Tuesday, May 22, 2018

MUSICALS AWAY! Mamma Mia! AND Moulin Rouge!


It was a MUSICALS weekend at the Fortress of Ineptitude as the family gathered to watch two movie musicals this weekend. Both movies were jukebox musical romantic comedies with two word titles ending in an exclamation point. But they could not be more differerent.


On Saturday, we watched Mamma Mia!, a 2008 movie based on the1999 stage musical  based on the songs of   ABBA. As a lifelong fan of ABBA since the days of my kidhood, oddly enough, I had never seen Mamma Mia! live or on screen. But I stumbled upon it on Netflix Saturday night and I figured, why the hell not? I convinced Andrea and Randie to give it a go. 





Meryl Streep plays Donna Sheridan, a single mother whose daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is about to get married. Sophie would like her father to walk her down the aisle at her wedding. Except she doesn’t know who her father is. But thanks to her mother’s diary, she’s able to narrow down the list to three men: Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) and Bill (Stellan SkarsgĂ„rd). So Sophie sends out wedding invites to these three guys, hoping when they arrive, she can suss out who her real dad is.


They do arrive but she can’t pin down which of these guys is her real dad.


Oh, and Donna really doesn’t want any of these guys there.


So hilarity ensues. 


Mamma Mia! is, to be blunt, a silly and contrived trifle. But it is a silly and contrived trifle that we all got a kick out of watching. It’s a screwball comedy but with heart, driven by the infectious melodies of ABBA tunes. Meryl Streep comports herself well as the aging pop star/flower child running a rag tag resort on a Greek island. (The island setting for this movie is gorgeous.) Her singing is quite good. Christine Baranski who plays a friend of Donna’s does a wicked cover of Does Your Mother Know?. And Amanda Seyfried does a very good job with her ABBA songs. The biggest weakness in terms of singing is Pierce Brosnan; it looks like he’s trying to pass a kidney stone every time he sings; sounds like it too.  


The three of us had a lot of fun watching this movie. I was worried that it might be too light a confection to appeal to my teenage daughter but I’ll be damned, the next day, Randie was looping ABBA songs on her phone.  


If  Mamma Mia! was a pleasant daydream of a movie, the next musical we watched Sunday evening was a fevered dream skirting the edges of nightmare.



From 2001, Moulin Rouge! is the story of Christian (Ewan McGregor), a young English writer, who falls in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), a cabaret actress and courtesan, the star of the Moulin Rouge in Paris. Although set in the year 1899, the movie employs pop songs from the mid-to-late 20th century. 





The set design is abstract, diverging off from reality. Camera angles swoop and change with extreme closes up interchanging quickly with panoramic shots. Lighting moves from color infused brightness to washed out hues draped in shadows.  Moulin Rouge! is a wild ride of shifting tones and perspectives, not just in how it looks but the story it tells. Scenes of broad comedy give way to scenes of sadness.


Christian warns you up front, narrating after the fact from the year 1900, telling you who is dead. When that death arrives in the narrative, no amount of warning dulls the impact.


Moulin Rouge! is an emotionally challenging film, building up a powerful tale of passion and romance, of the giddy heights of what it is like to find love and be loved in return, knowing that love is doomed to a tragic end.    



If one dances away under a sun dappled sky from Mamma Mia!, one can only walk away under a grim grey sky, shoulders hunched down against a cold wind from Moulin Rouge!, exhausted by the spectacle and brought low by the death of a love that can never be again. 



Whoa. That’s heavy. 

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