Very Cool!!!

Great Film overall

As Good As It Gets

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I think this is a pretty decent flick for the whole family, probably not at the same level of masterpieces like "The Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins", but at least it was much better than most of the so-called family films that Hollywood keeps producing in the recent years.For me, what made this movie work were the funny performances of each actor, particularly Colin Firth and Emma Thompson, who made this film a very enjoyable experience despite the silliness of some scenes.Honestly, this turned out to be much better than I was expecting, and some scenes (like for example, the beautiful ending scene) remind me the times when innocent films for the whole family were produced, unlike the commercial and inappropriate kid's movies and television shows of the recent years.

While I am not sure that I would have cast Colin Firth as the father in this movie, he does an okay job. The rest of the cast are pretty near perfect. The children led by Thomas Brodie- Sangster are just right and manage to be irritating at the beginning without being so obnoxious that the viewer hates them. Imelda Staunton shows what a fine comedy actress she is as does Celia Imrie. Emma Thompson has written a marvellous screenplay and her performance as the title character is just pitch perfect. it would have been so easy to overplay such a quirky character. She is everything that Mary Poppins should have been and was not. This is the sort of film that normally i would run a hundred miles from so I never saw it in the cinema or on DVD. I caught it on TV and both my wife and I loved it. Miss Thompson has crafted an instant children's classic which will be shown over and over and enjoyed by succeeding generations of all ages.

"Nanny McPhee" is essentially "Mary Poppins" updated for the twenty-first century, although it also incorporates elements from "The Sound of Music". Like "The Sound of Music" it revolves around a widower with seven children. It shares with "Mary Poppins" a late Victorian or Edwardian setting and the idea of a mysterious nanny with magical powers. There are, however, also differences between "Nanny McPhee" and those two films. Whereas Captain von Trapp was a strict disciplinarian, the father in this film, the undertaker Cedric Brown, is completely unable to discipline his unruly children, who take great pride in the fact that they have managed to drive out seventeen nannies. Whereas Mary Poppins was played by Julie Andrews as an attractive young woman in her twenties, Nanny McPhee is (at least at first) a hideous old crone with a snaggle tooth and a face covered in warts. After she arrives at Cedric's home, he in desperation hires her as his children's eighteenth nanny, and she sets about reforming them through a mixture of magic and strict discipline. There are also sub-plots involving Cedric's elderly and eccentric Aunt Adelaide, on whom the family are financially dependent, and Mrs. Selma Quickly, a vulgar and self-centred widow with romantic designs on Cedric. It is thanks to Nanny McPhee's help that the children succeed in securing the continuance of Aunt Adelaide's allowance and thwarting Mrs Quickly's plans, as well as engineering a romance between their father and the pretty young scullery maid Evangeline. As the children's behaviour improves, so do Nanny's looks, until by the end of the film she is free of her disfigurements. Emma Thompson not only stars in the film, but also wrote the screenplay, as she did for another of her films, "Sense and Sensibility". Thompson seems to have been angling for both the child and the adult audiences. Parents will be delighted that Nanny McPhee has five important lessons to teach her charges, all along the lines of go to bed when you are told, do as you are told and respect your elders and betters. Yet despite this improving, moralistic framework, the younger generation will be equally delighted by the fact that the Brown children manage to get away with a surprising amount of anarchistic mischief (including a food fight) and to terrorise the unpleasant adults, especially Mrs Quickly. "Nanny McPhee" is the sort of film that the phrase "fun for all the family" could have been invented for. 7/10

I really really had a good time watching this film, just exactly what I needed to escape a bit exactly what movies used to be when I was a child. Some will say it's way too predictable but some It's not a movie aiming at delivering a high level of suspense. It's a good tale with some wise moments. I especially like the parts when Nanny McPhee let the children take their own decisions and warn them about the consequences. I personally find this in real life to be an extraordinary way of dealing with children. The filming and set are beautiful (though I found the colors way too loud) and some moments are really funny exactly the sort of things children candidly laugh at (tricks played by the children, food fight). The thing I didn't like so much is that the relationship between Mr Brown and Evangeline is not really developed in the first part of the movie. He doesn't even seem to show any interest in her whatsoever. Even though we know from the start they'll get married at the end, it's kind of abrupt when they declare their love to each other. Small children will like this film as well as any grown up who's got a good dose of nostalgia and who kept one's child's spirit.