andrews.  Saving Mr Banks has achieved its goal in wanting me to give the Disney version of Mary Poppins another go, but in many other ways it is problematic.

The film claims to tell the story behind Disney’s adaptation of the first Mary Poppins novel, where the novelist P.L. Travers (real name Helen Goff) was given script approval rights. As every review I’ve read of Saving Mr Banks has pointed out, the film isn’t honest: what we see is P.L. Travers slowly coming to terms with and accepting the Disney team’s vision of the film, while in real life she wasn’t pleased at all with the finished product and made sure Disney never had a hand in adapting one of her books again. The film’s story is a much better one: in fact, the real-life scenario would have made an indifferent film. Where’s the development, the story arc? Intransigent author remains intransigent, and as discontented with her deal with Disney as at the beginning? No, I can understand they didn’t make a film like that. What I do wonder, in view of the facts, is why they made a film at all.

The answer is probably because they wanted to go to town on the battle between two formidable personalities: P.L. Travers, not unlike the real Mary Poppins in her vinegary snappiness, and Walt Disney, a man with considerable steel under his genial exterior. Emma Thompson as Travers is  the undisputed star of this film, but Tom Hanks does a good job of Disney, too. You can’t expect a Disney film to show Uncle Walt in anything but a kindly light, but you do get a sense of his toughness, in Hanks’s steamrolling manipulativeness as well as in his employees’ attitude towards him. There is terror on their faces when Travers insists on Mr Banks being depicted as clean-shaven: the request that he should have a moustache comes from “Walt himself”. When it comes to intransigence, Travers has clearly met her match. It reminds me about what Carl Barks said about Disney: that he always gave you the last word, and that last word was always “Yes, Walt”.

The premise of the film – that Travers saw her own father in Mr Banks, and that Disney got around her by making sure he had a redemptive ending – is a weak one, as also mentioned in reviews. The author’s father (according to this film at least) was an alcoholic dreamer, which means that the only thing he had in common with Mr Banks was that he worked in a bank. With an author as imaginative as Travers, there is surely no need to look for far-fetched autobiographical echoes. She defended her fictional characters – including Mr Banks –because she created them: there has to be no other explanation. Moreover, the flashbacks to Travers’s/Helen’s childhood weigh down the film, which would have been more enjoyable if it had been shorter. That said, young Helen (or Ginty as her father calls her) is played with pathos by Annie Rose Buckley, and the scene where the Sherman brothers’ “bank song” merges with a speech made by the drunken Mr Goff on Market Day in deepest Australia is very well made.

What’s extraordinary is that even knowing the facts have been tinkered with, and realising that the “saving flawed father” premise is weak, I was still left feeling more lenient towards Disney’s Mary Poppins than I’ve been before. No-one disputes that P.L. Travers did get script approval and was deeply involved with the film in its initial stages – though she had no power over the film editing – which means that, at some point, she must have accepted a young and pretty Mary Poppins. I saw the musical version of Mary Poppins more years ago than I care to remember, and there too we had a good-looking Mary, and many of the film’s seductively hummable songs. IMDB quotes Travers as saying of the film at one point: “It’s glamorous and it’s a good film on its own level, but I don’t think it’s very like my books”. Maybe this is the best way to view Mary Poppins in its Disney version: as a product that is separate from the book’s Mary Poppins, but good “on its own level”.

tisdag 16 juni 2015

Making magic

As I've mentioned before, many people view Disney with mistrust. And in a way, I can understand how the continued efficiency of the Disney brand can be unnerving. I don't think their "ordinary" motion pictures are always a hit, but their animated films are and remain the heart of the Disney franchise. Despondent and grumpy, as I often am shortly before a holiday begins, I settled down before Big Hero 6 last Sunday, confident that I was in the most capable hands imaginable when it came to improving my mood. I was right. Roughly one and a half hours later, I was sobbing like a child while feeling predictably warm and gooey inside. For me, Disney is the "dream factory" rather than Hollywood, and even their animated duds are a lot better than most popular entertainment on the market. There are times when I've caught myself thinking that I'd actually rather fancy seeing Atlantis or Treasure Planet again, and regretting that they are not for hire. It's eerie, I can see that. Disney, the multi-million dollar company peddling dreams, would certainly be the villain in one of its own films.

Big Hero 6 is far from being a dud, and hits home with admirable precision. I'm not sure whether it kids superhero-crazed children into seeing a moving film about friendship and handling loss, or whether it kids the rest of us into seeing a superhero film. Maybe a bit of both. The superhero parts left me fairly cold, though the playing with the genre clichés was fun, and the members of the nerd gang who try their hand at superheroism are endearing, if lightly sketched. (I'm still not sure whether the name of the obligatory English butler in the obligatory castle where one of the gang lives is a sophisticated in-joke or not. He's called Heathcliff - like one of the fictional characters from the English canon who's least likely to make a success of butlering.) What got me was the development of the relationship between the hero Hiro and Baymax, the healthcare assistant robot his brother has been working on before tragically perishing in a fire (hey, it's as well that you know). While we grown-ups - or as grown-up as a Disney fan ever gets - sniffle over their scenes, the little ones can get on with enjoying the chases and gadgets. Clever. Maybe a bit manipulative, even. But it works.

It has to be said that strictly speaking, I'm more of a Frozen girl. I carol "Let it go, let it gooo" as enthusiastically as any six-year-old, and appreciate Disney films with a fairy-tale touch and some romance (be warned: there is absolutely no romance whatsoever in Big Hero 6). Nevertheless, I'm very satisfied with this year's Disney helping - the Mouse is still on top.

Magic of another kind is to be found in the lunch read I've just finished, The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett. Yes, I thought it was high time to give Pratchett's Discworld novels a go - maybe more than high time, seeing as Death (also a character in the book) recently grabbed hold of the author. The first Discworld novel proved to be the perfect lunch read. It was slim, it was funny, and the characters were unexpectedly likeable. I can certainly see that Pratchett's books must have inspired Jasper Fforde, who works in much the same genre. In fact, though Fforde's Dragonslayer novels have improved a lot from the first rather annoyingly moralistic one - the latest, The Eye of Zoltar, ended with a real cliff-hanger - I'm a bit sorry that he entered the dragons-and-wizards field at all, seeing as humorous but affectionate debunking of pompous fantasy clichés has clearly been done before. But ignore me - if it were up to me, I'd put a spell on Fforde which obliged him to produce nothing but Thursday Next books, and that once a year. There's certainly enough material in the affectionate fantasy-debunking way to be going on with, especially if the author is inventive enough when it comes to shaping his own world.

As for Pratchett, I liked The Colour of Magic, but I'm yet to be as bitten by his fictional universe as I am by Fforde's. For one thing, I'm not certain I'll keep the novel for re-reading. Nevertheless, I'll buy other Discworld novels, and am especially looking forward to the follow-up to The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic. I really want to know what happens to Twoflower (naïve, kind-hearted tourist) and Rincewind (his guide, a failed, cowardly wizard with a genius for survival - my favourite) now.

onsdag 3 juni 2015

Problems with the two-track reading system

I thought I'd hit on a clever reading idea. I have several tomes which I very much want to read, but which are simply to heavy to lug to work each day. So what about reading two books in tandem: a slim one during lunch breaks at work and the odd bus ride, and a hefty one at home during evenings and weekends?

The catch is the same as with every tandem-reading enterprise: what do you do when one of the books proves far more engrossing than the other? I manage to get through the slim ones fast enough, but I'm currently a bit stuck in my hefty-book choice. Cheating by smuggling in a Christie or two among the slim lunch reads doesn't help - they always get read first, while the hefty book languishes.

I didn't really see this coming, as the doorstopper I've currently got going is Karleen Koen's Now Face To Face, the sequel to the readable if corpse-laden Through  A Glass Darkly. It promised to be an improvement in some ways, as the tiresome sort-of hero is safely dead, and the often-bereaved heroine Barbara didn't have an awful lot left to lose, so things could only look up. Oh, and apparently Philippe, the tasty villain from Through A Glass Darkly, would appear again (there's a list of Dramatis Personae at the beginning of the book). Maybe a bit of villain sex wouldn't be too much to hope for? Koen does villain sex rather well - in fact, she's one of the few authors I've come across who does villain sex at all.

Sadly Philippe plays a very limited part indeed in this sequel. He has one good scene - a stare-off with the novel's matriarch - but otherwise, the few times he appears, he's little more than an arrogantly French prop. Forget villain sex. This time around, the heroine's sluttish mum's the only one who's properly getting any (at least on-stage, as it were). There's no promising new baddie on the horizon either. I try valiantly to focus on the various plots and love affairs that do go on, lack of villain totty notwithstanding, but I find myself increasingly impatient with Barbara. Finally home after a far too long stay in Virginia where she unsurprisingly ends up freeing slaves, Barbara's next project seems to be to get even with the King's minister Walpole for not reducing her late husband's South Sea Bubble-related fine as he has promised.

Now, I can see that it's a quite an important thing for a heroine to be at least solvent. For this reason, if no other, one would not object to some fine-reducing. But let's review the facts, shall we? Barbara's husband was a director of the South Sea Company. He did speculate. I can't quite see why his widow should look upon it as an unassailable right that his fine be reduced, even if he was pally with Walpole. I suppose it is all an excuse to make her ready to join a Jacobite plot, which will be handy when she comes together with her next love interest, a Jacobite plotter. But in the meantime, I'm getting tired of Barbara stalking around thinking dark thoughts about "Robin" (Walpole) while the men around her sigh and the women - understandably - grow resentful.

Still, there's one consolation - if things don't look up soonish, not least on the Philippe front, I won't have to keep the novel and will free some much-needed bookcase space once I've finished it. I wonder if I'm the only one with limited book space who experiences ambivalent feelings every time I hit upon a novel that turns out to be really, seriously good: I'm thrilled, of course, but it does mean I will probably want to read the novel again, which means no bookcase space is cleared. Plus I will have to find space for the same author's other books. Oddly enough, though, the last part seldom worries me: the excitement of new and fairly safe book acquisitions blocks space worries effectively. That is, until it's time to put the darn things somewhere.