FEATURE FRIDAY | SAVING MR. BANKS

FEATURE FRIDAY | SAVING MR. BANKS

Welcome to another installment of Feature Friday, in which we share with you some of our favorite Movies & TV shows! When we were first dating, one of the things we bonded over was chatting about some of our favorite shows. We’ve found that it’s the same for a lot of our couples, too! So, every now and then, we will showcase a different movie or show and share some of the reasons why we recommend it and the things that we really like about it. So be sure to tune in, check out some of our favorites, and maybe even turn it into a date night with your fiance! Make dinner or order in and tune in to watch one of our favorites!

This week: Saving Mr. Banks

It’s no secret that Walt Disney has had a tremendous insult on our lives. If it hadn’t been for Walt, we probably never would have met, and there would be no Ivory Door Studio. And “Mary Poppins” is especially significant for us, since it was the third movie depicted on The Great Movie Ride – the place where we first met and our story began. While we both left Disney World well past the point of it still feeling “magical,” that ride still holds a special place in our hearts, even though it closed for good last year.

So a movie about Walt Disney MAKING “Mary Poppins” seems like it should have been a no-brainer for us. And when it was announced that Tom Hanks would be playing Walt and that Emma Thompson would be Pamela “P.L.” Travers, the author of the Poppins stories, that should have pushed us over the top. It came out in 2013, which was still early in our “it’s not magical anymore” phase, so we missed this in theaters and instead picked it up on DVD, just to check it out. And it was wonderful.

There are a ton of historical inaccuracies throughout the movie that Travers fans are rightfully upset about, but taken as its own thing, Saving Mr. Banks is a very nice bit of storytelling about Travers’ trip to the States where Disney tried to convince her to let him make a film from her books. Hanks IS Disney, or at least the “Wonderful World of Disney” version of Disney that generations have grown up watching, but Thompson steals the show as Pamela, who distrusts the Hollywood machine and is worried (and with good reason) that Walt is going to soften the edges of her characters while also hardening the titular Mr. Banks, who Travers based on her own father (played in flashback by Colin Farrell).

The best scene in the movie is Pamela hearing Jason Schwartzan and B.J. Novak (playing Disney songwriting icons the Sherman brothers) play “Feed The Birds” for the first time. We dare you not to get choked up.