You may be asking yourself, is Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again just 90 minutes of second-rate, b-side Abba songs? All those weird songs that no sensible story about unplanned pregnancy could call for? Songs like Waterloo?
Nope. It is nearly two full hours of it.
Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) wants to open her mother’s crumbling Greek hotel as an upscale island resort. She’s so terribly angsty about it! Will anyone come to the grand opening? Will her mom be proud of her? Can she handle the pressure if her husband’s traveling and two of her three dads can’t make it?
Transition to a simpler time, a time when her mom Donna was young (played by Lily James), bohemian and striking out on her own. She has chutzpah. She has friends who love her. She has great hair.
The majority of the sequel to Phillida Lloyd’s 2008 smash looks back on the romantic voyage that created the three dad business of the first film.
James is a fresh and interesting a young version of the character Meryl Streep brought to life in the original. Likewise, Jessica Keenan Wynn and Alexa Davies make wonderful younger selves for Tanya (Christine Baranski) and Rosie (Julie Walters).
The three dads have young counterparts as well, though only Harry (Colin Firth/Hugh Skinner) lands a memorable characterization. Firth is reliably adorable while Skinner’s socially awkward young man is as embarrassing and earnest as we might have imagined.
Also, Cher.
Expect an awful lot of needless angst and long stretches without humor. Whether present-time or flashback, the film desperately misses the funny friends. Desperately. But when they are onscreen, Here We Go Again cannot help but charm and entertain.
The story is weaker, although there is a reason for that. While the original gift-wrapped an origin story to plumb, the plumbing is slow going when you still have to abide by the Abba songtacular gimmick.
The sequel’s musical numbers rely too heavily on slow tunes and stretch too far to make the odder Abba songs work, but in a way, that is, in fact, the movie’s magic.
Your best bet is to abandon yourself to the sheer ridiculousness of it. There is literally no other way to enjoy it.
Damn, there is a lot of good stuff coming home this week! A fair amount of middling stuff and a handful of full-on garbage, too, so your best bet is to let us walk you through your options.
Jack the Ripper carved up prostitutes in real life and in about a million cinematic representations. But Jack’s not the only marauder who recognizes a helpless population when he sees it. Sometimes, though, the prostitute gets the last laugh.
5. The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
John Erick Dowdle’s film is a difficult one to watch. It contains enough elements of found footage to achieve realism, enough police procedural to provide structure, and enough grim imagination to give you nightmares.
Edward Carver (Ben Messmer) is a particularly theatrical serial killer, and the film, which takes you into the police academy classroom, asks you to watch his evolution from impetuous brute to unerring craftsman. This evolution we witness mainly through a library of videotapes he’s left behind for the police to find, along with poor Cheryl Dempsey, (Stacy Chbosky).
While Cheryl’s plight is the most morbidly fascinating, a tricky side plot involving the murders of prostitutes not only clarifies the murderer’s game, but offers some of the most troubling scenes in the film, toying not just with horror but with weird personal anxieties: like the popping of a balloon.
4. Frankenhooker (1990)
Wanna date?
Director/co-writer Frank Henenlotter took the Frankenstein concept in strange, unseemly new ways with this one. Out-of-work loser with a knack for science Jeffrey (James Lorinz) mourns the really messy loss of his beloved Elizabeth (Patty Mullen) in his own way. Grief is like that—personal. And when you’re really grieving, a project can help you get past that. It focuses the mind.
Jeffrey rebuilds Elizabeth with the help of a lot of body parts made available to him via NYC prostitutes. They’re not volunteered, and Jeffrey is really conflicted about that, but this isn’t what makes him a bad person. It’s the fact that he never really accepted Elizabeth for who she was, or he’d be a lot less picky about these parts.
Jeffrey learns his lesson—kind of—in a film that is unusually sweet given the topic. It’s funny, gross, wrong-headed and more than a little stupid as well.
3. We Are What We Are (2010)
Jorge Michel Grau’s horror about the disposable population of Mexico City centers on a family with a ritual to fulfill. Too bad the patriarch’s death leaves no one but novices to put dinner on the table.
The fact that this family is a cannibal clan is a brilliant avenue into the sociopolitical theme of a society feeding off the poor, but Grau’s perspective offers a little bit of optimism in its own, bloody way. The cops are useless, the system is ridiculous, but those very people who have been disregarded by society are not as helpless as you might thing.
The family underestimates a society it deems beneath them, a group of people so low they are not even fit to kill. What Grau does with this circle of prostitutes is like a Pat Benatar video done right.
2. American Psycho (2000)
Mary Harron’s near-perfect horror comedy send-up of the Reagan era benefits from a number of things, including maybe the best casting in cinema history. This cast and Harron hit every note perfectly, offering a film that is as bloody and alarming as it can be, with every re-watch an opportunity to see more and more of its comic genius.
And of the many memorable moments in the film, the line most likely to be quoted is this: Don’t just stare at it. Eat it.
There is a lot of soullessness afoot in American Psycho, and in that line, but not in Cara Seymour’s performance. As Christie—Patrick Bateman’s favorite prostitute, God help her—she gives this film its first truly empathetic character. She is the one character you root for, the one whose death you don’t want to see happen. When Christie is lured back to Patrick’s apartment for a second round, for the first time in the film, you find yourself feeling sad for someone, finding the empathy Patrick so utterly lacks.
1. Peeping Tom (1960)
Director Michael Powell’s film broke a lot of ground and nearly ended his film career. People tend to react badly to horror movies that unnerve them, which is really odd given that this is the entire point of the genre. Peeping Tom pissed everybody off, maybe because—like Michael Haneke’s films Funny Games—Peeping Tom implicates you in the horror.
Mark (Karlheinz Bohm) had a difficult childhood, developing a bit of a voyeuristic hobby to help him cope. He starts off with prostitutes, filming them, capturing their terror as he kills them. He’s a voyeur, but who can throw stones? Didn’t every one of us who’s ever watched this film— or any other horror movie, for that matter—sign up to do exactly what Mark was doing?
Bohm’s great success is in making Mark unsettlingly sympathetic. Powell’s is in using the audience’s instincts against us. Bohm makes us feel bad for the villain, Powell makes us relate to the villain. No wonder people were pissed.
Welcome back to The Screening Room, where we discuss all that’s new and fit to watch in theaters and home entertainment. This week we run through Skyscraper, Sorry to Bother You, Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation, Leave No Trace and The Devil’s Doorway. We also cover what’s new in home video.
The stars are aligning for Boots Riley. The vocalist and songwriter for The Coup—the funkiest radical socialist band you’re likely to find—has managed to produce a wild and relevant satire of capitalism that might possibly find a mainstream audience.
And that’s not because he whitewashed his message.
Sorry to Bother You uses splashes of absurdity and surrealism to enliven the first act “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” tale of a weary young man’s ascension through the ranks of telemarketing. It is a funny and pointed send-up of cubical hell that—unlike most office comedies—focuses quickly on a system that benefits very few while it exploits very many.
There is so much untidiness and depth to relationships, characterizations, comedy, horror, style, message and execution of this film that you could overlook Riley’s directorial approach. He expertly uses the havoc and excess, first lulling you into familiar territory before upending all expectations and taking you on one headtrip of an indictment of capitalism.
Led by Lakeith Stanfield (Get Out, Atlanta) and Tessa Thompson (star of Creed, Thor: Ragnarock and her own gleaming awesomeness), Sorry to Bother You finds an emotional center that sets the friction between community and individual on understandable ground.
Thompson offers bursts of energy that nicely offset Stanfield’s slower, more necessarily muddled performance as the “everyman” central character for a new generation.
And who better to embody everything a capitalist system convinces you is ideal than living Ken doll Armie Hammer? He is perfect—an actor who entirely comprehends his physical perfection and how loathsome it can be. He is a hoot.
Riley’s film could not be more timely. Though he wrote it nearly a dozen years ago, and it certainly reflects a trajectory our nation has been on for eons, it feels so of-the-moment you expect to see a baby Trump balloon floating above the labor union picket line.
Bursting with thoughts, images and ideas, the film never feels like it wanders into tangents. Instead, Riley’s alarmingly relevant directorial debut creates a new cinematic form to accommodate its abundance of insight and number of comments.
Does it careen off the rails by Act 3? Oh, yes, and gloriously so. A tidy or in any way predictable conclusion would have been a far greater disaster, though. Riley set us on a course that dismantles the structure we’ve grown used to as moviegoers and we may not be ready for what that kind of change means for us. Isn’t it about goddamn time?
The first time I saw Desperately Seeking Susan, I remember being unnerved by the image of three identical men, all dressed the same and leaning up against a building to ogle Madonna as she exited a cab.
Weird, I thought.
Little did I know that those three brothers were the center of a global media hubbub at the time.
Back in 1980, as Robert Shafran moved into college, he was greeted warmly by many as “Eddy.” The 19-year-old would soon meet his doppleganger.
Eddy Gallan—also adopted, also born July 12, 1961—and Bobby became inseparable friends. Brothers, actually, and their story attracted the attention of several newspapers as well as another young man born July 12, 1961.
When David Kellman joined the crew, three brothers separated at birth held the world’s attention. This story itself, told warmly and with great compassion by documentarian Tim Wardle, is endlessly charming based on the contagious joy the brothers felt to be reunited.
And you coast along on that charm for a while until this nagging idea creeps into the party atmosphere: why were they separated in the first place?
Even those who remember the brothers’ tale will find this recounting fresh and fun. Footage and photos of their time together as young men paired with their own lively recounting of the story creates an energy that entertains. Wardle expertly moves the story forward, offering new, often funny and sometimes touching reminiscences of certain events from those closest to the action.
Wardle’s less a master of visual storytelling. Stylistically, the film struggles. Some painful musical choices, stagy reenactments and otherwise uninspired visual representations give the film an amateurish appearance. Late-film montages of earlier revelations and quotes feel like information force-feeding. But, thanks to the truly fascinating story and the charm of its leads, these missteps don’t derail the effort.
The filmmaker’s strictly sequential chronology relies on your assumptions about documentary and ensures consistent surprises. What begins as a zanier-than-life story slowly turns into a dark tale of conspiracy colored by larger themes of nature versus nurture.
As Wardle pieces together a frustrating puzzle, he’s left with more questions than answers. Constantly revealing a new piece of information, a new source and more complications, the investigation itself becomes as much a character in the film as the triplets.
So many horror films delve into those murky holy waters of Catholicism. So many horror movies are clearly made by lifelong non-Catholics. If Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway gets extra points, it’s for knowing the religion it is lambasting.
Two priests—one young, one a veteran—head into dangerous spiritual territory in a film that fully understands that you will compare it to The Exorcist. How can you not?
The Devil’s Doorway follows Fr. Thomas Riley (Lalor Roddy) and Fr. John Thornton (Ciaran Flynn) to a Magdalene Laundry, one of Ireland’s infamous workhouses populated by women the country wanted to hide and exploit.
The setting itself is a way of inverting the gravitas of The Exorcist, which saw two priests—one firm in his belief, the other confronting a crisis of faith—come to the aid of an innocent girl facing the corruption of her purity from something demonic.
Here, Fr. Riley, the elder priest, has to face his own crisis of faith. But his belief has been stretched to breaking by the corruption of the church itself, as manifest by this place.
So, they go to investigate a miracle but find something more predictably menacing is afoot.
There is an earnestness in the battle between faith and cynicism in this film. The Exorcist and films like it, those that saw the wayward horror of man as only correctable with help from above, have long given way to something else. A demonic possession now feels like it happens within holy walls because that’s where the devil lives in the first place.
While most films of this ilk simply take potshots, The Devil’s Doorway mourns the corrosion of something worthwhile and holy. Applause for finding an honest statement to make within this over-worked subgenre, although the congratulations belong primarily to Roddy.
The Irish actor finds truth in Fr. Riley—Doubting Thomas’s—struggle. He stands out as the only sane person, the only responsible adult in the house. And though the Mother Superior role is written with evil relish (as per usual), Helena Bereen’s delivery stings in a way that is eerily authentic.
Until it’s not.
We get it. Nuns are creepy. Twelve years of Catholic school clarified that.
The film gets a bit caught in genre trappings, and what starts as an indictment of the church becomes so punchdrunk on jump scares it loses its focus entirely. The found-footage gimmick works well enough for a while, but devolves in the end into something so familiar it’s almost sad.
The Devil’s Doorway started out with promise, but like so many lapsed Catholics, it lost its way.
Horror and disappointment available at home this week. Hopefully not at your home. Just movies, you know? One of the best horror movies of the year, and one terrible disappointment.
Everybody needs a hand now and then, a little guidance. Everybody, even cold-blooded killers, because murder can be really difficult to pull off. You can’t just google a how-to. I mean, you probably can, but where’s the personal connection? The relationship? The trust.
It’s all here, in our list of the best films focusing on murderous mentors.
5. Addiction (1995)
Like most of director Abel Ferrara’s work, the film is an overtly stylish, rhythmically urban tale of brutal violence, sin and redemption (maybe). Expect drug use, weighty speeches and blood in this tale of a doctoral candidate in philosophy (Lili Taylor) over-thinking her transformation from student to predator.
Taylor cuts an interesting figure as Kathleen, a very grunge-era vampire in her jeans, Doc Martens and oversized, thrift store blazer. She’s joined by an altogether awesome cast—Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco and Christopher Walken among them.
Ferrara parallels Kathleen’s need for blood to drug addiction, but uses her philosophy jibberish to plumb humanity’s historical bloodlust. In monologues and voiceovers, Taylor waxes philosophic as she comes to terms with her own evil nature, and here is where the film nearly implodes. It begins to feel like Ferrara’s real warning is that philosophical pretentiousness spreads like a disease. But just when you are tempted to give up on the pomposity, Walken appears as Kathleen’s vampiric mentor. Thank you.
He injects the film with random violence and nuttiness, as is his way, and Ferrara pays you for your patience and thoughtfulness with viscera aplenty before settling on the uneasy answer that there is no excusing your own bad behavior.
4. The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007)
John Erick Dowdle’s film is a difficult one to watch. It contains enough elements of found footage to achieve realism, enough police procedural to provide structure, and enough grim imagination to give you nightmares.
Edward Carver (Ben Messmer) is a particularly theatrical serial killer, and the film, which takes you into the police academy classroom, asks you to watch his evolution from impetuous brute to unerring craftsman. This evolution we witness mainly through a library of videotapes he’s left behind—along with poor Cheryl Dempsey (Stacy Chbosky)—for the police to find.
Cheryl is Carver’s masterpiece, the one victim he did not kill but instead reformed as his protégé. It’s easily the most unsettling element in a film that manages to shake you without really showing you anything.
3. The Last Horror Movie (2003)
A clever concept handled very craftily, The Last Horror Movie is found footage in that we, the audience, have found this surprising bit of footage recorded over the VHS tape we are apparently watching. What serial killer Max (a top-notch Kevin Howarth) has done, you see, is made a documentary of his ghastly habits and shared them with an audience that has shown, by virtue of the movie it intended to rent just now, its predilection for something grisly.
Like Edward in The Poughkeepsie Tapes, Max wants to pass on his expertise to a protégé. (There’s a reason the audience isn’t quite enough.) He hires an assistant (Mark Stevenson), who helps with the documentary Max is making. The assistant shoots the footage. Max tells the camera, step by step, what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, how he came to the decision. It’s a how-to, really, and the assistant is supposed to be paying attention.
But when push comes to shove, will the assistant have the stomach for it?
2. Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006)
Writer/director Scott Glosserman’s film takes us to Glen Echo, Maryland. It’s a small town, exactly the kind of town that would be perfect for a slasher, and Leslie Vernon is just the villain Glen Echo doesn’t know it’s aching for.
This is a mockumentary and an affectionate ode to slashers. It pulls the concept of a documentary crew participating in the crime (a la Man Bites Dog), builds on the expected steps of every slasher film (Scream), and yet somehow feels fresh and fun.
One reason is Nathan Baesel as Leslie. He’s a charming, self-deprecating joy.
The second reason is the whole “training” concept. By way of the documentary being filmed, we’re invited into the hard-core training that goes into becoming the next immortal slasher villain. Not just cardio—although Leslie is very clear on the need for cardio—but all the little skills you can’t just pick up on your own. That’s why Leslie is blessed to have the help of a committed community who wants to see him succeed, including Eugene (Scott Wilson), a retired slasher himself.
Clever, funny and surprisingly adorable, this one’s a keeper.
1. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
Henry offers an unforgivingly realistic portrayal of evil. Michael Rooker is brilliant as serial killer Henry (based on real-life murderer Henry Lee Lucas). We follow him through his humdrum days of stalking and then dispatching his prey, until he finds his own unwholesome kind of family in the form of buddy Otis and his sister, Becky.
“You mean to tell me you’ve never killed anybody before?” a disdainful Henry asks Otis, and the mentoring relationship is born. Otis really takes to it, too.
What’s diabolically fascinating is the workaday, white trash camaraderie of the psychopath relationship in this film, and the grey areas where one crazy killer feels the other has crossed some line of decency.
Rooker’s performance unsettles to the bone, flashing glimpses of an almost sympathetic beast now and again, but there’s never a question that he will do the worst things every time, more out of boredom than anything.
It’s a uniquely awful, absolutely compelling piece of filmmaking.
Welcome back to The Screening Room podcast, where we marvel (see what we did there?) at the breezy comedic stylings of Ant-Man and The Wasp, get political along with the latest Purge, celebrate Robert Pattinson’s continued streak with Damsel, discuss why Whitney is such a solid doc, and also run through what’s worth it and what is not in home entertainment.
