Mary Poppins

Seriously.

I just watched it again for the first time in ages. It's a pretty genius film in that nothing really happens, but it happens in such beautiful well-paced ways that you almost don't mind. I may have a soft spot for it because it's the first thing I ever saw in a theater-- though I'm amazed at how much I enjoyed it given that there's so much that I didn't understand (women suffragettes, the whole bank thing, etc) at all.

It has some nifty lyrics ("Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid"), two excrutiatingly cute children, and David Tomlinson doing a very nice job with a character who is built to be a cliche from the ground up.

But Mary Poppins herself-- nearly godlike, yet completely feminine. Nurturing without being goopy and weak, strong but not in a mannish way at all. And it's the male sidekick who has to pick up the narrative slack-- Bert becomes a clever device for avoiding any sort of weakness or explaining about her character. And the slight hints that they have some sort of backstory, but that she's in charge of it and he's the one who has to wait patiently for the times when she appears.

Okay, so she's maybe a kids version of a woman and not a woman's, but I'd still like to nominate her for the list.