At the Cinema - August 2018

Mama Mia – Here We Go Again – 8

While the audiences wait for the 4^th iteration of “A Star is Born” they can look no further than this frenetic wafer of a film to see it actually happen.  Lily James sets the screen on fire as the young Donna of Donna and the Dynamos, played by Meryl Streep in the first Mama Mia, and briefly in this movie.  You see, the Meryl version of Donna has died of either movie disease or contract negotiations, leaving Pierce Brosnan alone to paint well and sing poorly on their Greek island.  Her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is still singing and has taken over the restoration of her mother’s hotel project.  Early on, a storm comes and goes as the movie does the time warp shuffle between past and present.

Apparently, the budget was modified to bring on Cher as Meryl’s mother (I know) to sing a couple of songs.  To put it kindly, she looks like someone slapped white paint on Mt Rushmore.  But she can still sing, and it’s very helpful that the former boyfriend she runs into is named, wait for it, .. Fernando.

Once you throw all this in the pot, you have a fairly entertaining movie, a tad better than the first one, mostly due to the casting of the young Donna and the Dynamos, led by Lily James, who would be perfect in the fifth Star is Born.  The 40 year old pop of Abba is reprised, including some lesser known songs and if you liked the first Mia, you’ll like this one too.

 

RBG – 9

As it turns out, there is a lot to learn about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  She was a prominent lawyer in the Women’s Liberation Movement, winning 5 of 6 cases she argued before the Supreme Court.  Prior to that she was a pioneering female student at Harvard Law School.  After that she was a Judge renown for her thoughtful opinions. In this wonderful documentary, friends, family, and foes speak glowingly about her persistence, her intellect, and her work ethic.  Her friendship with her polar opposite, the late Anthony Scalia, is examined and it seems they met their intellectual matches with each other.  Finally, it chronicles her tacking to the left as the court continues to move to the right.  This movie will be shown on CNN soon, and it’s another one of many great documentaries in 2018  

Scanning the Satellite:

The Sinner: Season 1 – 10

In keeping with the Binge economy – “I’ll give you 8-10 terrific episodes” – the USA network gets into the Fargo – True Detective act with this terrific series.  The first season, available on Netflix, stars Jessica Biel as a woman who goes berserk on a beach one day, and stabs a man who is being to cozy with his girlfriend.  The story is so far-fetched that it is riveting.  Biel and costar Bill Pullam (as a troubled detective) have never been better.  Got a weekend?  Take the plunge.

Sharp Objects – 1
HBO’s highly acclaimed summer series stars Amy Adams, and the accolades end there for me.  While Amy is terrific, the series is a muddled mess of misdirection.  It’s a sure sign that your murder mystery is a calamity when after 8 episodes you don’t reveal the killer until half way through the closing credits (hope half the audience hadn’t tuned out by then) and it’s so obscured that you better have a recorder so you can slow it down and look at it frame by frame.  More ridiculous than you can imagine, even with the high brow praise.  Got a weekend?  Go to the beach.

Succession – 3

HBO’s other summer entry was one that I gave up on after about 4 episodes.  It has not one interesting or sympathetic character.  Hard to watch when you have no one to root for in a family of megalomaniacs.