"Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again"

 ☆☆☆ 

In England, where I saw Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again as an afternoon respite on an unusually hot summer day, there's an old ad slogan that has entered everyday use: "It does exactly what it says on the tin." Meaning, of course, that sometimes the best you can say about something is that it does what it claims to do.

Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again fits the description to a tee. Here we go again with the same corny plot contrivances, the same characters (most also presented here in their younger selves), the same beautiful scenery, the same ABBA overload. Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again isn't as much a film as it is a series of ABBA songs strung together searching for a plot.

So what if the words to "Fernando" make absolutely no sense when sung as a love song? You think the movie is going to move its setting from the Greek islands to Mexico and recast its young lovers as civil war soldiers just to make the song work? Ha! The song will work, lyrics aside, because it has to work. And the cast is going to make it work, no matter what.

Because it's the second movie, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again doesn't get the benefit of containing ABBA's biggest hits -- they filled up the original Mamma Mia. But because any collection of ABBA songs isn't worth its salt without "Dancing Queen" and "Super Trouper," they pop up again here, entirely unworried about being recycled from the first film -- these songs are the reason the audience is here, and the one thing Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again would be loathe to do is disappoint its audience.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who is trying to rebuild and reopen an island resort in Greece.  Her husband (Dominic Cooper) is a work-absorbed schmuck who values a business trip to New York over his wife's endeavors, which are meant to -- SPOILER ALERT FOR THOSE WHO REALLY CARE ABOUT A SPOILER IN A MAMMA MIA MOVIE -- help keep alive the memory of Sophie's mother Donna (Meryl Streep), who has died before the start of the movie.

Amusing shenanigans take place. Sophie invites everyone who's anyone to a grand, all-star, exclusive gala, but a freak storm wipes out everything, and while that happens the film jumps back and forth in time to tell concurrent stories of both Sophie and her misadventures, as well as younger versions of Donna (Lily James in flashbacks) and her BFFs.

All three of Sophie's possible fathers (Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skårsgard) try to make their way to the island, while the movie offers up more detail on how Donna got pregnant with Sophie and why she has never been sure -- even in the days of Ancestry.com and 23 and Me -- which one of them is Sophie's real dad.

If you want to know more about the story, well, you're probably at the wrong movie. Story is irrelevant.  Singing skills are irrelevant (though better this time around than in the first). What matters is what the setting looks like and what the people look like, and they both look just wonderful. Spectacular, at times. The men who fall over themselves to have sex with Sophie are as breathtaking as the scenery, and blandly perfect for a movie like this.

Eventually, some things happen and then some other things happen, and about every three minutes there is another ABBA song that (more or less) fits the action. All three of the fathers show up, and there's a ton of happiness and giddiness and then Cher shows up as Sophie's grandmother.

This is indeed the Cher who spent several years in the 1980s and 1990s building her acting chops and winning an Oscar, but that's not the version of Cher who's in Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again.  This Cher is the one who headlines in Las Vegas. The icon, or the caricature, depending on which way you feel about her.

She's the one who accomplishes the not-insignificant feat of making "Fernando" sound like it fits. She's a fun addition to the experience, but also an odd one -- Mamma Mia is all about the interaction between the characters (and the songs, obviously), and Cher almost looks like she's been digitally composited into most scenes. Look at long shots of scenes that involve her, and she's nowhere to be found, as if the few moments of her role were shot in isolation from the rest of the film, which may indeed have been the case.

It's a minor spoiler that Streep shows up for an extended cameo toward the end of the film, which leads to an unexpectedly honest and emotional climax that finishes things up on a somewhat bittersweet note, or would if there weren't one final, plotless song-and-dance extravaganza tacked on to the film.

Well, wait, "tacked on" sounds so negative. And there's no negativity allowed in the presence of Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again. That final song-and-dance routine is pitch-perfect, exactly what the audience needs and wants. The 6-year-old girls who were dancing and prancing around the aisles when I saw Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again perfectly captured what the film wants to do and what it succeeds at doing -- giving everyone a good time.

Objectively speaking, Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again isn't actually all that good.  It has a far-fetched plot filled with holes, it features bland and wholesome characters who don't really do much in a story that would have felt stretched as a 22-minute sitcom episode, and, when you get right down to it, it doesn't even take place in Greece -- it was shot on Croatia's island of Vis.

You don't go see Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again expecting it to be anything other than what it is. Or, at least, you shouldn't. It does exactly what it says on the tin. No more, no less.


Viewed July 20, 2018 -- Odeon Covent Garden 

1745

"Ocean's 8"

 ☆☆☆ 

Years and years ago, there were Dollar Tuesdays, when every movie cost just a dollar for admission, any show, any time, all day. Back then, you'd hear people say things like:

"Is it any good?"

"Sure, especially if you go on Tuesday."

Here we are decades later and we've got the 21st century, technologically enhanced version of Dollar Tuesdays called Moviepass*, which looks like it might end up being as much a fleeting phenomenon as Dollar Tuesdays themselves were. (First, they became $2 Tuesdays, and then, as the economy improved and the threat of staying home and watching VHS tapes began to wane, they disappeared forever.)

And the question that comes up regarding Ocean's 8, a sort of reboot of the Ocean's Eleven movies with a predominately female cast of crooks, is: "Is it any good?"

The answer to which is, "Sure, with Moviepass."  I, on the other hand, paid full price, out of pocket to see Ocean's 8 and found it a perfectly entertaining, acceptable, frequently funny, often meandering, tremendously overlong movie that kind of moves along in fits and starts, layering in one new plot point onto another like a giant, fluffy dessert that looks like it might fall in on itself at any moment.  I was amused.

If I had seen it essentially for free, I'd probably be overjoyed at the outcome, because Ocean's 8 is more than passable entertainment, and when you get it for free, what is there to complain about?

Now, having seen one, two or all three of the previous, male-dominated Ocean's movies, what lingered in my mind was: absolutely nothing. One of them, I think, took place in Las Vegas, and all of them involved a lot of merry criminals who were breezy and funny and looked very, very well dressed.

When I watch the news and see people taken in for big, brazen crimes like this, they generally look angry, confrontational and not at all like the people you'd like to see at a swanky party. But the Ocean's movies are heist movies, and heist movies are usually better if we feel the heist is being done for thrills rather than with criminal intent.  I mean, these people are committing major, international crimes; they're not nice people, but we've got to believe they are.

This time around, the heist begins with Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean, whose brother was Danny, the "Ocean" in the original title. The criminal inclination runs in the family, it seems, and Debbie has been spending five years in prison thinking about the next job she's going to pull just as soon as she gets out.

And snap-bam, here we are. No parole officer hearings, no worries about where to live or how to survive, just right back into a life of crime, and doing it with a smile on her face the entire time. Bullock remains an engaging and winning film presence, so she can get us past the disbelief. She hooks up with an old friend Lou (Cate Blanchett), whose criminal enterprise has diminished to watering down vodka in a nightclub.

It's not too long before Debbie reveals her master plan: to steal a $150 million necklace during the Met Gala. It'll be around the neck of a glamorous movie star named Daphne Kluger (Anne Hathaway), with the down-on-her-luck celebrity designer Rose Weil (Helena Bonham Carter) in on the job. So are Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling and Akwafina in decidedly underwritten roles that exist primarily to have people to take on different positions in the elaborate heist.

The film is divided roughly into four parts, each of which plays to varying success: The setup and building the team is substantially less interesting than it's been in earlier movies; the planning and tech rehearsal are amusing and suspenseful; the heist itself proves a little more complicated than expected (some of the key information on who moves where and does what has been withheld from us, and having the audience fully aware of every detail has long been key to enjoying a heist picture); and the final investigation builds on a needless and extraneous story that involves a fellow criminal Debbie used to love.

For all the talk about female empowerment and women playing strong roles in films, it's curious that Ocean's 8 was written and directed by men, and features a handsome, ultra-masculine man at its core who the women, for a long period of the film, need to talk about. Sociologically speaking, Ocean's 8 leaves you wondering why they couldn't trust the women to be as smart as they are, or they just thought that no one can believe that a woman's ultimate goal can't be to attract the attention of a man. That kind of casual sexism left me with some weird thoughts about what Ocean's 8 wanted to accomplish.

But all that stuff aside, the question is: Does it work? And the answer is, yes. The acting is at times iffy, the story is iffy, the plot requires not mere suspension of disbelief but putting it into your smartphone, turning it all off and ignoring it for a couple of hours.  You don't want little nagging thoughts gnawing at your head as the heist gets underway, since some of it requires such astonishing coincidences to pull off, that ... well, wait, see what I mean?  Put that disbelief away for a couple of hours.  Ocean's 8 won't work any other way.

Let it happen, succumb to the geniality of it all, and it's a fun, diverting little film, cleverly made, totally enjoyable, and often so ludicrously plotted that there's just no way that one person could end up over there at just the right time-- wait, see what I mean?  Forget about it.

It's a fun movie. Especially if you see it on a Moviepass. Ocean's 8 may, indeed, be the ultimate Moviepass movie; how can you be too critical about something you didn't even pay to see?

The good news is, it's much better than that. But increasingly, the scariest part is, maybe it didn't even have to be.

--------------------------------

* The popularity of Moviepass, incidentally, leaves me thinking that no matter the financial state of the company behind it, it demonstrates an underlying fear among exhibitors and studios of streaming services -- even while studios double-down their bets on streaming, they've got a problem of simultaneously urging people to stay home to watch digital content while needing people to go to theaters. Moviepass plays an important role in this, and probably sooner rather than later, we'll mostly go to movies with these subscription models, just as most people go to the opera or their local symphonies with season tickets. Moviepass as a brand will likely die off quickly; the company behind it can't sustain its questionable business model, but movie theater owners are looking eager to fill this void. And all of that calls into question whether the era of $70 million comedies like this one will be able to last much longer. It's an interesting quandary the entertainment industry has found itself in, and one entirely of its own making.



Viewed July 10, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

1955

"Three Identical Strangers"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

Here is a story filled with dark and tragic family secrets, a story that begins in happiness and ends in tragedy, a story about the terrible and twisted things human beings do to each other, and the most remarkable thing about this story is: it's all true.

The happy part begins in 1980, when Bobby Shafran walks onto a college campus to the strangest welcome anyone's ever known. Everyone he sees is a stranger, but they all act like they know him. It doesn't take long before the mystery is solved -- and an even bigger mystery begins. Bobby, now in his late 50s, recounts how another student looked at him, asked if he was adopted, and put him on the phone with Eddy Galland, who turned out to be his long-lost identical twin brother.

Their wild story made the newspaper, and when David Kellman read it, there was another revelation: the twins were triplets, and had been separated at birth. Jane Pauley and Phil Donahue and everyone who was anyone wanted to talk with them. The triplets became celebrities. As soon as they saw each other, they loved each other. They compared notes about their lives, and discovered there were remarkable similarities.

They were as overjoyed as 19-year-old boys could be. Their parents -- an affluent professional couple, a middle-class couple, and a working-class couple, each of whom also had an adopted daughter -- were happy, too. But they were suspicious. They paid a visit to the adoption agency that had given them the boys. The people there, who specialized in placing Jewish babies, seemed less than eager to reveal too much.

Then things got really weird. That's also where Three Identical Strangers moves from being a standard talking-head documentary to being an exciting, confounding, sometimes downright shocking blend of quasi-sensational re-enactments and puzzling, unexpected revelation.

As Bobby says to begin, it's a story you'd never believe if it were recounted to you by someone you knew. British filmmaker Tim Wardle could never have even proposed the concept as a piece of fiction; it would be entirely too outlandish, except that it's true. And what it reveals about humanity is many-layered, disturbing and sometimes even unexpectedly profound.

Three Identical Strangers is at once a comedy, a thriller, a horror movie and a stirring drama, which is quite a feat for what on the surface appears to be a straightforward documentary. Other than some simply produced (and at one point rather pointedly melodramatic) dramatic re-enactments, it's a blend of talking heads and period home movies, helped immeasurably by the film's setting in early 1980s Long Island, just as Americans were growing more and more obsessed with documenting their lives.

Impressively, the film barely hints at its deeper secrets, and even if you go into it as I did with a little foreknowledge that something grim is at its core, it's easy to be swept away by the pure joy of the first third of the story -- as Bobby, Eddy and David discover each other, and take advantage of becoming momentary celebrities, Three Identical Strangers would be satisfying as a recollection of a minor footnote in pop-culture history.

Then comes the first bombshell, as the boys and their parents learn that so many of the things that seem impossible in their story might not be as impossible as they imagined. Yet, even knowing what they know, the boys plow forward with their notoriety, at one point opening a restaurant called Triplets that becomes a minor Greenwich Village hotspot.

And even while the filmmakers are still exploring all of the unbelievable implications of the first shocking revelation, here's the second big plot twist, another one that would be almost eye-rolling in its drama if Three Identical Strangers were fiction. But it's not.

What happens in the final third of the story brings deeper nuance to everything that has come before, and opens up a broader line of questioning for director Wardle and his associates.  The question of nature versus nurture has been an inherent part of the story from the start  -- did Eddy, Bobby and David grow up with differences and similarities despite or because of their varied upbringings, and what does that say about the way anyone's environment affects his or her development? That's the question every TV talk-show host wanted to know from the moment the news broke of the triplets' strange story.

But Wardle waits until just the right moment to bring in this second shocker, which along with a late-in-the-story introduction of some new characters (anyone who has read Agatha Christie knows the importance of that kind of a trick in a mystery), leaves the audience reeling.  There aren't many documentaries that can elicit a communal gasp from the audience the way this one did when I saw it: The revelations are that extraordinary.

Three Identical Strangers has a little bit of a harder time knowing how to wrap it all up (also not uncommon to twisty mysteries), and if its denouement feels a little uncertain, maybe it's because nearly 30 years after the events of its story, there's still no satisfying conclusion -- too much about its story remains unresolved in ways that are themselves more than a little mysterious and troubling.

At a brisk 96 minutes, it would have been easy for Wardle to succumb to the temptation of turning this into a 10-hour miniseries for digital television or a multi-episode podcast, but he keeps the story compact, taut and mesmerizing. It's a rare documentary that can rival Hollywood entertainment, but Three Identical Strangers does exactly that.




Viewed July 8, 2018 -- Laemmle Town Center 5

1330

"Sorry to Bother You"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Maybe the problem with things, one of the characters in Sorry to Bother You says toward the end of its wild, weird story, is that when a problem is so big it doesn't have a solution, people respond by getting used to it.

It's a sobering moment in a film that is mostly drunk on its own possibility, and it says as much about the world we live in as it does about the world in which it takes place, a world that looks a lot like our own but with some minor variations that first appear on the edges of the frame before they start to take over.

Lakeith Stanfield stars as Cassius Green, who in the opening scene worries aloud to his girlfriend that maybe his life hasn't amounted to much. She's an artist named Detroit (played by Tessa Thompson), which means she gets to express herself, something Cash can't do at all -- he can't even afford to put a gallon of gas in his beat-up car. He winds up taking a job at a telemarketing company, where one of his co-workers (Danny Glover) reveals the secret of success: a "white voice." Turns out, that's something Cash can do well ... eerily well. He starts out selling encyclopedias, but before long he has his eye set on becoming a "Power Caller," one of the elite who make a fortune selling -- well, hm, no one knows exactly what.

But lurking everywhere are advertisements for the ubiquitous Worry Free company, which has taken over just about every aspect of life. It's the TV we watch, it's the way we live, it's the stuff we buy, and it's always looking for new workers. The head of Worry Free is Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), who combines capitalism and self-help in a way that appeals to the downwardly mobile, which in the world of Sorry to Bother You is just about everyone.

Some of Cash's co-workers want to organize a union (this might be the first movie in a few decades to name-check Norma Rae), while Detroit is part of a militant group called Left Eye that opposes Worry Free, and just about the time it's finally dawning on the audience that Sorry to Bother You is not merely a satire about working life, the movie takes a sharp turn into completely uncharted territory.

Well, maybe not completely uncharted, because there are echoes of the paranoid thrillers that were in vogue the last time America had a seriously hard time trusting its government to do the right thing, which makes Sorry to Bother You a real surprise in the way it shines a spotlight on subjects like our willingness to trust just a few companies with almost everything we have, own and do; and the way we'll settle for the illusion of protest rather than the real thing.

There's a lot more going on in Sorry to Bother You: race relations, media saturation, the politicization of technology and music, our fascination with the material -- keeping up with it all can be exhausting. Writer-director Boots Riley, who's also a hip-hop musician, wants to get it all out there, which is the core frustration of his frequently striking, often flat-out hilarious, movie, which might have benefitted from cutting out a few key scenes that on their own are worthwhile but diminish the movie's overall effectiveness and dull what should be a razor-sharp sense of satire.

At times, too, Sorry to Bother You also feels just a little too close to last year's Get Out both in tone and in some major plot points, particularly the way both movies use a whacked-out videotape playing in the basement of a mansion to present the bizarre, broader conspiracies at their core.  (If you thought the one in Get Out was weird, wait until you see this one.)

And yet, there is so much that is good about Sorry to Bother You, so much that will appeal to fans of The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror, and it's combined with such a streak of good humor and charm, that it's easier to gloss over the faults than to let them linger.

At one point, Cash finds himself trapped and looking out on a scene of violent overthrow that's so damned weird -- and also manages to make sense in the context of the film (though it would seem ludicrous if I tried to explain it now) -- that Sorry to Bother You seems something of a miracle. What it presents on screen is so outrageous, and so far from the film's benign opening scene, that when you think about how much audacity it took Riley and his performers to pull it all off, it's a little mind-blowing.




Viewed July 7, 2018 -- ArcLight Hollywood

1230

"Won't You Be My Neighbor?"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

As much as anyone, I suppose I'm something of an expert on Mister Rogers, not be virtue of having children but of having been one at just the time when Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was at the height of its popularity and influence.

It's a funny thing, because both as a pre-schooler watching the show and as a middle-aged adult watching the new documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, it seems impossible to place Mister Rogers in time.  He is ageless both as a character and as a concept, and his gentle tones and simple pace make it as likely his shows were produced yesterday as 50 years ago, and his messages seem as uncannily simple and unnervingly topical today as they did back then.

Mister Rogers helped children wonder why the world was difficult, and to marvel at its complexity and beauty, even while recognizing that it wasn't always easy to get through each and every day.  Even for a 3-year-old, Fred Rogers innately understood, some days just suck. So do some people. And it is okay not to like them.

Funny thing about Mister Rogers: In his own way, he told it exactly as it was, and one of the more surprising revelations in Won't You Be My Neighbor is that one of the key reasons both the show and the man endure wasn't because of his intrinsic kindness or fabled exhortation that "you are special," but because of anger.

"What do you do with the mad that you feel?" was the question a little boy asked Fred Rogers early on, and became the centerpiece of Rogers' Congressional testimony that helped save the Public Broadcasting System, which President Richard M. Nixon had wanted to eliminate.

What, indeed, did people in mid- to late-1960s do with the mad they felt, with the anger that fumed and seethed, with the fear and distrust that seemed to be everywhere, the senseless murders and the horrible never-ending wars?  Mister Rogers didn't try to answer the questions of the day -- he went straight for the questions of the heart, and it turned out a lot of young children were confused by the world around them.  Mister Rogers helped set them right.

How he did that is not an easy thing to explain, but Won't You Be My Neighbor? makes a valiant effort. This small-but-potent documentary digs in deeper than expected into Fred Rogers, touching on everything from his own unhappy childhood to his perfectionist ways.  It proceeds from the assumption that Fred Rogers was a real man -- not merely a celebrity who had a public persona, but a man with the rare ability to define and project who he was at heart and communicate it through the medium of television.

Throughout a bevy of talking-head interviews and a wonderful range of clips that range from the 1950s to the early 2000s, it becomes clear that the man who smiled at children and asked them questions with no easy answers, who taught them how to be kind even while allowing them anger and dissatisfaction, was exactly who he appeared to be, a man who believed in the goodness of people.

The interviews are insightful and marvelous, the insight into the series is a delight, but the real reason to see Won't You Be My Neighbor even if you didn't grow up watching Mister Rogers' Neighborhood comes a little more than halfway through the film, when the story of Fred Rogers, after a remarkable television career that cemented him as an American icon, moves in an unexpected direction.

A middle-aged man who has worked at the same job for most of his life, Rogers finds himself in a shockingly familiar dilemma: He wants to do something different, but fears he doesn't have the skills to do anything other than what he's always done.  He stopped producing Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and started producing a series for adults called Old Friends ... New Friends, and it failed.  He went back to the Neighborhood, and there's a sense that he was frustrated by his detour. His wife, Joanne, the most insightful of the warm and interesting interview subjects, shares a letter Fred Rogers wrote to himself, expressing deep doubts about his abilities, fear of the future.

What's that? Mister Rogers, afraid? Mister Rogers, unsure? Mister Rogers having an existential crisis? But it happened, and more than once it seems -- the sort of detail that makes Won't You Be My Neighbor feel braver, less cautious than mere hagiography.

This isn't a gossipy film. It genuinely wants to explore the phenomenon of Fred Rogers, and provides honest and penetrating efforts to look at the man himself, and consider why he seemed to know so much about what kids want, how they feel -- the answer might seem like a "spoiler alert," though it's not: Fred Rogers had an unusual ability to recall his very own childhood, his personal fears and sadnesses, and to know that what he felt was not out of the ordinary for any young child.

What Won't You Be My Neighbor? director Morgan Neville, in turn, understands is that viewers of the film by and large will remember their own interactions with Mister Rogers through the TV set; they remember the deep feelings that Mister Rogers tapped -- feelings of being odd, being lonely, being dumb, being scared, being creative, being different. The documentary does a masterful job at simultaneously evoking the feelings through clips and, through great commentary, examining why Rogers was so successful at addressing them.

It's a deeply affecting film, one that stirs powerful emotions of childhood, and asks some hard questions (which it doesn't directly answer) about the banality of kids' TV programming, the intense consumerism foisted upon kids at an early age, and about violence and dissatisfaction with the world and how that's portrayed on TV -- how our kids are growing up hearing those messages.

So, maybe the ultimate point to Won't You Be My Neighbor? is that Mister Rogers never hurt anyone. His TV was about personal discovery and personal growth, it was about being a better person. And the second point the film makes, less directly but with no less power -- it's both satisfying and entirely appropriate to see the film become this -- is about what we've become today in a post-Rogers world.

Won't You Be My Neighbor? doesn't shy away from the right-wing conservative allegations that Mister Rogers' belief in the moral and emotional development of children has led, in their minds, at least, to a slacker millennial generation. For some, Rogers is a lightning rod, Exhibit A in their theory that young people have grown up without a backbone.

The irony to that argument is that it's the middle-aged TV commentators themselves -- the successful, allegedly well-adjusted ones -- who grew up at the height of Rogers, not the 20- and 30-somethings they are mocking. The arguments and attacks ring hollow here, but it's to the film's credit that they are presented.

His self-proclaimed mission was to  teach the world about the need for kindness, for inclusion, for tolerance, for love -- genuine, humanitarian love, for every single person. Increasing numbers of conservatives (and remember, Rogers was a Republican) have seized on a gross perversion of one of Rogers' most famous messages: "You are special." It never meant you're a delicate snowflake; it meant that Mister Rogers likes you  just the way you are, and exactly as you were made, with all of your gifts and your shortcomings. I like you because you are on this planet with me and we are all people.

It's so alarmingly simple a message -- espoused by a quiet, meek Republican -- that it sounds downright radical and vaguely leftist today. And though Won't You Be My Neighbor doesn't jump into the current political fracas in any direct way, it's hard not to walk away from this film wondering what Mister Rogers would have made of our sharply divided, eternally quarreling nation and the egomaniac who "leads" us.

It's impossible to sit through Won't You Be My Neighbor? and not wonder what Mister Rogers would be telling us to make of it all, dispensing advice for getting through this never-ending unhappiness and sense of unfairness.

Then again, if Mr. Rogers really were still around, we probably would never have gotten into this whole mess in the first place.


Arclight Sherman Oaks -- 2115

Viewed July 6, 2018