Review - Saving Mr. Banks

Saving Mr. Banks takes us behind the development of the Disneyfication of the Disneyfication of Mary Poppins (how meta!), the movie rights to which author P.L. Travers was notoriously resistant to sign over.

Emma Thompson plays Travers ('Mrs.' Travers, as she'll quickly tell you she prefers to be addressed), at the end of her rope and in need of money, urged by her agent to let Walt Disney Studios turn her beloved childrens book Mary Poppins into a feature film. She is loathe to let her precious creation become trivialized by the kid-friendly brand, but reluctantly agrees to travel to L.A. to work with Disney's writers and tunesmiths. Among her many insistences are that the film not be a musical, not star Dick Van Dyke, and contain no animation nor the color red. As history tells us, Disney reneged – or at least changed Travers' mind – on those stipulations.

Sunday Top Ten - Musicals from the 60s

As the studio system of decades prior started dissolving in the late 1950s, the Golden Age of the Hollywood musical, an era ruled by versatile song-and-dance men like Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, came to end. By the mid 1970s, the screen musical was all but dead, but what of those tumultuous 1960s years? Despite a proclivity for grasping at already popular shows from Broadway, the death throes of the movie musical marked an interesting and oddly ripe transition period – one that adopted a newer style which would inform some of the 70s' more experimental musical flare.

These are my ten favourites.

Sunday Top Ten: Movie vehicles I wish I owned

What I hope to get out of this Sunday Top Ten series (which officially starts today – right now, in fact!) is a collection of lists that reflect a bit about me. Needless to say, all the opinions on this blog are my own personal ones, so don't be expecting any thoroughly researched expert analysis. For instance, dork that I am, I would ill qualified to write about the ten “coolest” movie vehicles of all time. But ten movie vehicles I myself would love to own, that's something I can write about. So why not make that the inaugural countdown: