Needing & Wanting - a guide to Nanny McPhee

I watched this film yesterday. Heck, IF I had KNOWN earlier, we would have been watching V for Vendetta. However, Nanny McPhee wasn't so bad. Of course, being a Friday and all, Lido was packed with screaming bratty kids. You would think that Nanny Mcphee with her 5 lessons and knobbly stick would have struck terror into little bratty hearts but no... Most of them were giggling away, though I do admit that the film's appeal lay in how childish it was. Humour was mostly slapstick, punctuated with typical British dry wit.

Most of the characters were quite obviously stock types, from an overbearing aunt with hideous hat in tow, to a nasty vindictive stepmother in even more ridiculous dressing (it HAD to be the sort that revealed cleavage). As I said - these were Fairy Tales stereotypes. One must recall that the target audience of the film was children. Still, I think parents and young kids would have enjoyed it. At least, the audience at Lido were screaming with laughter.
Still, the film set was very pretty. The house where the children live in in the movie had a blue staircase. How cool is that?? A wooden country house staircase.... Walls were red and blue. Very pretty. Had the feel of children living in it - children with rather unorthodox tastes, at least it looked like a fairy tale house... very ideal for a film with typical fairy tale conventions, including a happily everafter of course.

Almost the only intriguing thing about the film is Nanny McPhee herself. Emma Thompson slips into the role of strict nanny with all apparent ease, to the extent that she seemed to have enjoyed herself immensely. A mysterious character that pops up whenever she is NEEDED, be it by the adults who run the house or the children themselves, her ending in the film is equally shrouded in ambiguity. Who is she? What IS she? I guess the answer is something we can only speculate about.