Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

Film: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)
Stars: Amanda Seyfried, Lily James, Dominic Cooper, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Andy Garcia, Cher, Meryl Streep
Director: Ol Parker
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I have seen the musical Mamma Mia! both onstage and in theaters, but for me the songs of ABBA will always be something from my childhood, not something I learned about as an adult.  While I was nowhere near old enough to have ABBA be something on the "new hits" radio when I was younger, I stole my mom's ABBA Gold CD (along with Carole King's Tapestry & The Bodyguard...coming out feels so unnecessary in hindsight) and played it over-and-over again, secretly wishing for "Man After Midnight" and strutting to the "Dancing Queen."  The appeal of ABBA is their inexplicably fresh, infectious pop melodies-it's impossible to hear one of their songs that you know and not sing along as a result.  This is also the appeal of the Mamma Mia! franchise, now expanding into a fun, though oddly melancholy sequel-it makes the audience's nostalgia and inability to not sing along a character onto itself.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film take places a couple of years after the previous film, with Sophie (Seyfried) trying to make her mother's hotel dream come to life a year after Donna (Streep) has passed away.  Her relationship with her boyfriend Sky (Cooper) is strained as he is consistently away on business (and the audience is upset that he isn't jet-skiing in red board shorts again), and that two of her three fathers, Harry (Firth) and Bill (Skarsgard) aren't going to be able to make it for the grand opening.  We also learn that Sophie is pregnant (though in this case she knows Sky is the father), and we see flashbacks to her mother's arrival on this Greek island, and her interactions with younger versions of the three fathers.  This back-and-forth actually works quite well, with Lily James stepping into the role of a younger Donna with a great fizz.  The film ends with Donna's grandmother (Cher) coming out of the woodwork in time to sing "Super Trouper" and "Fernando" to a very game Andy Garcia (between this and Book Club, this is the summer of Andy Garcia romancing older women, and I am here for it).

The movie lives or dies off of the two things: the songs and the hot guys.  Really, Mamma Mia knows that its audience is women and gay men, and it doesn't disappoint either group.  The songs are fluffy and fun, and while there aren't any standout numbers (other than the gaudy loveliness of "Fernando"...I was at a morning matinee and I still heard applause from my fellow moviegoers when Cher started singing), you'd have to be deaf with a heart-of-stone not to be humming one of the songs when you left the theater.  The latter aspect we get in the forms of the three young fathers: Hugh Skinner (young Harry), Jeremy Irvine (Young Sam), and Josh Dylan (Young Bill).  Dylan, in particular, with his mop of blond hair and Elvis-like swinging thin hips, literally made me blush when he started moonwalking on a boat it was so, umm, arousing.  They could have just used the tagline "Come for the Hot Guys...Stay for the Cher" and made just as much as money.

The film's decision to go in a darker direction than its predecessor, with Donna dead for most of the film, feels a bit off at first, but as the film progresses it kind of works.  It's a testament to the confidence of Lily James' work, the appeal of the younger "dads" and the tunes of ABBA that you don't really miss Meryl Streep until she shows up and reminds you that she's a true movie star for a reason, giving a wrenching performance of "My Love, My Life."  Streep, more prone to cameos in recent years than she used to be (The Horseman, Suffragette, Mamma Mia 2, and probably Mary Poppins Returns this winter), knows how to effectively land her character in a few short breaths, and rocks out over the credits with Cher.  If they make another movie (and honestly why not at this point?), they don't need to even have the callback to her when they inevitably push Shirley MacLaine as Sophie's great-grandmother, but Meryl makes the most of her big number (as expected).

Burlesque (2010)

Film: Burlesque (2010)
Stars: Cher, Christina Aguilera, Stanley Tucci, Cam Gigandet, Kristen Bell, Eric Dane
Director: Steven Antin
Oscar History: I know you're laughing at the thought, but the film actually won the Best Original Song Golden Globe and may well have gotten Diane Warren her first Oscar had it made it through, but it sadly was skipped over for "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me"
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

It's Pride this weekend, and also we all need at least something to stop the madness in our lives right now (really-I cannot remember a year this volatile, and it's not even half over yet), so I am going to do a film review of a movie that I suspect no one out there can look at the photo of without both A) smiling and B) thinking "that's pretty gay," and that would be Burlesque, which I caught for the first time this week.  Sadly excused from our OVP for 2010 (more on that in a second), the film didn't do as badly as one would have expected (it bombed domestically but did well enough overseas to more than recoup its surprisingly large budget), and it's a lot more fun than you'd expect even if the broad brushstrokes of the picture are all laughably cliched.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Ali (Aguilera), a waitress with big city dreams who wants to go to LA to make it big, who stumbles across a burlesque show in Los Angeles that is down on its feet despite the denials of owner Tess (Cher).  There she meets a ridiculously hot (though conveniently straight) bartender name Jack (Gigandet-remember back when he was a thing post-Twilight...come to think of it remember when all of those actors on Twilight save the two stars & Kendrick were a thing...when is their Oprah: Where Are They Now coming up?), and eventually becomes his roommate despite him having a fiance.  After begging to be in the show, Tess eventually relents when one of the girls gets pregnant, and during a sabotage from her arch-rival Nikki (Bell), Ali gets a chance to sing and as she's Christina Aguilera she doesn't skip out on the "on-pitch foghorn" thing she's so famous for (I mean that as a compliment), and suddenly the entire film transforms as she deals with being a star and what comes from such a situation.

The film, as you may imagine, is filled with cliche.  Every single scene you can see coming a mile away-there is no surprise here, except that Cher and Christina never actually do a duet on-stage, which felt like a missed opportunity.  Ali's journey to being a headliner at Tess' club is obvious from the beginning of the movie (and not just because we know Christina can sing), but it's a film that does most of these scenes with relative charm.  It helps that you cast Cher and Stanley Tucci, both very game and fun performers (every scene between the two of them is a blast) and then don't ask some of the rest of the cast to do much.  Aguilera is actually better than you'd expect (this is no Crossroads situation), though she's not about to outdo, say, what Anna Kendrick would have done in this role-she has timing, and though she's occasionally over-eager in her delivery, it's a pity this film wasn't better-received by critics as she actually has some presence onscreen (Cam Gigandet doesn't, but his role here is really just to be obnoxiously good-looking, and in that he's successful).  No one would ever confuse this with being a "good" movie, but it's also certainly not a bad one, and it's pretty fun, quite frankly.  It goes to show that the Golden Raspberry Awards are intensely sexist and (in particular) decidedly homophobic that they thought it would be funny for Cher to be nominated for Worst Supporting Actress here, since she's way too good onscreen in this picture to ever be considered a "worst supporting actress."

The film should have been Oscar-nominated in Best Original Song, however, and that's a fact.  We discussed this race over here (please click if you're newer to the blog and aren't familiar with our now hundreds of Oscar Viewing Project write-ups), but this would have been the perfect time to give Diane Warren an Oscar.  "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me" is genuinely a good song, and comes in a critical moment in the film (unlike some nominees in this category in the past), and plus it's way better than anything the Academy came up with, which is admittedly not often the case for Diane Warren.  Honestly-it would have been the perfect time to honor a longtime celebrated songwriter without having to sacrifice the category, and she'd just won the Globe (and there weren't even five nominees in 2010-you wouldn't have had to bump anyone, and it's not like Randy Newman needed a second makeup Oscar).  All-in-all, one of the bigger blunders Oscar has made in recent years.

Those are my thoughts on Burlesque, a cheeky, occasionally ridiculous, but very watchable camp film. What are your thoughts?  Do you think Christina Aguilera will ever make another picture, or do you think her actress-appeal might be too limited?  How about getting Cher back in front of the camera?  And who else thinks this was Diane Warren's Oscar and AMPAS screwed it up?  Share your thoughts below!

OVP: Silkwood (1983)

Film: Silkwood (1983)
Stars: Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Cher, Craig T. Nelson
Director: Mike Nichols
Oscar History: 5 nominations (Best Director, Actress-Meryl Streep, Supporting Actress-Cher, Original Screenplay, Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

I do adore Meryl Streep, this is a true statement.  But on occasion I do miss her a little bit.  The reality is, for those who have grown up with a Devil Wears Prada-style Meryl that the Grand Lady of American Cinema wasn't always so stylized in her work on the screen.  Yes, there's little doubt that the past decade has been terrific for Streep, and that she's managed to parlay her work into being a movie star for a new generation, but it's worth remembering that she used to be a more naturalistic performer.  When Streep rose to prominence, there was such a sense of excitement around her, and the way that she could inhabit characters and create these deeply real, fleshed-out human beings.  She also, and this seems a bit harsh, used to be in better movies.  Perhaps few have been as good, though, as Silkwood, her 1983 drama about the life of Karen Silkwood, a nuclear whistleblower and labor activist from the 1970's.  The film, over thirty years old now, still feels fresh and relevant, a near-impossible coup for an issue film, but Mike Nichols and Streep herself aid this with bravura acting and a script that is more about human ignorance and bullying against a crusader than a specific issue.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film follows Karen (Streep), in many ways in the same vein as Erin Brockovich who would succeed her.  She's not a great mother (her children don't even live with her, a less forgivable reality in 1983 than today, but the indictment still rings the same), she is sexually promiscuous at work (she flashes a coworker in a crowded room), and she seems to just sort of skate by with an okay performance while claiming she's doing a great job (we all know that person at work).  She works, however, at a nuclear plant, and is frequently dealing with issues of nuclear safety.  The film features the famed Silkwood shower scenes, where after nuclear exposure a person (in this case, frequently Streep) has to endure a harsh, rough shower and forced scrubbing from coworkers in order to "prevent" radiation from the plutonium.

The film is certainly at its best when it focuses on Streep and her role as an unlikely crusader.  One of the more interesting points of the film that separates it from other "unlikely crusader" style films is the way that they don't point out how odd it is that Karen, who hasn't seemed to care about anything but herself before this fight, is the one doing it.  Karen Silkwood doesn't have her "come to Jesus" moment, and in many ways is doing this to save herself and find purpose in her life rather than initially as a safety precaution for her fellow workers.  Still, the way the script unfolds around her becomes even more haunting as the film progresses, as thirty years later we have a sense of the lies that she was being told, and the ways that the the plant would eventually go belly-up in the wake of her death due to the misplaced plutonium.  Watching her coworkers use arguments like "I want to keep my job" and "it's fine the way it is" are scary not only because you know they're essentially in the building that is guaranteeing their death, but because you see that sort of ignorance still today, where people claim climate change can't be real not because of the science but more because "it would cost jobs" and "it's too expensive."  A lot of the film, quite frankly, resonated with me as a climate change crusader, and I felt that you could pretty easily bring the entire story to the present day without much issue in that regard, which is petrifying.

The film received five Academy Award nominations, with Streep positioned best-of-all in the bunch.  There's something so mesmerizing about Streep in the early-1980's, watching the way that she doesn't dumb down her performance, the way she's so on in every scene.  In many ways her work here recalls Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln and There Will Be Blood in the way that she abandons any sense of the movie star behind the work, instead just becoming an iconic character.  I feel like in some ways, despite some really amazing work since, she hasn't done that in modern memory in quite the same way since Miranda Priestly.  Cher, gaining her first experience of "serious" acting, is fine but not in the same league as Streep's lesbian best friend-she and Kurt Russell both have their moments (I love the question mark that Cher leaves on her character, whether or not she sold her out in order to keep her job), but really they just sort of our sidelined by Streep's outstanding work (Kurt Russell was definitely a dish in this movie, though, it's worth saying).  Mike Nichols' directing is taut and clear as always-he keeps slightly extended-shots when he needs it, and the ending is filmed with just enough malice to get across his opinion of what happened to Karen Silkwood without legal being involved.  Combined with Nora Ephron's succinct script, the film is certainly well-done.  The movie might have a tad bit of sprucing up of the supporting characters (I particularly never quite got what was going on with Craig T. Nelson), but that's a pretty quiet quibble for such a film.

Those are my thoughts on this movie-what about yours?  Are you with me that Silkwood still feels remarkably prescient today?  Do you occasionally miss the Meryl of yore?  And considering she had an amazing cast of Debra Winger, Julie Walters, Jane Alexander, and the victorious Shirley MacLaine competing against her in 1983, do you think she deserved that Oscar?