'Nanny McPhee And The Big Bang'

On Sunday evening we went to see 'Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang', the latest film by Emma Thompson and her great portrayal of Nanny McPhee. The film treads a nice line between being a sequel and being a film that you don't have to have seen the first one to enjoy, and it works very well indeed.

As a 'family' film there was a lot of scene setting up-front, with the children being out of control and needing a nanny to sort them out, exacerbated in this film by having the posh cousins arrive at the country farm of their aunt whose husband is away fighting in the Second World War. There are a few sub-plots going on, like the bad brother of the husband who wants to sell the family farm to pay off gambling debts and being threatened by the nasty debt collecting women - it's nice for the baddies to be women for a change, and very good they are too.

The children are all good and interact well, the adults all play their stereotyped roles well and it was a surprise to see Sam Kelly as his pantomime character somewhere underneath his rather fleshily rotund physique. Maggie Gyllenhaal was great casting as the hapless mother who saw the positive side of her children using her wedding veil to trap the escaped piglets. She and Ewan McGregor make a nice couple, especially since Ewan doesn't actually have any lines. The piglets were stars in their own right as a porcine synchronised swimming team.

Emma was great fun as Nanny, gradually becoming prettier as the children learned their lessons. It's actually quite refreshing to have an actress of Emma's calibre deliberately playing it ugly, warts, fat and all, and still commanding the screen. But one of the best scenes goes to Maggie Smith when she sits on a cowpat during a picnic - a lovely scene. And, of course, she trumps everyone else in the penultimate scene when she holds the baby's rattle she was given by Nanny McPhee in the first film which suggests that her character was the baby in the first film, now grown old.

It might be a kids fillum, but go and see it on the big screen while you can - it's a celebration of life. And then buy the DVD so you can celebrate life whenever you want!