Tag: Amanda Seyfried

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Mama Mia! Here We Go Again

I poke my head into my wife’s office and ask if she’s still interested in going to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again with me. No, sorry. She would, but she’s not as far along with her work as she thought she would be at this point. But it’s okay. I can go on without her.

It’s just an ABBA movie. 114 minutes of ABBA. I can do this.

I arrive at the theater and the pleasant girl behind the counter waves me in. They know me here. I arrive at my seat after the Chevy commercial, but before the trailers are done. Things are looking up! What do I remember about the first one? Meryl Streep’s got a daughter who wants to know who her dad is. Turns out it could be Pierce Brosnan, the handsome rich architect; Colin Firth, the handsome rich banker; or Stellan Skarsgård, the handsome rich sailor. Everybody sings a bunch of ABBA songs and decides nobody cares who the father is because the real father was the friends we made along the way.

The film begins, and I’m reminded that Meryl Streep’s daughter Sophie is played by Amanda Seyfried, whom I believe is secretly a Mark II Emma Stone android. She immediately starts singing ABBA a capella. I take a deep breath and remind myself I’m only here because I couldn’t stomach The Equalizer 2.

Here we go again — more ABBA, more Greece, and more singing in the sequel to Mamma Mia.

Sophie is sending out invites to a grand re-opening of Hotel Bella Donna, and also her mom Donna is dead. Apparently we couldn’t afford Meryl for the 10-years-after sequel.

But what’s this? A flashback to 1979! Donna’s a Dancing Disco queen and also valedictorian. It takes me a minute to figure out the connection, because young Donna is played by Lily James, who doesn’t in any way resemble Meryl. In lieu of a valedictorian speech, Donna sings “When I Kissed the Teacher,” which I have to admit is thematically appropriate. Just so happens that I stumbled across a marathon of Leonard Bernstein’s Omnibus on Turner Classic Movies last night, and watched an episode where the great composer takes a deep dive into the history of American musical comedy. The form originated in the late 1860s when a theater troupe and a minstrel group were both stranded in a town with one theater, so they took turns performing scenes and songs. People ate it up.

The guy who wrote West Side Story would have despised this movie. Bernstein said the key to a good musical is that the songs must advance the plot and illuminate emotions, creating artistic unity. In Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, things just kind of happen to provide excuses to sing listlessly. These renditions are so flat and lifeless, they make the original versions sound raw and edgy. Even the subtitle, “Here We Go Again,” sounds drained of energy.

Everyone is very sad that Meryl is dead. I haven’t seen a production scramble to maintain its dignity after a losing its star since Charlton Heston played hardball with the producers of Beneath the Planet of the Apes. But they got the last laugh. He showed up at the end.

Did I mention the Hotel Bella Donna is on an island “at the far end of Greece”? That’s how Young Donna describes it as she sets out from Paris on her postgraduate transcontinental insemination spree. The first guy she meets is Young Colin Firth (Hugh Skinner). You can tell he’s a punk because he shops at Hot Topic in 1979. The Busby Berkeley-inspired production number of “Waterloo” he and Allen perform with a horde of French waiters dressed as Napoleon is pretty much the high point of the picture. Then it’s on to the ocean, where Donna ends up with Young Stellan Skarsgård, (Josh Dylan), on board his yacht The Panty Dropper. At least I think that’s what it’s called. I dozed off for a while. Finally, she meets Young Pierce Brosnan (Jeremy Irvine), and they cohabitate in a rustic farmhouse. In the barn is a powerful black stallion—which is in no way a sexual symbol—that Donna must tame.

The blonde guy’s obviously the father, by the way.

What’s weird is, in the ABBA Universe, the Greek economic crisis of 2009 still happened. And Cher is there, but she looks like Lady Gaga, and is absolutely murdering “Fernando.” Then, just as the film goes full Beneath the Planet of the Apes, it hits me: Donald Trump is not president in the ABBA universe. That’s why everything seems so aggressively pleasant.

This Greek island seems nice. I want to go there.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

First Reformed

One thing the great filmmakers of the 1970s valued above all others was intensity. That’s evident in a pair of the decade’s masterpieces—Taxi Driver and Raging Bull—that were collaborations between director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader.

Ethan Hawk stars as a priest in existential crisis in First Reformed.

Schrader is something of a legendary figure in Hollywood, which is understandable when you see his filmography. He appears in the infamous New Hollywood gossip epic Easy Riders, Raging Bulls holed up in the Hollywood Hills with a pistol and a pound of weed, furiously pounding out the script to American Gigolo. Schrader called those films “man alone in a room stories.” They, along with his films like Auto Focus, rotate around a single individual, tortured, mysteriously driven, and often trying to make sense of a chaotic world. Usually, the protagonists, like Travis Bickle, come apart in the end in some spectacularly weird fashion.

Ethan Hawk and Amanda Seyfriend

First Reformed is a major comeback for Schrader, now 71. In this case, the man alone in the room is Ethan Hawke as Toller, an Episcopal priest in rural New York. His titular church was a stop on the Underground Railroad, but now it’s a dwindling congregation in a fading town. Toller spends more of his time giving tours to leaf peepers and school groups than ministering to his flock. That’s why, when Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks him for counseling, it’s something of a relief. Her boyfriend Michael (Philip Ettinger) is a environmental activist who just got out of prison in Canada on charges related to an oil sands pipeline protest. Mary is pregnant, but Michael doesn’t want her to have the baby. He no longer thinks the fight against climate change is winnable and believes its wrong to bring a child into a world that is doomed to foreseeable catastrophe.

Amanda Seyfried

The scenes between Hawk and Ettinger are brutal in their intensity, even though they’re just two people sitting alone in a room, talking. In his diary, which Schrader uses as a voice over device, Toller says the philosophical, scientific, and theological debate felt “exhilarating” like “Jacob wrestling the angel”.

The repercussions of that single conversation echo through the lives of the three characters. Toller was an Army chaplain whose son was killed in Iraq, driving him from the service and breaking up his marriage. He’s struggling to keep his psyche together and his job intact as the 250th anniversary of the founding of his church approaches. Mary and Michael’s dilemma puts pressure on him at exactly the wrong time as he prepares for a ceremony where his megachurch-leading boss Pastor Jeffers and the governor will attend, bringing unwanted attention to a man who just wants to disappear.

Hawke puts himself into the frontrunner position for the 2018 Best Actor Oscar with his performance as a strong but brittle man nearing his breaking point. Schrader’s screenplay is unsparing in its honesty and directness. Toller’s inner turmoil is existential, but grounded in real world pain. The situations are entirely believable and throughly of today, but Toller’s philosophical ponderings are right out of Shakespeare. Is it all, in the end, worth it?
The film’s unsparing intensity is at once its greatest strength and biggest weakness. To watch First Reformed is to stare unsparingly into the most basic, unanswerable philosophical questions we have. It is, as Toller says, both exhilarating and exhausting. Schrader earns his depth—there’s no such thing as gratuitous Christ imagery in a film with a priest for a leading man—but it’s about as subtle as a gold brick to the face.

First Reformed

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Film Features Film/TV

While We’re Young

So, Generation X is pushing middle age now. It’s okay. Our pop culture has been preparing us for it since the 1980s. The tone of Noah Baumbach’s new film While We’re Young is not that different from Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that appropriated the name of Billy Idol’s first band and applied to us. Coupland’s cast of self-destructive, 20-something slackers had been told all their lives that they didn’t have it as good as their parents, the Baby Boomers. Their internalized, preemptive disappointment often looked like nihilism from the outside, but from the inside, it felt like fighting back with the only tool we had: refusal. The Baby Boomers wanted to change the world for the better, but it didn’t work out like they planned. We decided to opt out of the aspects of America we found stale and rancid. We took our characteristically defeatist motto from Nirvana: “Oh well/Whatever/Nevermind.” If our grandparents who won World War II were the Greatest Generation, we were the Grumpiest Generation.

Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

For Ben Stiller’s character Josh, the preemptive disappointment of the 1990s has given way to the muddled malaise of the 2010s. He’s a filmmaker whose first documentary Power Elite was well received by critics but is now available only via VHS tapes for sale on eBay. He’s been working on his follow-up doc for eight years now, but it’s still six hours long, and when he tries to explain what it’s about, he can only say, “It’s about America.” His wife Cornelia (Naomi Watts) is a movie producer who works with her father, a storied documentarian from the film verité days named Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin). Josh’s resentment of his father-in-law’s success and his own relative obscurity means they don’t get along very well, but otherwise, he and Cornelia seem to have a pretty good life in Brooklyn. But when their friends Fletcher (The Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz) and Marina (Maria Dizzia) have a baby, it brings some of their discontent bubbling to the surface.

That’s when Josh meets Jamie (Adam Driver) while delivering a lecture to indifferent college students, in a scene that recalls Holly Hunter’s ill-fated speech on journalistic integrity in Broadcast News. Jamie is an up-and-coming documentarian who has actually seen Power Elite. The two hit it off, and soon Jamie and his wife Darby (Amanda Seyfried) are hanging out with Josh and Cornelia on the regular, despite their 20-year age difference. Josh and Cornelia find themselves reinvigorated by their new friends, who have a spark of youth they seem to have lost. “They have all the stuff we threw out,” Cornelia says of their vinyl-listening, VHS-watching new besties. “It just looks so much better in their space.”

Naomi Watts in While We’re Young

Baumbach’s been directing arch indie comedies about uncertain slackers since 1995’s Kicking & Screaming, but While We’re Young seems like a welcome departure for the auteur. He first collaborated with Stiller on 2010’s Greenberg, but this time around the tone is more generous and extroverted. Stiller successfully walks (and sometimes pratfalls) the line between sympathetic and jerky, but by the end he seems to have grown — something that doesn’t always happen in a Baumbach film. Watts brilliantly brings depth and charm to a character who, in lesser hands, could come across as underwritten. Crucially, she and Stiller are totally believable as a couple who’ve been together for a while, but who are still in love. Girls co-star Driver just seems to get better and better, and he is great as the younger, hungrier version of Stiller’s Josh. Grodin represents the older, more successful version of Josh, and when it becomes clear that he has more in common with the hustler Jamie than his fussy perfectionism, it only fuels Josh’s resentment and pushes him into greater, more hilarious humiliations. The most surprising performance is by a bearded Horovitz as a wide-eyed new father. Who knew Ad-Rock could act? But that’s the charm of While We’re Young: It starts off as a familiar comedy of postmodern manners before opening up and embracing a wider world. Cheer up, it says to Gen X. Everybody’s in the same boat. Get over yourselves.