Disney’s new film Saving Mr. Banks is a tribute to the perseverance of Walt Disney in getting Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers to allow him to make a film of her beloved character. The Disney studio is just as earnestly trying to get the legion of lovers of Mary Poppins to see that new film. Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke were trotted out to meet Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks in the spotlight at the Hollywood premiere this week. Most of the new extras on the erroneously titled 50th Anniversary Edition – it’s actually the 49th Anniversary this year – are a tie-in to the new film as well.

Despite all that, I have to say that the long anticipated Blu-ray release of the film provides everything fans could possibly hope for. It is pictorially and aurally magnificent with another new bonus – A Mary-oke as opposed to a “karaoke” sing-along to five of the film’s best loved songs. Missing, though, is Walt Disney’s alleged personal favorite, “Feed the Birds”.

The film’s original release in 1964 couldn’t have been more fortuitous for Disney. Julie Andrews had become a major star on Broadway in Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady in 1956 and an even bigger one when she played Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella live on TV the following year. Her follow-up Broadway role as Guenevere in Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot in 1960 was just as legendary. The show business world was shocked when Jack Warner hired Audrey Hepburn to play Eliza Dolittle in the 1964 screen version of My Fair Lady because Julie Andrews wasn’t a “movie star”. Disney quickly remedied the situation by casting her as Mary Poppins and Fox soon added to her newfound movie stardom by casting her as Maria Von Trapp in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. Mary Poppins made it into theatres first in August, 1964 two months ahead of Andrews’ dramatic debut in The Americanization of Emily and four months ahead of My Fair Lady. When the Oscar nominations were announced My Fair Lady led with 14, closely followed by Mary Poppins with 13. My Fair Lady went on to win 8 including Best Picture and Mary Poppins won five including Best Actress for Andrews. Hepburn wasn’t even nominated.

Earlier this year, two similarly themed major films found disfavor with critics and the public alike. Millennium Films’ Olympus Has Fallen got there first and made more money, $99.9 million on a $70 million dollar budget. Columbia Pictures’ White House Down, which is actually the better film, suffered by comparison when it opened three months later. It made just $73 million on a budget of $150 million. Both are ironically released on Blu-ray and standard DVD by the same company – Sony.

Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen is a relentlessly dehumanizing film in which cardboard villains capture the White House, tie up the President and his cabinet and commence shooting them one by one. The terrorists are North Koreans and their sympathizers. Gerard Butler is the disgraced former Secret Service guard to the president who just happens to be around when he’s needed. Aaron Eckhart as the President spends most of the film tied up. Morgan Freeman as the Speaker of the House and acting President and Angela Bassett as the Secret Service Director also sit around for most of the film, albeit at a conference table.

Roland Emmerich’s White House Down gives us a much more likeable action hero in Channing Tatum, a President who does a lot more in Jamie Foxx and, other leaders who do more than sit around and as plausible a plot as you can expect from a film in which you have to suspend disbelief anyway. The terrorists here are homegrown. The supporting cast includes Maggie Gyllenhaal, Richard Jenkins, Michael Murphy, James Woods and a very smart, very resourceful girl played by Joey King.

Zal Batmanglij’s The East, co-written by the director and his friend and star, Brit Marling, is highly reminiscent of the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s. Based on Batmanglij and Marling’s experiences following anarchists around when they were broke a few years ago, Marling plays an undercover agent for a private security firm who infiltrates a group of activists who come close to being terrorists. Alexander Skargard co-stars as the leader of the group that also includes Ellen Page, Toby Kebbell and Shiloh Fernandez. Patricia Clarkson plays Marling’s boss and Jason Ritter her left behind boyfriend. It’s no coincidence that the film plays like Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallex View and All the President’s Men, which are the director’s two favorite films.

The East is available on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Another collaboration between a film’s director and its star is Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, co-written by Baumbach and Greta Gerwig.

Filmed in the style of the French New Wave films of 1959-1964, it was shot digitally in color, but released in gorgeous black-and-white. Gerwig, who rose to fame in Baumbach’s Greenberg, plays a twenty something girl living in New York who floats from apartment to apartment trying to find herself. An aspiring dancer, she eventually gives up that career to work in an office and be able to have an apartment of her own without roommates. The plot doesn’t sound like much, and it really isn’t. The joy of the film is in the little everyday things that its protagonist and her friends go through.

Frances Ha, for which Gerwig is a Golden Globe nominee for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy has received the dual format deluxe release treatment from Criterion. One package contains both the Blu-ray and standard DVD. Extras include Peter Bogdanovich’s interview of Baumabch and Sarah Polley’s interview of Gerwig.

Warner Bros., which now holds the rights to the Samuel Goldwyn library of films, has released a re-mastered edition of Stella Dallas, the 1937 film for which Barbara Stanwyck received her first Oscar nomination as the self-sacrificing mother. Anne Shirley was also nominated for her lovely performance as Stella’s daughter. Directed by King Vidor, the film was preceded by an even better 1925 version with Belle Bennett and Lois Moran giving equally superb performances under Henry King’s sterling direction. Ronald Colman, Jean Hersholt, Alice Joyce and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. co-starred in the roles that were played in the 1937 version by John Boles, Alan Hale, Barbara O’Neil and Tim Holt. That version is a surprise bonus on the new release of the remake.

This week’s new releases include Ain’t Them Bodies Saints and Elysium.