Tuesday, June 18, 2013

If Christopher Nolan re-booted MARY POPPINS

Memo:

FROM: Christopher Nolan
TO: President of Walt Disney Pictures

SUBJECT: Re-boot of MARY POPPINS

After watching the original 1964 movie once I know how we could improve this beloved children’s classic and make it relevant for today’s theatergoers.

The color scheme must be grey.  Most of the film will take place at night.  

It is still a period piece but we update it slightly. It now takes place during the bombing of London in World War II. Let’s take some creative historical license and blow up Big Ben and the Parliament building. We have the means to do that in a very cool way. To punctuate the moment cut to an Englishman saying “SuperFUCKINGcalifragilisticexpialidocious!” as a double decker bus almost decapitates him. We can still say two fucks and keep our PG-13.

Bert, the street performer, is a loner with a dark past. Dick Van Dyke was fine for his day but I see Steve Buscemi. He should always be an ominous presence. He himself was abused as a child and we must always be afraid when he is around children.

His fellow street people are all damaged due to the horrors of World War I. There might be some comedy in seeing them act silly as long as we understand it is because they are deeply traumatized.

There will be no singing, dancing, or animation in this new version. Anything to take us out of the reality of innocent people being slaughtered is counter-productive. Modern children don’t want fuzzy bedtime stories. They want to be scared shitless. Let’s do that for three hours.

Mary Poppins arrives. She too has a dark past. Sexual abuse and forced into prostitution has caused her mind to snap. Her sunny optimistic disposition is really psychotic repression. She thought she was applying for position of madame not nanny. but to avoid a savage beating from her pimp she takes the job. Julie Andrews was serviceable for the time. But now we need a warrior. Casting suggestion: Katee Sackhoff as Mary Poppins.

The kids take to her right away. She still has the magic bag filled with wonders that they’ve never seen. But those wonders are dildos and handcuff and cock rings. The kids play with them. We get our heart, our comedy, and our bonding. If time allows, Bert comes over and teaches them how to play doctor.

Keep some of the familiar conventions but justify them. The floating tea party is the result of the children being drugged. The dancing penguins is a bad acid trip. I have some leftover designs for the Penguin in DARK KNIGHT. We can use those.

Keep the scene where Mary takes the kids to the bank to see their disinterested banker father (who has a dark past, by the way) and it turns into chaos. But let the chaos be a bank robbery. Let the children be held hostage. Let their father learn to appreciate his children by seeing guns to their heads. Let Mary impale one of the robbers with her umbrella. Let it go right through him. This starts a gun battle. One of the children dies. That will get the dad’s attention to really love the remaining ones.  Let the dead child be his favorite.  That ups the anguish -- always a crowd pleaser. 

Eventually the family’s home is bombed so there’s no further need for a nanny. Mary moves on thus setting up the franchise for sequels. I have some ideas for how she can clash with Mr. Belvedere but I’ll save those for MP2: THE WAR OF THE APRONS.

As always, these recommendations are non-debatable. Please confirm their brilliance at your earliest convenience so I can get the wardrobe people working on Mary’s armored house dress.

Sincerely,

Chris

23 comments :

  1. Hmmm, sounds more like Zach Snyder than Christopher Nolan to me...

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  2. Good news! The NolanSynder has cut a sizzle reel for this project:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic

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  3. Don't give Tim Burton ideas!!

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  4. I just wish Hollywood would release a 42 hour long Super-Bat-Iron-Star Trek-Avenger-Star Wars MAN movie all at once (since they are the same movie) and be done with it. The nerd-geeks would be happy or at least occupied and then maybe they could make a decent movie for the rest of us.

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  5. Needs J.J. Abrams and some lens flare from the umbrella.

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  6. Hilarious stuff, Ken. And all too, too true. Not to just pick on Nolan, but all the gang of tragic film artistes in recent years who think "fun" an obscene term.

    I heartily endorse heroes having "feet of clay", but modern movie-tv minds seem to think that clay has to go up to the eyebrows.

    There is laughter, decency and fun in the real world. Really. They could portray that without losing their artistic integrity.

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  7. No singing? Pity, the tunes practically write themselves...

    Dildos and butt plugs and little cock rings /
    These are a few of my favourite things!

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  8. Stephen Geigen-Miller said...
    No singing? Pity, the tunes practically write themselves...

    Dildos and butt plugs and little cock rings /
    These are a few of my favourite things!

    Funny stuff but you do know you're using songs from THE SOUND OF MUSIC, right?

    Ken, any chance I could get hired for the inevitable rewrite???? I think what this reboot needs is MORE violence. Sounds like there is WAY too much character development as well.

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  9. Generational differences have been lamented by older folks since the beginning of time, but the contrast between the culture of the original MP and the culture of this piece makes think that THIS time the difference is the most severe of all.

    Very funny...and sad. :)

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  10. That would rock!

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  11. Somewhere, a Travers is screaming from a cemetery.

    You forgot the updated "A Spoonful Of Sugar," which provides an entirely different take on the term "go down."

    BTW, Nolan's earlier idea to remake another Julie Andrews movie had been rejected. The studio didn't deem "The Prostitution Of Emily" a sufficiently high concept.

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  12. Actually, I would watch Katee Sackhoff in anything...

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  13. Victor Velasco6/18/2013 12:47 PM

    Hilariously plausible. Thanks.

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  14. Well, you could keep "Step In Time," only they'd be dancing in a mine field!

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  15. I loved every word of this post. Even the punctuation. Suggest slight title change: Mary Poppers

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  16. If Nolan brings in Snyder to direct, all the males, even the children, will be shirtless throughout. This includes any World War II soldiers in uniform and hemets during the "Magical Blitz."

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  17. Actually, that would fit in with the book, which is creepy and weird and very much less Disney than the movie.

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  18. "Feed the birds, tuppence a bag" becomes "Feed the birds to the much larger birds"

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  19. Hurrah! The feeling I felt after I watched THE DARK KNIGHT shoe-horn absolutely absurd cartoon villains into grotesque reality, is finally being voiced and felt by others.

    As well-crafted as that film is, there's something crazy about trying to turn a children's comic into something as realistic as possible -- while still keeping all the original characters.

    Oddly enough, this problem echoes what happened in the comic book world when ALAN MOORE decided to examine what it really meant to be a superhero in WATCHMEN back in 1986. It was a HUGE success and suddenly everyone decided that's how all superhero comics should be done. For ever...

    Apart from ALAN MOORE, of course, who tried to pull away and remind everyone that comics could be fun, too. There are, after all, plenty of other things that can be done in the medium -- it wasn't his intention to say, "this is how it should be done". Nobody listened then, either.

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  20. Jeffrey Mark6/18/2013 6:29 PM

    Utterly ridiculous...absurd...and very sad that people actually want to be entertained by a film just described. What the fuck has happened to people? Why do we even talk about crappola like this? I didn't find anything funny about it. It's just fucking sad all the violence people need to be "entertained." We're so fucking cynical and desperately searching for something to be entertained...so it comes down to this fucking garbage. I ask again...what's happened to people? Please, someone educate me why we have a culture that eats this stuff up? Hate to be pollyannish about it...but geez...enough already! MP was a damn good movie...stop being so cool and hip and cynical and all that and just enjoy it as it was.
    'Nuff said.

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  21. To Jeffrey Mark

    WHOOSH

    That is the sound of the post going completely over your head. The point was that Mary Poppins was great but if you took modern directors they would screw it up.

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  22. I think poor Jeffrey was horrified that your searing satire was actually true because it's so possible.

    What is being missed by many of today's film and TV folks is that, in times of economic and political stress, the public craves colorful escape.

    In the '30s, there was the mammoth success of Shirley Temple. In the turbulent '60s (Dick Clark's words) it was BEWITCHED, THE FLYING NUN and LAUGH-IN, which couched the country's woes in groovy splashes of color and partying amid the chaos.

    The sharp mind that realizes that will have the next "big thing" on his/her hands.

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  23. Christopher Nolan still > Spike Lee/Stephen Daldry/Lee Daniels their ilk... #realbaddirectors #getaclue

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