SAVING MR. BANKS

P.L. Travers on the Mary Poppins script: "Where is the gravitas?"--Saving Mr. Banks

Last night I saw Saving Mr. Banks at Canada Square.  That's the movie about P.L. Travers and Walt Disney collaborating (combatively) to make the movie Mary Poppins.  The psychology was pretty middlebrow, and Travers' dissatisfaction with the final movie gets glossed over.  But Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks are uncanny in the lead roles.  I also liked Colin Farrell as Travers' alcoholic father in the flashbacks.  Now I want to learn more about Travers' life.

I love the Mary Poppins movie--the Sherman Brothers became Hollywood's most prolific songwriting team, but they never surpassed their early work there--but I didn't care for the first of the books when I read it some years back.  Presumably, the books read better when you're one of the few people who haven't seen the movie.  (Maybe I should try them again.)

I've returned to translating those Portuguese booklets about the lives of the saints.  I've been working on the story of Sao Tomas de Aquino, but it took me a few days to realize that's the Portuguese name for St. Thomas Aquinas!

Father found a book of Pindar's odes, in both their original Greek and an English translation.  I'm likely to spend some time on that.