{"id":500844,"date":"2026-03-28T22:47:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T22:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/500844\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T22:47:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T22:47:10","slug":"can-the-genius-behind-paddington-clean-up-enid-blyton-for-the-big-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/500844\/","title":{"rendered":"Can the genius behind Paddington clean up Enid Blyton for the big screen?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Paddington 2 <\/a>screenwriter Simon Farnaby is a busy man. Fresh from writing an updated prequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet to star in, he has turned his attention to cleaning up Enid Blyton\u2019s Magic Faraway Tree series for modern audiences, with greater success. Wonka felt like a bit of crisis management for the Roald Dahl brand, filing away all Dahl\u2019s orneriness and dark wit for the sake of a well-behaved Wonka you could introduce to your gran \u2014 which is to say, no Wonka at all.<\/a><\/p>\n

The outdated gender roles of Blyton\u2019s tale are a much easier fix. Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy make for an appealing pair of young parents: she\u2019s the high-earning designer, while he looks after the kids (Delilah Bennett-Cardy, Billie Gadsdon and Phoenix Laroche), trying to prise them away from their devices at dinner. But when Foy quits her job, it\u2019s time to dust off one of the couple\u2019s earlier dreams and head for the countryside, where Dad can grow his own tomatoes, a hipster dream of artisanal self-sufficiency that horrifies the kids. They roll up at a cobwebbed, ramshackle barn with no wifi and a tractor where the kitchen top should be. \u201cI\u2019ve only got 3G!\u201d the kids wail. \u201cHave we gone back in time?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ClaireAndrew Garfield and Claire Foy star as the young parents who move their family to the countryside <\/p>\n

As his work on the Paddington films showed, Farnaby excels at charming portrayals of modern family life with just enough fractiousness and idiosyncrasy to make them believable. It\u2019s almost a shame when their youngest, Fran, is led by a fairy named Silky (Nicola Coughlan) to a magical tree in an enchanted forest. In its upper branches they find a big-headed Regency dandy named Moonface (Nonso Anozie), an angry pixie (Hiran Abeysekera), Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning) and a ladder leading to a series of different worlds. There\u2019s the Land of Goodies and the Land of Birthdays, a kind of roller-disco seemingly staffed by Eurovision presenters, where everyone gets one wish.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The all-you-can-eat buffet arrangement is the giveaway here. With the series first published in the 1930s, Blyton was writing before CS Lewis\u2019s Chronicles of Narnia,<\/a> but her magical worlds have none of the cohesion and moral danger of Lewis\u2019s. We are in the same gauzy candy-coloured dreamland of 101 children\u2019s entertainments, with a few tacked-on warnings about not being too greedy and a late-arriving villainess played by Rebecca Ferguson. The film is more plugged into the dreams of the parents than the kids; every time we return to Garfield, Foy and their dream of a tomato farm, the story revives.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Farnaby has much more fluency round the choppy emotions of family life, you realise, than he does for straight magic \u2014\u00a0the magical elements in Paddington 2 were, after all, minimal \u2014\u00a0but if it\u2019s a fully realised vision of Arcadia you\u2019re after, Greta Gerwig\u2019s Narnia, coming in November, would seem like the one you must pin your hopes on.\u00a0
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606
U, 110min<\/p>\n

\"ADakota Johnson in Splitsville \u2014 \u201cdon\u2019t see this film if you\u2019re in love, or want to be\u201d<\/p>\n

Dakota Johnson lends her slow-burn sophistication to the sex comedy Splitsville. That\u2019s not \u201csex comedy\u201d as in something for teenagers loaded with jokes fit for the locker room. Nor is it \u201csex comedy\u201d as in something frilly and British with naked husbands peeking from behind lace curtains to see if the coast is clear. Instead, with a nod to the director Judd Apatow<\/a>, it\u2019s a sharp, adult themes-filled throwback to the films of the Seventies, like Paul Mazursky<\/a>\u2019s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, where a group of educated, liberated sophisticates say, \u201cWe\u2019re fine with this,\u201d and then end up in a Gordian knot of jealousy, insecurity and confusion by the film\u2019s end.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

That\u2019s pretty much the plot of Splitsville, which is not really about sex at all but about people being confused about what their emotions are. It helps that the characters are hipsters and life coaches who feel as if they should know better. <\/p>\n

After a brutal break-up, Carey (Kyle Marvin, who co-wrote the film with its director, Michael Angelo Covino) winds up weeping on the expensive couch of his best friend, Paul (Covino), and his wife, Julie (Johnson), who have \u201csolved\u201d the problem of adultery by taking the guilt out of it: they have an open marriage. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhat if it\u2019s someone you know?\u201d asks Carey, who promptly puts the theory to the test by taking solace in Julie\u2019s bed one night when Paul is off in the city. Paul responds with an assault worthy of John Wick<\/a>, smashing vases, furniture and fish tanks. It ends with both men on a mercy run to save the fish. He\u2019s not as OK with it as he thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Therein lies the rub of Marvin and Covino\u2019s busy, freewheeling comedy, which seems to have run its course by about the 30-minute mark but keeps finding new romantic triangulations to run past us. \u201cThis is exhausting,\u201d Carey\u2019s ex-wife, Ashley (Adria Arjona), says, and the film is, a little, too. <\/p>\n

Marvin and Covino like a busy screen with lickety-split dialogue that allows punchlines to come out of nowhere \u2014 many of the jokes land like gut punches \u2014 but there\u2019s no one\u00a0you hope will get together in the final reel. <\/p>\n

Johnson, as usual, seems to be playing with rom-com formula the way a cat plays with mice, as she did in The Materialists<\/a> last year. So don\u2019t see this film if you\u2019re in love, or want to be. See it in the aftermath of a break-up, or want a cackle at the improbability of commitment.\u00a0
\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606
15, 104min<\/p>\n

Two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman<\/p>\n

Times+ members can enjoy two-for-one cinema tickets at Everyman each Wednesday. Visit\u00a0thetimes.com\/timesplus<\/a>\u00a0to find out more.<\/p>\n

Which films have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Paddington 2 screenwriter Simon Farnaby is a busy man. Fresh from writing an updated prequel to Charlie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500845,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-500844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500844\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}