Saturday, May 23, 2020

📽Last night we watched “Saving Mr. Banks,” about the making of Mary Poppins. The movie stars Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Bradley Whitford, etc. — excellent cast.

“Saving Mr. Banks” takes great liberties with historical reality. In reality, PL Travers, the author of the series of Mary Poppins novels, never cared for the movie “Mary Poppins,” and wouldn’t permit another adaptation for 30 years. When she finally relented, for a stage production in London, she stipulated no Americans could be involved. And she had a much more interesting life than “Saving Mr. Banks” portrays. She was a successful actress and dancer and poet and studied philosophy and lived with Native Americans for a time and studied their philosophy and folklore. She adopted a boy, from whom she was later estranged.

Walt Disney, in real life, was kind of a bastard.

The movie is bullshit and propaganda and I loved it anyway and would gladly watch it again.

Much of the movie focuses on Travers’ childhood in Allora, Australia, in the early 1900s. It was a small town then and it’s no metropolis today, with a population of 1,223.