“Saving Mr. Banks”
OK, so just to get this over with since everyone I see is already asking me: YES, I will go see Saving Mr Banks. And I am sure it will be nice. And as it shows some of the people I remember from my childhood with tremendous respect and affection, specifically Don DaGradi and the Sherman Brothers, and I hope my grampa, I'm sure it will be fun. But I will eat my hat if this review is not right on the mark. What my family's business has done is to dumb down and middle-ify and oversimplify (ok, ok DISNEYFY) so much, and while that has rightly and admirably brought a lot of pleasure--joy even-- to a lot of people who needed it given that life can be hard and pleasure hard to come by, it has also encouraged that most grim and American tendency to gloss over the untidy complexities of life, sometimes at great cost to the lived experiences of many others. Were we as a people, for instance, more inclined to welcome stories involving moral complexity and nuance we might not be so quick to accept the ever increasing and frequent invitations of our presidents to jump in with both feet to "defend our freedom" in far away places we know nothing about at great cost to innocent people who couldn't give less of a shit about our freedom and don't even understand why we think they are a threat to it.
