By guest reviewer DANFOX DAVIES:
Synopsis:
Stolen HARRY POTTER Music shoved hurriedly into the EDWARDIAN era on a set somewhere between DAVID COPPERFIELD and NANNY MCPHEE. BOWLER HATS and lack of plot sense belie the FRENCH ORIGINS of the film.
MILDRED HUBBLE is ridiculed at CACKLE’S ACADEMY and starts RUMOURS.
She casts the NEVERENDING STORY spell and these rumours get a little too real.
Writing BOOKS is such fun, Mildred almost fails to notice her MOTHER is becoming less Nanny McPhee and more CLARA COPPERFIELD by the day. Her SMUGNESS outlasts her mum and her PATHETIC PAINTER crawls back with ONE LEG and a BEARD. Then it gets WORSE so she dresses as CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW and goes EMO-GOTH.
By The Numbers:
- Incredulous fake laughs: 2
- How dare you’s: 2.2
- Worst Witches: 1
- Children scared by them: at least 1
- Letters delivered: 3
- By owl: 0
- Make-up, in hours it took to layer it deep enough: 9
- Do I look like a man?: 1
- Glasses removed for a serious Look: 1 pair.
- Bowler hats on extras: over 9000
- Of which are later replaced with Trilbies: at least 3
- Obvious green screens: 5
- Lolcats: 6
- 4th wall facial expressions: most of them including all of Mildred Hubble’s
- Jars of pickled eggs: 5
- Chitty Chitty Bang Bangs: 8
- Huge dogs: 2
- Of which died during the making of this film: 1
- Shameless sucking-up moments: 2
- Dreamy glides through tidy gardens: 3
- Attempts to place selves in genres: 5
- £400?!:1
- Musical mood swings: 15 or so
- Painters using psychology to get in bed with an author and later regretting it, leaving her and then crawling back a gambler and debtor:1
- The cost to him of leaving her: 1 leg, -1 beards
- Deathbed scenes:2
- Seconds between a mother’s death and her daughter selling her story: 9
- Boost this provides to book sales: predictably, over 9000
- Use of God Save The King to introduce the smugness: Quite.
- Posh networking events: 7
- Hermiones: somehow, 1
- Loves requited despite smugness: amazingly, more than 0
- Montages to move the story breezily along: 5
- Magic elixirs: 1
- Reduction in quality of paintings between beginning and end of film: 100%
- Difference this makes to the film or the paintings: 0%
- Angels: 0
- Servants who quit this farce: 2 including the husband.
- Badly acted illnesses: 2
- Disappointed pipe smokers: 1
- Rape kisses: 1
- Nudity scenes: 3
- Sex scenes: 3
- Of which are rapes: 1
- Actual plot aside from the lessons about obsession with writing: very little
- Lesbian relationships in the closet, later moved to a cottage: 1
- Games of hangman, real and cheated at: 1
- Relationship between main character bitchiness and number of deaths: exponential
- Naff last words: all of them.
- Obvious fake snow: all of it
Overall: 2/5
I mean, really, there aren’t even any angels in it. OK, there are a couple of stone cherubs and Mildred Hubble claims her name is Angel. So?
The moral: erm, if you’re a bitch you should dream through your life so you don’t notice your immense smugness.