Nanny McPhee and the big bang Melbourne Central Hoyts, 13/04/2010
Status: Just like betting on the AFL wooden spoon, the bookmakers won’t take your calls
120 films in a year. That’s 10 a month. So if it’s the 29th and I’m only at 30 films, I’m behind by either 9.2 films or 29 days. Either way, it’s not real flash. This is what happens when I spend 10 days doing nothing but talking about comics: me numbers suffer. Back to (mostly) regular programming now, though. That means I’ll still be falling behind, just at a slower rate…
In the meantime, I present reviewdle number 30 (Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang), I hope it is as utterly joyful and completely wonderful as the film was.
Mrs Green (MAGGIE GYLLENHAAL, Stranger Than Fiction) manages five children, the local shop and her farm while her husband is away at the war. Her brother in law (RHYS IFANS, The Boat That Rocked) is trying to sell the farm out from under her to pay off some nasty debtors. When everything gets as bad as it possibly can (you can tell because the children are screaming at each other and covered in cow poo), Nanny McPhee comes to the rescue.
EMMA THOMPSON reprises her role as Nanny McPhee, the world’s most effective and most hideously ugly nanny. This little gem, though, is waaaaay better than the 2005 original. There is a much more restrained hand here - not every outfit it candy-coloured velvet and not every character is over-the-top slapstick (not all that surprising, perhaps since director SUSANNA WHITE has come from such serious fodder as “Generation Kill” and the recent “Bleak House” BBC adaptation) and I like it much better for that - the action is more fun and the drama more tense because of the firmer grounding in reality.
It says something that both my four-year-old niece and I give this a hearty thumbs up. As such it joins a very small group of live action children’s films that we can both stand to watch without wailing from boredom or puking from saccharine.
