How Could I Resist Ya?

Year: 2018

Director: Ol Parker

Cast: Lily James, Amanda Seyfried, Cher

Run Time: 1 hour 54 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

I don't wanna talk about things we've gone through, but as a reviewer it's kind of my obligation. The 2008 Mamma Mia! is a frankly disastrous film adaptation of a shallow but fun stage musical based on the songs of Swedish disco supergroup ABBA. Nevertheless I love it, for reasons almost entirely separate from the movie itself. And I couldn't help but be excited for its ten-years-later sequel, for the twin reasons that it's a movie that should never have existed (the type of thing I'm unduly fascinated by) and that I love the ABBA discography, and going deeper into it is far more rewarding than just skimming off the top of ABBA Gold like the last film did (for more of my thoughts on that, check out my first contribution to one of my favorite film sites: Alternate Ending). Also Cher. But I could have never predicted what I actually got, and I'm all the more dazzled by that. Let's jump in.

Because if there's one thing that's incredibly safe and comfortable to do in those outfits, it's jumping.

That history book on the shelf is always repeating itself, which is how we got this belated sequel in the first place, but the notes of Here We Go Again's plot are still somewhat unfamiliar for this particular glittery universe. We meet up again with Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) on the eve of the grand re-opening of her mother's hotel on the Greek island of Kalokairi. It has been a year since Donna Sheridan (Meryl Streep) has passed, of causes unknown (though the random screengrab of her white-knuckling a glass of wine that's hanging on the wall might offer some clues), and she and one of her three dads Sam (Pierce Brosnan) are still heartbroken over it.

Those happy days, they seemed so hard to find, but never fear! Our old pals are back to play, including Sophie's beau Sky (Dominic Cooper), her other two dads Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan Skarsgård), and her mother's glee team Rosie (Julie Walters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski). Joining them are Andy Garcia as the hotel manager Fernando (gee, I wonder when that'll turn out to be important) and Cher as Sophie's absentee grandmother Ruby. As Sophie tries to navigate into the newest stage of her life, she finds that her story is mirroring that of her mother's way back when in 1979, as played out by Lily James alongside younger versions of Rosie (Alexa Davies) and Tanya (Jessica Keenan Wynn) as she flirts with and beds future dads Bill (Josh Dylan), Sam (Jeremy Irvine), and Harry (Hugh Skinner).

Although it's possible she didn't know they were three separate people, because they all look more or less exactly the same.

It was like shooting a sitting duck to make a Mamma Mia! movie that I'd actually enjoy, whether it was incredible, terrible, or anything in between. But the absolutely terrific thing about Here We Go Again is that it edges up against incredible, at least on the admittedly very adjusted scale that comes from being in continuity with Mamma Mia!. 

Having the time of your life is obviously the movie's biggest priority, and there are certain aspects in which the movie fails as a whole in its efforts to achieve this. For one thing, the narrative is completely inert. Sure it has more thrust and structure than the previous entry, but that's like saying you have more character drama than a Transformers movie. It's not exactly an achievement. Most of the movie, at least in the present day scenes, is just about people sitting around waiting for a party (which I could relate to, having gotten to the theater an hour early). And the flashback sequences are slavish retreads of the exact material implied by dialogue and lyrics from the original (the "walk along the Seine" line from "Our Last Summer" even gets a totally superfluous nod). And yet, the way the film connects Sophie's experience with her mother's miraculously achieves a sort of tenderness and genuine emotion of which I would have previously thought this franchise completely incapable.

But I won't feel blue like I always do, because this movie has so much more to offer than a mere story. For one thing, it has a director who actually seems to know how movies are made. The first time the camera moved in a scene, I almost jolted out of my seat, because that never happens in the original. Mamma Mia! just plunks down on a tripod and lets its cast of high wattage stars do their karaoke. In Here We Go Again, Ol Parker's camera roves around the set, snatching glamorous and sometimes even glorious images from the tumult of turquoise and glitter. It's entirely refreshing and allows the manic energy of the material to be captured in a way that actually highlights and accentuates its key components rather than sitting back from the material and letting its gaudiness shine through.

The picture clear, everything seems so easy to Parker, who crafts a musical theatre spectacle like his life depends on it. It helps that he doesn't have to rely on the A-listers who wander in and out of the present day portion like they're in one of the Netflix seasons of Arrested Development. He has the freedom to keep them around as their schedules allow, toss them a few bones here and there (thankfully, not too many are caught by Pierce Brosnan, who has not taken singing lessons in the intervening decade), and focus his best on the young, relatively unknown cast in the 1979 sequences. Because their characters are attached to the famous people, he knows audiences will still care, and his casting could focus on actual talent and not star wattage. And they sure are (mostly) talented! Some of the boys sing a little too emphatically, like they're worried they'll be fired if you miss a single syllable, but the production numbers (especially "Waterloo" and "Why Did It Have to be Me?") are lovely little trifles with grand choreography that utilize every little element of the setting and create imaginative dreamscapes that remind one of the best of classic movie musicals.

Although, as much as I love the song "When I Kissed the Teacher," what compelled them to include such a track in 2018 is still a mystery to me.

Would you laugh at me if I said I cared for Lily James' outfits more than most human beings? Costume designer Michele Clapton knows how to make the human body look cinematic, and Lily James is the perfect canvas for some of the best movie costumes of the decade, perfectly flowy and retro yet effortlessly modern and stylish at the same time. But I digress. This is a musical, let's talk about some more music! Here We Go Again resists temptation to repeat too much of the original soundtrack (of the canonical songs that appear in the actual film and not the credits, we just get "Mamma Mia," "Dancing Queen," an expanded "I Have a Dream," and a blissfully brief reprise of "S.O.S." with the rest of the songs being relegated to the instrumental score during dialogue scenes), and pulls some truly special, unexpected tracks like "Andante, Andante" and "Angel Eyes," two songs I love so much I could't help but thrill with delight.

All my sense had gone away, but I can still admit that there are certain... flaws in more than just the plot. There's still a bit of abrupt song introductions and flat singing (Brosnan and Cooper being the worst perpetrators), Seyfried is sleepwalking so hard you can practically see the drool, and Cher is a lot of things but she's not particularly convincing, as much as I love the fact that she's here at all. And it's a little hard to ignore the fact that they seem to have forgotten that Colin Firth's character is gay (the biggest mention of his character's sexuality is secreted away in an end credits stinger), and that the glitz and glamor of this musical about rich tourists ignores the economic plight of the Greek people they use as props (the film has one scene about fishermen being out of work, and it's used as an excuse to get a character a boat). I'm not saying they're bad for not mentioning it, I'm saying they shouldn't have introduced the concept in the first place if they were going for full musical theater fantasia, because it introduces a bit of a rankling cognitive dissonance.

But the destination makes it worth the while, because - especially in the second half - Here We Go Again is actually genuinely funny as well as entertaining spectacle. The script is much stronger this time around, building gags and character dynamics out of the thin air that was the original characters. Plus, Baranski and Walters (and their younger counterparts) are given some material that's actually quite dirty instead of innuendo so subtle that Christian Grey would even be scratching his head. So, let's add this all together. Terrific, non-obvious ABBA songs, actually talented cast members, solid humor, a director with a head on his shoulders, colors that pop, and a heartfelt emotional throughline? Are you sure this is a Mamma Mia! movie?

Knowing me, knowing you, it's the best they can do.

TL;DR: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is surprisingly tender and terrific.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1591
Reviews In This Series
Mamma Mia! (Lloyd, 2008)
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (Parker, 2018)

Popcorn Culture: Best Picture Contenders, Vol. 2

I did it! For the first time in my life, I've actually seen every film nominated for Best Picture in a particular year! Am I glad it was this year? Probably not, but at least I can feel accomplished. Here are my mini-reviews for the final two bricks in that wall.

Phantom Thread

Year: 2017

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast: Vicky Krieps, Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville 

Run Time: 2 hours 10 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A meticulous and demanding couture designer meets and seduces a young woman, who becomes his muse and eventually enters a battle of manners and wills in the power struggle between him, her, and his spinster sister.

Phantom Thread is a hard movie to review, because it's so impeccably structured and designed that it's impossible to ignore the skill and craft that went into its creation. But it's at least a little difficult to find a foothold and manifest an active interest in the proceedings, which are appropriately chilly and at arm's length. 

There's hardly a fault in the visual world that Paul Thomas Anderson, costume designer Mark Bridges (who has worked with PTA since his debut, but more importantly worked on Dollman vs. Demonic Toys and Waxwork II: Lost in Time) and production designer Mark Tildesley (who worked on 28 Days Later... and aren't you glad you're reading my commentary, because nobody else would be telling you these important things) have created, which is pristine and precise from top to bottom.

The fun of this movie comes when you place the three actors into this toy box and send them spinning into one another. At first their interactions are as stiff and formal as the scenery, but as they settle into their roles, it quickly becomes clear that this is the ensemble of the year. I don't have a lot of respect for Daniel Day-Lewis' ostentatious style of preparing for a role, but he does do a good job, although he is conspicuously the weakest link in this trio. Krieps is doing tremendously subtle work here that quietly, almost imperceptibly builds toward an incredibly bold set of actions in the final act that you wouldn't have thought her capable of just 90 minutes before. And Manville is incredibly frightening as a woman whose stiff, prim confidence can weather any storm. With these two in the room, Day-Lewis just looks like a child play-acting that he's fancy.

I really did warm to this movie but he third act, but there's no avoiding the fact that at times it's quite dull, progressing from stiff scene to stiff scene at the pace of an arthritic snail. It's probably the artiest art film on the slate, and that just isn't really what gets my engine revved. But if you like angry, horny, twisted comedies of manners, it's worth it to stick around.

Rating: 6/10

Darkest Hour

Year: 2017

Director: Joe Wright

Cast: Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Winston Churchill must find the strength to lead England into what seems like an unwinnable war against the Nazis, after he is voted prime minister by a parliament that has no real faith in him.

Darkest Hour has reputation already for being the most flagrantly terrible of the year's Oscar slate, but for my money no film is as actively anti-entertaining as The Post, so this film is safe from my wrath. Unfortunately, it has nothing to offer other than not sucking so hard your fillings dislodge from your teeth. It's the most aggressively average bit of Awards bait in a year full of projects that - good or bad - are all at least unique in some way.

Like all performances the Academy loves to reward, Gary Oldman does nothing to push the craft forward other than drowning himself in prosthetics and shouting as loud as he possibly can without having his fake jowls wobble right off his face. His portrayal of Winston Churchill is a screeching caricature, constantly winking at the history buffs in the audience while conspicuously failing to craft an actual human character.

We're meant to take his abuse of the other characters in the movie as a charming symptom of his passion and eccentric individualism. At least Phantom Thread had the decency to know how twisted its control-freak character was, we're supposed to root for this blowhard. And in the process of this extravagant yelling, every other character is shoved against the wall and flattened to one dimension at best as they act out a grab bag of real life scenarios, including - mysteriously - the decision to evacuate the troops at Dunkirk, which is just a grim reminder that you could have been watching Dunkirk instead of this movie.

The best thing I can say about Darkest Hour is that it's at least shot well. Joe Wright and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (who shot the sumptuously gorgeous Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as well as Amélie and Inside Llewyn Davis) have a way of isolating Churchill inside the frame that isn't the least bit subtle, but is far more emotionally satisfying than any scrap of dialogue, for stimulating the audience using visual beauty rather than desperate wheezing.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 874

Reviewing Jane: A Lady's Imagination Is Very Rabid

In which we review (almost) every film adapted from or inspired by the works of Jane Austen, as I read through her extended bibliography for the first time. (This is a previous review that has been retrofitted to be as such)

Year: 2016

Director: Burr Steers

Cast: Lily James, Sam Riley, Jack Huston

Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Would you believe that I’ve been waiting years for a Pride and Prejudice and Zombies movie? When I sat down to read the source material, Seth Grahame-Smith’s novelty mash-up novel, I was greatly disappointed to find that he had merely copy-pasted Jane Austen’s masterpiece and added a reference to zombies every other paragraph or so. It was a lazy cash grab, but I instantly hoped they would make it into a movie, because the concept is stellar and the visual medium would reduce its slavish devotion to the text of the novel.

I stand by that idea. A movie of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a great idea. Just not this movie.

Turns out, beggars CAN be choosers.

Running through the plot feels like a pointless exercise given the title of this movie, but let’s do it for the sake of tradition. Country girl Lizzy Bennet (Lily James) lives with her parents and sisters, all under pressure from their mother to get themselves married off, although she resists the idea. When Mr. Bingley (the preposterously beautiful Douglas Booth) moves into town with the sour zombie hunter Colonel Darcy (Sam Riley), Lizzys sister Jane (Bella Heathcoate) falls for Bingley while Lizzy herself catches Darcy’s eye.

Thus begins a tentative romance between two stubborn, star-crossed lovers as the British prepare for battle with the zombie hordes that threaten the London stronghold. Also, Lizzy has a brief dalliance with one Lt. George Wickham (Jack Huston, who you probably don’t recognize as the new Ben-Hur because nobody saw that movie), who shows her that the zombies may be forming an I Am Legend-esque society where they retain aspects of their humanity while the living senselessly slaughter them. But nothing comes of it because Grahame-Smith is not Richard Matheson.

Frankly, it’s insulting to even mention their names in the same sentence. Please accept my humblest apologies.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in a weird place, tonally. The characters in the story must take themselves seriously in order for the absurdity of the premise to land. This is also true of the satire present in the source material. So far so good. Unfortunately the satirical elements of Austen are damped by the zombie mayhem, shifting the priorities of the characters too far from their original focus on marriage-above-all to be effective.

If the film had doubled down on its action sequences and gross zombie mutilations, it could have overcome that flaw by instilling a further sense of fun, but the gleefully grotesque potential is hampered by a PG-13 rating, leaving us with a social satire/absurdist mash-up in which neither of those halves are particularly funny. This maddeningly delicate tonal balance could still have worked, but it definitely required a lighter directorial hand than the one attached to 17 Again auteur Burr Steers.

According to IMDb, David O. Russell was originally attached to helm this movie. It probably would have still sucked, but imagine a universe where that happened. Delightful.

So, no. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is not fun. It is not gory. It is not even a little bit campy. It’s still better than the book, but what’s the point of comparing a dumpster to a landfill? The film is mostly a desaturated, overserious slog that’s utterly dull to watch, like The Witch only with no obvious intention and not a single memorable frame. There are occasional sparks of life in the shambling corpse of a film, like the expositional opening credits presented in pop-up book form or a fun twist on the Indiana Jones map cutaway, depicting the characters’ journeys as a droplet of blood running down a map. But these genuinely delightful design elements are buried under a pile of glum, grey gunk.

It doesn’t help that the plot is a shambles. The guardrails of the Pride and Prejudice text (in which – spoilers, I guess – no major character dies) prevent anything particularly interesting or deadly from happening, and the one wholecloth addition to the plot – the zombie war and the unique way the zombies can avoid losing their human faculties – is a dreadful mess. The battlefront scenes require Gahame-Smith to use his own imagination, so they’re a nonsensical slurry. The main villain’s endgame is wholly perplexing and the film introduces a strangely supernatural element (four literal horsemen of the apocalypse) that it completely ignores. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies constantly hints that there’s a far more interesting film going on somewhere around the edges, but that just makes it all the more frustrating that we’re frogmarched through the Darcy-Lizzy romance, brought to life by two actors who have absolutely zero chemistry. (James is fine here, but Riley grumbles out his lines like he’s slowly being turned to stone).

Every addition to the source material is muddled, and their presence renders the power of the original story impotent, so there’s no particular reason for the film to exist. Jane Austen’s dialogue is still great, so at least it’s possible to sit through the film and survive the experience. And there’s one shining jewel in the film’s blasted, bloodless firmament: Matt Smith’s excellent and hilarious performance as the foppish Parson Collins. But this film stabs itself in the back at every turn, rendering it an extravagantly pointless affair.

TL;DR: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a boring sludge of taking itself too seriously.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 917
Other Films Based on Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice (Leonard, 1940)

Pride and Prejudice (miniseries - Langton, 1995)
Bridget Jones's Diary (Maguire, 2001)
Pride & Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (Black, 2003)
Bride & Prejudice (Chadha, 2004)
Pride and Prejudice (Wright, 2005)
Unleashing Mr. Darcy (Winning, 2016)
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Steers, 2016)
Before the Fall (Geisler, 2016)
Marrying Mr. Darcy (Monroe, 2018)
Christmas at Pemberley Manor (Theys, 2018)
Pride, Prejudice, and Mistletoe (McBrearty, 2018)

Pride & Prejudice: Atlanta (Baraka, 2019)