Tag: Colin Firth

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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 Features Film/TV

Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle

If you’ve been keeping up with the headlines, you know the United Kingdom is undergoing something of an identity crisis right now. For a while, they thought they wanted to leave the European Union, and voted to do so. But now, once the implications of that epic goal are sinking in, a solid majority wants to remain. Yet they stay stuck on a course that only the worst minority of their citizens seem to want, paralyzed by bickering and a few savvy players with a death grip on power.

Hmm. Sounds familiar.

James Bond was the filmic personification of Cold War Britain. Ian Fleming was a man’s man. A veteran of Naval Intelligence during World War II, he created his super-spy as a projection of the best parts of his self image: tough but cultured, competent and ruthless but principled enough to use his death-dealing powers only for good. And, of course, a tiger with the ladies. In the seething fever swamps of online fandom forums, they would call James Bond a Mary Sue — a walking wish fulfillment that is automatically the best at everything he tries.

2014’s Kingsman: The Secret Service and its sequel, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, are Bond for Brexit Britain. Ostensibly, these films are satire of the super-spy genre, but in practice the distance between mocked and mocker is almost nonexistent. It’s only a comedy if somebody gets offended at the puerile sexism.

Director Matthew Vaughn’s basic method is to take the subtext from Bond and Bourne and make it the text. James Bond is a secret agent who dresses well. Harry Hart (Colin Firth) is literally a tailor who moonlights as a secret agent. Bond fights for queen and country, which is to say, wealth and empire. Merlin (Mark Strong) and Eggy (Taron Egerton) serve only pure capitalism. With their impeccable suits and high-tech assault umbrellas, they are the personifications of consumption. Pro patria is now keep shopping.

The familiarity continues with the plot, which starts with Mission Impossible before spinning off into supervillain stupid. Eggy, who inherited the code name Galahad after his mentor Harry took Samuel L. Jackson’s bullet in his face in the first movie, is leaving work after a tough day of tactical tailoring when he’s confronted by a gun-wielding cyborg named Charlie (Edward Holcroft), who has a Kingsman-sized chip on his cybernetic shoulder. After a thoroughly ridiculous black cab chase that ends with a riff on Roger Moore’s submarine supercar from The Spy Who Loved Me, what looks like an easy Kingsman victory turns into catastrophe. Left to its own devices, Charlie’s severed cybernetic arm hacks the cab’s computer and transmits the names of all the Kingsman agents to Poppy Adams (Julianne Moore). She’s the mother of all drug lords who lives in exile in a faux ’50s small town she’s constructed for herself in the jungle. Also, she’s holding Elton John hostage for some reason.

Poppy kills all of the Kingsmen except Merlin and Galahad, forcing them to swallow their pride and seek help from their American counterparts. The Statesmen, whose front-line troops include Agent Tequila (Channing Tatum) and Agent Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), who bears a striking resemblance to Smokey and the Bandit-era Burt Reynolds, are fronted and financed by a Kentucky whiskey distillery. Naturally, they are appalled when Poppy reveals her master plan to blackmail the countries of the world into legalizing all drugs, because they’re afraid she will cut into their profits. The inherent contradiction in Poppy’s plan to legalize drugs by poisoning drugs is immediately exploited by the President of the United States (Bruce Greenwood), but the Kingsmen and Statesmen fight her anyway.

Taron Egerton (left) and Mark Strong star in Kingsmen: The Golden Circle.

To be fair, Poppy’s plan isn’t really much stupider than, say, Drax from Moonraker‘s scheme to take over the world by killing everyone in it with an orbital poison gas bombardment. And for all their over-the-top competence, the Kingsmen aren’t that bright, either. Watching two well-dressed gangs of idiots fight with high-tech gadgets and wallow around in 1970s Bond tropes should be a lot more fun than this. This mutated lad mag of a film wants to be suave, polished, and witty, but is really loud, boorish, and impressed with its own cleverness while insisting you laugh at its dad jokes. I’d say they’ve captured the zeitgeist just fine.

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Film Features Film/TV

“Magic in the Moonlight” Is Less Than Magical

Critical judgments are seldom permanent; when given some time and room to breathe, an underwhelming or puzzling movie from March can end up on a best-of list in December. This is also true for filmmakers. As the years go by, some filmmakers step into the spotlight while others slowly recede from view.

Then there’s Woody Allen, who doesn’t appear to care about things like legacy and influence. Allen plugs away year after year and movie after movie, confronting the same old issues and repeating himself in the same old comic or dramatic ways no matter how badly you want him to just stop already.

Amazingly, he can’t be entirely ignored yet. 2011’s Midnight In Paris, with its uncharacteristically loose Owen Wilson performance, its gentle insistence that there were never any good old days, its jokey depiction of Lost Generation icons, and its plentiful shots of Rachel McAdams’ ass (purely accidental, I’m sure), was his best and most playful film in nearly two decades. But Magic in The Moonlight, Allen’s latest European period piece, is a humorless reversion to a depressing norm.

Emma Stone and Colin Firth

The old-timey jazz tunes on the soundtrack, along with that unmistakably faux-classical opening title-card sequence promise more of the same old thing. Set at the end of the roaring 1920s, Magic stars Colin Firth as Stanley, a famous magician and skeptic who’s asked by an old friend to travel from Berlin to the south of France to debunk Sophie (Emma Stone), a young medium from Kalamazoo who appears to have real supernatural powers.

As everyone in the movie points out repeatedly, Stanley is the right man for the job: having sworn fealty to logic, reason, order, and nothingness, he spouts Nietzsche at people who look at him too long and smirks at anyone “desperate for a little hope in a world that has none.” But will Sophie show him the error of his ways? Well, would an Allen surrogate like Stanley dare to let some girl expand his conception of how the world works?

In this cotton-mouthed farce, Firth deserves some credit for making Stanley an insufferable prick. Strident, heedless, and almost angrily self-satisfied, Firth plows through the film like a cross between The Great Gatsby‘s Tom Buchanan and The Big Bang Theory‘s Sheldon Cooper. Emma Stone, playing the requisite ingénue, handles her diaphanous-dipsy role better than previous Allen muses. With help from cinematographer Darius Khondji’s blurry, lens-flared Mediterranean postcard work, Firth and Stone’s scenes together almost drown out Allen’s usual God-is-dead, what-does-it-all-mean bellyaching.

If you have to see a Woody Allen movie this year, John Turturro’s Fading Gigolo, in which Allen played a supporting role, is a gentler and sexier romantic comedy where the characters may have read some existentialist philosophy but have the good taste not to lecture each other about it. But never fear; Allen is already at work on his next project. Emma Stone will star.