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.

I realize my opinion of this is not going to make me a lot of musical theater friends, but… I’m not going to give a whole-hearted condemnation of the Into the Woods movie adaptation, so, y’know… hot takes ahead.

I went on record in my Sweeney Todd review that Sondheim is not my favorite, and that Sweeney is an anomaly in my general opinion of his work. I usually find his musicals wordy, repetitive, and exhausting to listen to after a while. I’m not saying he’s untalented, cause clearly he is insanely successful and respected, but his style is not for me. If it’s not seven minutes of cannibal puns, I’ll pass.

I wasn’t even planning on exposing myself to the show before watching the movie because I had absolutely no interest. Unfortunately, Sideways recently released a video breaking down the musical motifs in the show, and mentioned there was a stark contrast between the original production and the movie. In fact, it was upsetting shadow of its predecessor, and missed the entire moral point of the musical. He referenced another video by Snugboy who made the case the adaptation was a failure, and I thought, great, I need to watch the show because now I need context. This sounds like a translation disaster, and after suffering through Disney’s adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, there was already blood in the water. My plan was to watch the show, then the movie, write up something, and then watch the Snugboy video and revel in how much we both hated the film. The 1987 recording of the show with queen Bernadette Peters is on Hoopla, so one night I sat down and watched it.

The original show is like 3 hours long, and it *feels* that long. There are a billion characters, and they crash into each other like golf balls in a dryer, minutely inching the plot forward and backwards until it finally crawls to a resolution at the end of the first act. Except not, because the second act, where the actual moral message is delivered, is another hour and a half of the show. For all that is going on, I will give it credit, the plot was fairly easy to follow (for the most part, a few notable exceptions I’ll mention below) and every character’s motivations were clearly outlined. But Jesus Christ, it’s the embodiment of chaotic neutral, and by the end I was fully checked out. I’m not going to rehash the plot here, but if you want a good summary of the show, please watch the Sideways video. His content is excellent and I will forever link it, even if sometimes I disagree with his overall opinions.

The next morning, I woke up nursing my Sondheim hangover, wondering if I could procrastinate watching this movie for another few months. Instead, I decided to be brave and regrettably renewed by D+ subscription so I could check out the movie adaptation. I’m already not a fan of the show, and the movie is supposed to be a thousand times worse, so I’m in for a world full of hurt, right?

I thought the movie was totally adequate. I’m even going to stick my neck out there and say they cut a lot of the fat of the original and better illustrated a lot of the conflict than the show did :dodges incoming tomatoes: I’m not saying it’s a movie I would ever willingly watch again, and that there aren’t things that were baffling and fucking uncomfortable, I’m just saying, the overall messaging is the same, and it’s easier to sit through.

Let’s start with the bad parts of the adaptation, and ease into the good, cause I feel like I need to earn the skeptics trust first:

• A lot of the jokes fell really flat. I don’t know how much of this was direction, or Emily Blunt in general, because I felt like she was the biggest culprit of this. The scarf line, overselling the value of the beans, and when she changed the tone of her voice to convince Rapunzel to let down her hair, were played so close to the chest. The whole hair stealing scene in general was malicious instead of comedic.
• I didn’t enjoy how abusive Jack’s mom was. I don’t like her much in the show; it made me uncomfortable watching her berate her son for his intelligence when he may or may not have a learning disability and it was played off for laughs? But at least it kinda sorta seemed like she did love Jack despite her feeling disappointed by him. In the movie, she’s constantly knocking him upside the head and berating him with no affection whatsoever, so I realllllly didn’t care that she died.
• Johnny Depp was UNBELIVABLY UPSETTING in this. I spent the entirety of his appearance on-screen cringing and screaming for him to stop lusting after a literal child. He’s licking his fingers and presenting his crotch to her over and over again. His character design, too, with his candy, cheap suit, and pedo moustache codes him as a sexual predator and it’s complete nightmare fuel. This is why it made me physically nauseous to listen to Red’s song later about him opening her up to new experiences. Get that shit out of here.
• Speaking of strange costume design, Meryl’s old lady makeup was really terrible, and the nails were truly unsettling and distracting.
• They should have included “No More”. I think the baker’s arc is still understandable in the movie, but it would have been nice to have this song included.

Now for the general positive aspects of the movie, and what I considered good creative changes:

• With the exception of the wolf’s suit, the costumes are impressive.

• I thought the actors sang pretty well. They’re not Broadway level, and I’ve already bitched about how annoyed I get when they don’t cast broadway actors in these things, but it wasn’t egregious by any means. Nobody’s performances stuck out to me as bad. I really enjoyed Anna Kendrick the most, however – she did a good job of balancing earnestness and comedy, along with some pretty stellar vocals. Bellas for lyfe.
• Christine Baranski. That is all. At least that’s all for now – I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about how much I love her in Mama Mia 2: Electric Boogaloo and Chicago.

• “Agony” was fucking hilarious. While some of the jokes of the movie did illicit a chuckle out of me, I was giggling incessantly watching this number. It’s acted and shot perfectly, and it was leaps and bounds more entertaining than the rest of musical numbers in the show and the movie.
• They cut the narrator and the dad out of the movie. I can’t imagine anybody arguing for the deadbeat dad to be around since he was added chaos, but a lot of people liked the 4th-wall breaking of the characters turning on the narrator, giving him up to the giant, and watching him fall to his death. There are two functions of the narrator they’d have to accommodate by removing him:

1. 1. The narrator’s death is supposed to articulate how cutthroat the cast is, and how reticent they are to place the blames on themselves for the predicament they’re in. The characters try and give up several other replacement people to the giant after the narrator dies, which proves the point anyway. While it’s a funny moment in the show, breaking the 4th wall never happens again afterward, and feels like a very strange way to get the narrator off the stage to allow the actor to play the father for the rest of the story.
   2. The narration throughout the show gives the audience the feeling they’re reading/watching a fairytale. By having the baker narrate instead, they fill that requirement, and also add a nice bookend to the story. The baker is the one telling this tale to his son at the end, so it makes sense that he’d be the one guiding the audience through the experience.
      • I will concede, however, that without the clear removal of the narrator, it does seem strange that the narration does not continue through the second half of the movie. The choice to include narration could be viewed as a way to make up for script deficiencies, as it was abandoned halfway through the film.

• The tone was a bit different and less comedic, but the original fairy tales are dark, so I understand why they did this. They’re literally cutting body parts off to shove a blood-soaked foot into a slipper, and it’s played as humor, but like, that’s fucking gruesome, right? There is so little humor in the second act of the show anyways, so I honestly didn’t miss it in the movie. This is also coming from someone who, other than at a few line deliveries from Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason, didn’t laugh much watching the Broadway show, either.

• I gave zero fucks about Rapunzel in the show, so I honestly didn’t care her and the prince fucked off at the beginning of the second act. She’s literally a disembodied voice 75% of the time, with the other 25% being motivation for the witch to feel betrayed and sad. Rapunzel only existed to prove that the witch’s actions of keeping her safe in the tower were motivated out of selfishness, and would ultimately create a rift between the two if Rapunzel were ever provided a better option. Once Rapunzel made the decision to leave her mother, that was all the devastation the witch needed to want to disavow humanity. She had nothing left to defend because she would never be able to repair her relationship with her daughter. She said herself, she’s not good, she’s not nice, she’s just right, and any opinion to the contrary would fall upon deaf ears.

• It was also much clearer the witch disappeared because she threw away the beans, invoking her mother’s curse again. She kind of poofs out of nowhere in the show, leaving me wondering if she’d come back later on.
• I also liked how they displayed the witch’s powers more prominently so it was better understood how much she gave up in pursuit of vanity. The special effects in general were a net positive, and a benefit of translating this to film.

• The baker’s wife actually showed interest in the prince before he started hitting on her, so it felt less out-of-nowhere when they hooked up. Not to say I supported this – this whole plot point is a weird detour, and honestly, it’s unneeded in the show and the movie. If the goal is to show the prince as being frivolous and untrustworthy, him abandoning his kingdom and running away from the giant would be enough for any person to be turned off by him. Cinderella was stepping up to solve the problem, and meanwhile her husband, the one in the true position of power, was wandering around the forest shirking his responsibilities. This would also mean they could cut the baker’s wife’s one-song wavering of her commitment to her new life, cause like, honestly, who cares? Songs that start a conflict at the beginning and resolve it by the end are filler in an already long show with too much shit going on in it.

• I found the plot a lot easier to understand in the movie. When I watched the stage show, I was so confused as to what the hell was happening during “Your Fault”, and had I not watched Sideway’s video beforehand, it would have been a garbled mess to me. When I watched the movie I understood the scene a whole lot better, and I thought it was because of how they shot it, focusing on each character intently when they were singing (I also had subtitles on, which helped). But it wasn’t until Snugboy mentioned they slowed down the song that the fucking lightbulb went off.
  • Sondheim loves to do this, create these songs with stupid fast tempos to make their characters seem panicked and flighty. Two notable examples off the top of my head are “The Worst Pies in London” and “Not Getting Married Today”. If one person is singing it’s easier for me to focus on, but if there are like 4 people with 4 different agendas screaming over each other as quickly as possible, my frustration increases because my focus is being pulled in 4 competing directions. Slowing it down was the right call, leaving its content to be more impactful.

So… after all that, would I recommend this movie to anybody? No. I don’t like any of the songs other than “Agony”, and the plot is convoluted and tedious. Snugboy wondered who the intended audience of this movie was, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say people who don’t like musicals. Like most movie adaptations, they’re trying to appeal to the largest group of people possible, and they took out a lot of the hokey stuff in an attempt to convince the more serious viewer of the film’s merit. It’s why we’ve gotten a gritty adaptation of Les Miserables, a Girl Boss version of Beauty and the Beast, and pleasureless rendition of Sweeney Todd. When adaptations fundamentally do not understand what makes the original show so revered, they’re bound to alienate its fans. While I wasn’t personally offended by this version of Into the Woods, it’s because I don’t understand what makes the source material so appealing. To me, the movie does a pretty good job of illustrating that selfish wishes may not make you happy, and if your actions in pursuit of your desires actively work against the greater good, or hurt the ones around you, they will ultimately backfire. However, to the fans of Into the Woods, I do know how annoyed I felt after watching Sweeney, and I sympathize with you.

Next week let’s continue to live in the magical, mystical world of parenting with Mary Poppins.