You know what I don’t want in my feel-good wine mom movie?  DEATH.

It took me almost 32 years to realize I kind of love disco music.  “Rasputin” has rocketed into my Top 5 feel-good songs of all time, and once I accepted that discovery, I slowly realized that I actually enjoyed ABBA.  I give Just Dance 100% of the credit for this development instead of Mamma Mia!, however, because I didn’t like the original movie the first time I watched it.  At all.

This could be because I inherently dislike Jukebox musicals.  Across The Universe kind of ruined them for me.  The only reason I watched it was because Eddie Izzard played a small part, so I tried to work against my preexisting bias against The Beatles for their sake.   And boy, that was not enough to get me through it.  I just could not force myself to give a shit about a flimsy romance told through songs I could take or leave.

So, several years later, when I finally got the nerve to give Mamma Mia! a try, I did not give it a fair shot.  I focused too much on how ridiculous the plot was, how Pierce Brosnan cannot sing for the life of him, and how I did not enjoy ABBA one bit.  But, coming off of several weeks of only thinking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this rewatch was a breath of fresh air.  Sure, it’s not going to change the world, and it doesn’t feature pyrotechnic vocals or anything, but it’s fun.  It’s a good night out with your girlfriends drinking chardonnay and fantasizing about 3 attractive men all vying for your attention, even 20 years after your affair ended, in one of the most gorgeous places on the planet.

But Mamma Mia! is not the movie I get to talk about in this post.  Oh no, the original Mamma Mia! did not make this list.  Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again did, however, and here we are talking about just the weirdest tonal pivot cash-grab sequel I can think of.

For those uninitiated, Mamma Mia! is about Sophie’s quest to find her biological father.  Her mother, Donna, played by Meryl Streep, had a very eventful summer back in 1979, leaving Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried, with three possible fathers: Pierce Brosnan/Sam, Colin Firth/Harry, and Stellan Skarsgård/Bill, respectively.  Donna does not divulge this information to these men, and instead raises Sophie by herself on the Greek island of Kalokairi, running a slowly decaying hotel to support the two of them.  Twenty years later, Sophie somehow tracks down all three of these men and invites them to her upcoming wedding to Sky, some dude who is like, fine I guess.  All three of them show up because they fondly remember Donna, they all find out they could possibly be Sophie’s father, hijinks ensue, and they all decide they don’t care which one of them is her biological dad, they’ll all parent her together.  Then Sophie decides she’s not ready to marry Sky because she’s too young, and Donna marries Sam, the guy she fucked that she was still in love with.

You know who I love in the original Mamma Mia!?  Meryl Streep.  This is not a radical statement, because Meryl is pretty much excellent in everything.  She charms her way through the songs, and it’s 100% believable that a woman like her would conduct very memorable affairs – memorable enough that people who barely knew her for more than a few days twenty years prior would want to rekindle the relationship.  But you know who isn’t in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again?  Meryl Streep.  Because Donna’s dead.  No, we don’t know how, or why, other than Meryl probably had something else better to do during the time they were making this movie.

5 years later in plot time, Sophie is trying to reopen the hotel on Kalokairi in her dead mom Donna’s memory.  Sophie’s story in the present is interspersed with flashbacks of Donna graduating from college, backpacking in Europe, and meeting and fucking all 3 of Sophie’s fathers in like 3 weeks.  Donna inherits a dilapidated farmhouse, fixes it up, and gives birth to Sophie.  She then raises Sophie for 20 years alone, 4 years together with Sam, and then dies unceremoniously of mysterious circumstances.

Lily James plays Donna in the flashbacks, and I think she does a terrific job as a wild, impulsive, free-spirited woman trying to find her way in the world while acting very intensely with her hands.  Donna’s friends Rosie and Tanya are also very charming, and the men they cast as the young versions of Sam, Harry and Bill are pretty dreamy in their own way (my favorite being Harry because he’s the same kind of awkward adorable as Colin Firth).  I believe this younger version of the cast had to audition for their roles because they’re all super talented and can sing and dance, which like… let’s be fair, none of the older male cast can.  There are plenty of fun numbers in the flashbacks, but it’s kind of like less fun knowing we’re living in the memories of a corpse.

Present day Sophie is busting her ass to throw a reopening party for the rebuilt hotel.  Her boyfriend/fiancé Dominic Cooper, who has somehow aged 25 years between the filming of these movies, is in New York for an internship and gets offered a permanent job out there doing… I don’t know what, hotel stuff.  Sophie is pretty pissed he’s considering staying out there, and can only swallow her contempt down long enough to greet Donna’s friends, Tanya and Rosie, who are there for the shindig.  She spends the rest of the movie walking by employees and asking them to make small, insignificant adjustments while simultaneously asking everyone if Donna would be proud of her.  A storm rips through, ruins some of the decorations and prevents people from travelling into the island for the party.  Thankfully, her non-step dads group together and recruit a bunch of fishermen to attend the party for free, using their boats as a ferry to the island.  Sky comes back long enough to find out that Sophie is pregnant, and suddenly Sophie’s dream of opening Donna’s hotel doesn’t matter anymore because she’s going to have a baby.  Amanda Seyfried again gets the privilege of singing in the presence of dead parents as she duets with ghost Donna at her child’s christening.  Why am I sad crying at Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again?  I don’t want this.  Does *anybody* want this?  Where is my escapism?

This is not to say the original Mamma Mia! was free of conflict, but it was *cute* conflict.  Sophie has too many dads, the hotel is kinda falling apart sometimes, and Christine Baranski has to fight young dudes off of her with a stick.  Meryl is still heartbroken over Sam’s betrayal, but literally all of this is resolved with a song and everyone lives happily ever after.  This sequel is just sad.  Sophie, her fathers, and Donna’s friends are all sad Donna is dead.  Sophie is sad that Sky doesn’t want to help her with the hotel.  Past Donna is sad her mother was never supportive.  Past Donna is sad that Sam lied to her about being engaged.  Past Donna is sad she’s raising a baby by herself.  Past Rosie and current Rosie are sad that Bill has jerked her around for 25 years.  Shit, the new hotel manager Andy Garcia is heartbroken by a tryst he had with Cher in 1960s Mexico, but at least that gave me my favorite moment of the movie.  I fucking love Cher and Terry Benedict, I can’t help it.

The biggest question I had leaving this film was why the fuck was Meryl not in this?  Apparently, it is well known that Meryl does not reprise roles because she wants to give herself the opportunity to try new things.  This is totally fair – Meryl can do whatever the fuck she wants with her career and we’ll all be cheering her on.  But why would they move forward with this sequel knowing straight away they’d have to work around Donna’s absence?  And if they knew this before writing the script, why do the present-day plot points feel so goddamn awkward?

They try to draw parallels to Donna’s first experience on the island to Sophie’s struggle to reopen the hotel.  But other than Sophie’s need to “fulfill Donna’s dream”, there are no stakes here.  Past Donna’s farmhouse was literally falling in on itself and a horse almost died as a result.  Sophie’s upset that the welcome banners might fly off the beach.  Donna is raising a child completely alone in a foreign country.  Sophie’s pregnancy has 3 grandfathers, a hotel full of people who like her, and oh right, the actual father of her baby excited about it.  She’s got a pretty charmed life, so it feels kind of hollow when they’re trying to make it seem like everything hinges on this hotel reopening.  The amount of safety nets Sophie has in place is insane, so I don’t really buy it, and I don’t really care.  They spent 10 years writing this conflict, you’d think it’d feel less clunky.

Thankfully everything works out, and Sophie now has a grandmother and a baby to add to her growing number of family members.  I understand they wanted to create a movie that dealt with overcoming grief and living your best life, but man, I really didn’t want that kind of melancholy to be set to ABBA, and the emotional whiplash between the past and the present was a lot to take.

But we did get this adorable scene of Hugh Skinner shimmying around Colin Firth, so it’s not all that bad.

Brace yourself, girls, because they’re trying to make a third Mamma Mia!.  How many hits did ABBA have?  Are there C-Sides they could milk for this?  Or maybe they’ll just reshoot “Dancing Queen” for a 3rd time.

Tom Hooper preemptively waving all the red flags for his future musical movie adaptations.

You’ve probably already guessed based on my Sound of Music post, but when I was a kid, I loved musicals.  I mean, really loved musicals.  My CD collection was a sea of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Rogers and Hammerstein, and I got made fun of at school a lot.  Turns out, a complete lack of knowledge of the current top-40 hits gets you labeled as a weirdo.

I also really loved to read, and my addiction was facilitated by several trips back and forth to the library.  Our local library had a few of those circular racks packed with hanging plastic bags containing cassette books on tape that I typically gravitated toward.  “Frog and Toad are Friends” was particularly excellent.  There was one fated trip, however, where my love of reading and musicals collided.  My mother drove all the way out to the Livonia Civic Library, because unlike the one we usually visited, they had these new fangled things called CDs you could check out.  I don’t know how I had discovered it, but I asked my mother if we could get Les Miserables, and to my surprise she agreed despite neither of us really knowing what the content of the show was.

When we got home, I played it on the big stereo in the living room.  My dad hated it (he strongly dislikes when people sing different parts over each other), my mom thought it was OK, and I was totally and completely in love.  My parents bought me a copy of the 3 CD symphonic recording soon afterward which included a booklet with all the lyrics in it.  Sitting on the floor of my bedroom next to the CD player, I’d read along with the songs for hours.  

When I was going through a particularly rough patch in my childhood, my parents bought me tickets to see Les Miserables at the Fisher Theater for Christmas in an effort to cheer me up.  I didn’t have anything appropriate to wear, so my mother lent me a long black skirt and a white blouse that happened to fit me, which I hated, but accepted as a necessary evil.  I still remember the strange and excited way I felt watching the show, mesmerized by the rotating stage.  Eponine was my favorite character, because as a tiny child, unrequited love was the only thing out of Les Miersables I could identify with, and I cried when she died.  This shocked my family, because I’m pretty sure they were convinced I didn’t have normal emotions.  

This experience only heightened my obsession with the show, and I desperately searched for new Les Mis content.  I stumbled upon “Cosette” by Laura Kalpakian in a bookstore, and read that 600+ page fanfiction in 6th grade.  In 7th grade, I attempted to read the novel “Les Miserables”, and after 3 separate attempts over 15 years and a 65-hour audiobook later, I conquered my literary ninja warrior and never. ever. again. jesus. tapdancing. christ.  It succeeded in making me love Javert and HATE Marius, so mission NOT accomplished.  I don’t need all that information about the Battle of Waterloo and the Paris sewer system living rent free in my head.

Anyway… as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been amused with the memeification of the self-aggrandizing earnestness the show’s reputation has.  When the Les Miserables movie was announced, I was curious, but not excited.  I had been burned by Sweeney Todd, and I wasn’t about to get swept away in all the hype only to be let down.  Still, after Christmas dinner, my friend Claire and I saw it at 10:30pm on opening day.

The movie isn’t perfect by any means, but I couldn’t believe how true to the musical and the book it was.  They showed the elephant Gavroche lived in, Fantine getting her teeth ripped out and some asshole shoving snow down her dress, Marius slumming it to piss off his conservative grandpa, the absolutely disgusting fact that Jean Valjean waded through literal miles of shit to save his daughter’s boyfriend… these are uncomfortable details of the desperate state of these character’s lives that sometimes get lost in the musical when you’re applying patina on plywood to make it look old.  This movie is also gorgeously epic.  It goes hard on the up-close shaky-cam shots with the actors looking directly into the camera like it’s a goddamn music video, and makes a lot of quick cuts because they couldn’t film the vocals and the action at the same fucking time, but watching Jackman hoof it though the French countryside and stay in that gorgeous church with the painted ceiling is worth the price of admission.

…I’m now realizing that maybe I’m more impressed with the set design and less impressed with the filming.  Point is, they pumped a lot of money into this, clearly someone thought and cared about this musical and wanted to give it its best chance.  But then they made the baffling decision for the actors to sing live in an attempt at authenticity, and putting it kindly, it had some mixed results.

I’m just going to embed this great video by Sideways that explains why having your dehydrated actors sing for 10-12 hours a day is unbelievably dangerous to their vocal chords, and is dumb dumb dumb.  And I’m not going to attempt to defend Tom Hooper’s choice here, because it could have done permanent damage to his actor’s voices, so even if it was the best stylistic choice, it wasn’t worth their health.  But what I will discuss is the emotional impact he was attempting to achieve by doing this, and where it succeeded and failed in the overall narrative.

It goes without saying, where he failed was with Jackman and Crowe, and while I would love to shit all over both of their vocal performances, I think Sideways exhausts this concept.  When the singing is off meter and key, it does have the tendency to pull your focus from the story – I will completely agree with that.  I’ll even go a bit farther and say that Hugh Jackman is just not a good Valjean.  He’s the smarmy circus owner with a top hat that smirks all the time, not the hardened criminal with a lifetime of pain behind him.  He overacts the shit out of this in some scenes and I haaaaate it.

I will argue that Sideways is a little too hard on Crowe, because with the exception of “Stars”, I think he does a decent job.  And even with “Stars”, it’s not egregious or anything, it just sounds thin.  He gave a very measured performance, which is in great contrast from anyone who’s been in the stage show, but not necessarily out-of-character for Javert.  He does have a beautiful voice, and the quiet contempt he seethes in Valjean’s direction is delicious.

I found myself more annoyed at Amanda Seyfried keeping up the long tradition of captive women who sing like tight-vibratoed songbirds, but that’s a personal preference and not necessarily anything wrong with what she did.  Cosette annoys me in general, so it’s probably on-brand that I feel this way.

But say you’re a director and you think musicals are corny, but still insist on directing one.  You want to take away all the emotional sincerity and make a gritty, realistic, hard-hitting, live-recorded adaptation of one.  Honestly?  Les Miserables is the best show suited for this.  It deals with a lot of serious topics, and even the numbers that are upbeat are absolutely steeped in sarcasm.  If you had any skill at directing comedy at all and casted actors to play the Thénardiers that weren’t phoning in their performance, theoretically you’d be set up for success.

I would say a lot of the group scenes benefitted from the live recording (at least the ones where the characters were in the same physical location).  The dynamic of the students felt really organic and adorable… well, until it was sad and bloody.  

Sidenote: I’m gonna go out on a limb and assume every casting of Enjolras as a super pretty boy is entirely intentional, because honestly, it’s distracting.  Or like, is Enjolras attractive because he wants to overthrow the monarchy?  The world may never know.
BONUS: Hot Phantom played him, too.

The other benefit to the live recording lied in the intensely emotional scenes, like with “I Dreamed a Dream” and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”.

Anne Hathaway deserved every bit of that Oscar.  This is a performance of a woman at the end of her rope and I weep every time I see it.  I don’t care that it’s not technically perfect, in fact, it’s kind of weird when it’s sung on stage and sounds so crisp.  Anne Hathaway has a practically-perfect-in-every-way air about her in some of her performances, especially those that require accents, so it was nice to see her break down like this (even though by the end of the movie she’s back at it with the Mary Poppins shtick).

I had no exposure to Eddie Redmayne before this movie, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting much with whoever was cast as Marius because Michael Ball’s version of everything is just freaking great and has ruined me for any sort of different interpretations.  I’ve listened to his version of “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” hundreds upon hundreds of times, and just… you can’t compete with this.  The breath control through “my friends, my friends, don’t ask me” absolutely slays me. 

Anything Eddie Redmayne was going to do vocally was not going to touch what others have done with this song.  And if Tom Hooper was going to go with a weirdly tight shot on his face for this scene, Eddie had to go for an understated, humanized version of this performance, and he fucking nails it.

The survivors guilt is in every expression, his voice inflection, and his movements.  I love this scene.  It might be my favorite in the entire movie.  It certainly is the one that’s stuck with me the longest.  It made me like Marius, a creepy, privileged college student who stalked a young girl for weeks because he thought she was hot.  This scene almost makes me forgive Tom Hooper for torturing a poor orchestra to improvise with these performances.

But the movie proves that this lighting-in-a-bottle kind of thing is not consistently reproducible, and when it fails, it fails hard.  Eddie Redmayne is sitting on a chair while he sings this song, and not participating in a swordfight, or getting rained on, or constricting his lungs by binding their chest with cloth, or laying directly on his back…  Man, they did Samantha Barks dirty.

Anytime the performance deviates from standing and singing, you’re putting your actors at a disadvantage.  Not to mention nobody else can fucking move while someone is singing because it’ll fuck with the audio recording, which makes for some truly awkward scenes and jump cuts.

There’s also the problem of having the realism work against the climax of the show… I hated how “One Day More” was shot.  It’s super impactful having the entire cast unite to sing it together, and instead in the movie separated them all by their physical locations and like… sometimes it’s better to fudge the plot a bit to get the emotional moment, yeah?  At least they figured it out at the end when they close with “Do You Hear the People Sing?”.

Second sidenote: When I saw Cats, I couldn’t not stop laughing at the ending because it’s almost identical to Les Miserables – all the characters gathered in a courtyard of white buildings in a heavenly afterlife-type deal.

Coming down to it, though, there’s a lot of good in this movie, and maybe with a director that inherently isn’t embarrassed by the musical format, it could have really been something.  I feel like I’m going to say some version of this statement ad nauseum as we progress further down this list.  

Also, it’s a bad idea to put your actor’s safety at risk for the sake of your “vision”.  Don’t do it.