Blu-ray Review: The World's End (2013)

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A postmodern version of an epic Arthurian quest lays just below the surface of as you like it hilarity in The World's End, the third and final installment of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Three Flavors Cornetto trilogy of sorts.

Wright's own junk food hangover cure he referenced along with co-writer Simon Pegg in their slacker vs. zombie cult classic Shaun of the Dead and then devoured onscreen in their Midsomer-like village set Michael Bay actioner Hot Fuzz, it's only fitting that the hangover cure come full circle for use in a film about the ultimate pub crawl.

 

Yet just like an inebriated man with beer goggles, it's safe to say that a good many will watch The World's End drunk on the overflowing humor and only begin to peel back the layers after it's finished. And not only do Wright and Pegg seem fine with that but they damn near count on it, building a vastly intoxicating behind-the-scenes Blu-ray experience that's almost as enjoyable as the film itself.

Guiding you through every aspect of the moviemaking process in more than three hours worth of footage, the two walk you through the insanely detailed, screenplay blueprint flip-chart, pointing out all of the signs and omens audibly and visually, before giving every department and/or topic its due.

With the benefit of knowledge meeting you halfway with your sense of humor already engaged -- it's safe to say that just like the film's main character, you're sure to want to go on the pub crawl a second time with fresh eyes as opposed to solely under the influence of beer (or humor) goggles.

Centering the onscreen quest on a very different King than Arthur, we're introduced to Pegg's irresponsible, overgrown adolescence in arrested development Gary King, who first brings us up to speed wearing rose colored glasses.

 

Reliving the greatest night of his life embarking on The Golden Mile pub crawl with his four best mates after graduating high school, Gary happily idealizes the past before a comment from a fellow addiction anonymous group member plants the seed of dissatisfaction in his middle-aged life.

Having failed to make it to all twelve of the pubs that make up the Mile in the past, Gary sets off -- determined to get the old band back together... well, not literally since he'd sold their instruments to buy drugs ages ago and all of the other men are in respectable careers now.

 

Manipulating each man with various tales until they bend to his will, the five knights embark not on horseback but via his vintage car nicknamed the Beast complete with a killer late '80s/early '90s mix-tape blasting away mile after mile.

While it doesn't seem to have a lot to offer in the way of plot -- at least initially -- things start going from strange to worse shortly into their Mile journey from one Tarot-card like symbolized, ominously named pub to the next all the way through to the titular World's End.

 

From the corporations that have taken over the pubs so that they've all begun to look the same to the bizarre behavior of the locals (moving in concert -- conformity and group-think gone haywire), our heroes begin to realize things aren't like they used to be.

And even though there's always the question of whether or not you can really go home again, the widening gap between us vs. them (or the heroes vs. the "blanks" as they come to be called) come to the forefront shortly after they begin slamming down pints as embodied in an apocalyptic twist midway through the movie.

 

Realizing they must come together to save the town from annihilation one pub patron at a time, Gary's pub crawl takes on a far more epic meaning as he and the others struggle to make it to the final destination of The World's End alive.

Actually, "blanks" turns out to be a great word as issues of any prejudice can be used to literally fill-in-the-blank if you want to read deeper into the movie (and indeed, are teased in a tongue-in-cheek conclusion as well). However, just like appreciating the humor first and the layers later, the apocalyptic comedic horror smackdown soon takes center stage over anything else, dominating your brain-space for the rest of the film.

 

An enjoyable romp that intriguingly pays off on the previous two films as we discover the way the blanks multiplied has zombie-ish similarities and reveling in the same type of over-the-top action we witnessed in Fuzz, The World's End marks a surprisingly soulful conclusion to the trilogy-in-jest.

 

While I still have a special place in my heart for Fuzz, in a year over-crowded with topically similar movies of every genre, comically speaking it's The World's End rather than This is the End that I think I'd sooner grab hold of a second time for a night of apocalyptical hilarity ever after.

Related Review

Hot Fuzz

     

Text ©2013, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: The Long Good Friday (1979)

Quite possibly the best British crime film of all time, The Long Good Friday remains a staggeringly complex, startlingly violent, ingeniously paced, and technically dazzling work that continues to pack an explosive punch more than thirty years after its production ended in 1979.

And long before young filmgoers became introduced to Bob Hoskins as the serious straight man opposite the fast talking Roger Rabbit in the Hollywood smash, he turned in some truly masterful, understated performances as a sort of old-fashioned, authoritative descendant of the men who populated Warner Brothers gangster films in the 1930s and '40s.

Yet while it was his work in Neil Jordan's underworld saga Mona Lisa (which was also recently released on Blu-ray from Image Entertainment) that earned him an Academy Award nomination, he's in a class all his own as ambitious mobster Harold Shand in John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday.

Determined to transform his shady “corporation” from illegitimate to legitimate with his plans to develop the docklands of London in time for the Olympic games, Harold and his longtime love Victoria (Helen Mirren) find their goals for wealth and respect threatened by a growing body count as his loyal crew members wind up dead one-by-one and bombs are discovered in his territory.

Uncertain whether or not he's in the midst of a gang war, needs to root out a traitor among his own ranks or if any of these explosive events have something to do with the arrival of a New Jersey mobster and his lawyer, essentially the only thing Harold knows for certain is that he's running out of time.

Sharply edited and lensed with some artistically daring decisions to change up perspective and make us feel as tense as Harold does throughout, whether that involves filming from upside down to illustrate the point-of-view of men hung on meat hooks from their ankles, the effect of a surprise slap across the face, or the doom of being taken on a one-way drive, it's moodily atmospheric, gritty and daring as hell.

Obviously a major influence on the oeuvre of Guy Ritchie among others, Friday is compelling from the get-go thanks largely to a taut and downright risky screenplay by playwright Barrie Keeffe (his first and only film script) that deals with race, class and sexual orientation in a blunt matter-of-fact manner in addition to Francis Monkman's chillingly pitch-perfect synthesizer based score.

While it's usually a thankless task to play the woman in a male-centric crime drama, Helen Mirren's quiet determination and unwavering loyalty is a marvel as her one-dimensional glamor girl character Victoria soon evolves into an increasingly fascinating and methodical second protagonist who is the absolute equal of Harold.

Boasting a nastily convincing performance by Pierce Brosnan in his feature film debut as a coolly detached hitman, Mackenzie's audacious criminal opus is given a scratch free, polished Blu-ray transfer that is sure to draw you in for the Long Good ride whether you've taken it before or are finally getting tuned in to Friday.


Text ©2010, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Movie Review: The Ghost Writer (2010)

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Related Reviews:
Frantic
Knife in the Water
Roman Polanski: Wanted & Desired

AKA The Ghost Writer

Since Ewan McGregor's character is as anonymous as his eponymous profession implies, it's fittingly appropriate that the nameless man who introduces himself as “The Ghost” would find himself working on his latest assignment at an isolated seaside home he dubs, “Shangri-la in reverse.”

And although it's the duty of any ghost writer worth his laptop to be discreet and forsake all credit in making the individual he's writing memoirs seem even more extraordinary on paper, in the case of the ghost in filmmaker Roman Polanski's sophisticated new film, McGregor is not merely the second fiddle but rather the second fiddle of a second fiddle in his assignment writing the life of former prime minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan).

The fifth and last interviewee who openly tells Lang's agent (Timothy Hutton) that he-- like everyone else-- doesn't read political memoirs, McGregor's ability to turn things around quickly as evidenced on his curriculum vitae lands him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a month's work as a replacement ghost after the first scribe wound up mysteriously dead on the shoreline.

Mugged on the way home by hoodlums who only swipe another manuscript handed to him for a read-through by Lang's agent, McGregor is in for several more shocks when he realizes just how dangerous politics can be. And soon he learns he's only allowed to read the dull autobiography in the privacy of the Lang estate as it's kept under lock key and security code by the woman openly having an affair with the married politician, played by an understated Kim Cattrall.

Yet the simple tweak job turns into a massive overhaul when Brosnan's Tony Blair-like character (and the subject of the book) is threatened by the Hague of being convicted of war crimes in knowingly sending suspects away on “torture flights” following the 9/11 attacks. Hastily, McGregor becomes embroiled in the mess after he lends his professional assistance in writing a statement of denial that makes him an accomplice, should the accusations prove true.

Although McGregor is able to just turn off his moral judgment like a light-switch to work on the book, it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the evidence and further inconsistencies in Lang's statements and the facts. And his suspicions are both confirmed and aroused after he uncovers documents and a GPS vehicle route left by the original deceased ghost. Additionally, he's lured into a web of seduction, which blossoms in the midst of scandal-induced isolation when he falls into bed with Lang’s wife (Olivia Williams).

Frequently dubbed in the advertising as Polanski's first thriller in over two decades, the film which has just earned the exiled Oscar winning filmmaker the director prize at Berlin is likewise one of the strongest English language mysteries for adults to hit the multiplex in a long time.

Moreover, it proves once again just how in-tune Polanski is with this particular genre, culling techniques and employing-- whether consciously or not-- the same type of imagery, comeuppances, love triangles, mistrust of authority, and startling conclusions that have been the hallmarks of his career from Knife on Water through Chinatown and Frantic.

Again water serves as major visual piece to the psychological puzzle, which has been woven throughout his oeuvre since the beginning. And when you blend the image and connotations of water along with themes of deception, sins of the past, and questions surrounding just who we’re letting into our little worlds, Ghost Writer begins echoing Frantic, Chinatown, Death and the Maiden and others from Polanski’s unique twist on the genre.

To this end, it’s certainly tempting to study the overlaps in his work, whether it's in his acknowledged fondness for Hitchcock and Chandler (which led to the film) or the definite autobiographical elements including a sense of Shangri-la in reverse, the transient nature of luck, persecution, accusation, and death that are blended together to masterful effect in Ghost.

While admittedly it does struggle a bit in the pacing of the work, which you can attribute to the fact that it’s hard to get a handle on the characters, luckily our hero is engaging because of what McGregor naturally brings to the role personality-wise as opposed playing the ghost in the aloof manner one would assume from the profession and original title of The Ghost.

Furthermore the film more than makes up for its shortcomings of a padded second act via some wicked surprises, which is most evident in another one of Polanski’s instantly classic endings that you could line up side-by-side with at least three of his others in terms of similarity and cinematic effectiveness.

One of the best twist-filled mysteries for grown ups since Transsiberian and the foreign film Tell No One, The Ghost Writer is also quite timely as an overt George W. Bush/Tony Blair allegory, based on author Robert Harris’ 2008 “Thriller of the Year” best-selling novel, keeping political minds stimulated almost as much as film buffs’ as the type of purely Polanski film that begs to be seen twice.

Text ©2010, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Married Life (2008)

The Heart Wants What It Wants,
Until It Doesn't Anymore.

Originally published on Blogcritics in my
Under the Radar Feature

There’s an old phrase: “the heart wants what it wants.” True enough, although perhaps it should read: “the heart wants what it wants until it doesn’t anymore.” Whether it’s a child growing too old for their favorite teddy bear, a girl taking down a poster of her favorite boy band, or a boy deciding that his favorite video game isn’t cool enough anymore, this desire to acquire along with the persistent thought that there’s always something much more enticing just around the corner only grows stronger as we age. And it especially seems to rear its ugly head as we begin dating and discover that some friends find themselves in relationships simply out of habit or fear of solitude, just biding their time until something better comes along or realizing much too late that the person we want isn’t on our arm as we’d first assumed in the mad throes of early passion, but rather the promise of someone entirely different altogether. Or is it?

Such is the stuff of Greek tragedies, women’s weepies of the 1940’s and ’50s, soap operas, TV melodramas, and dare I say a large instigator for action in one of my favorite genres—film noir. Instead of simply relying on Ladies’ Home Journal article advice in the “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column, trial separations, couples counseling, or tawdry extramarital hotel dalliances—in the days of film noir, infidelity, or even the sheer lust for another turned deadly in cinematic classics such as Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice.

A self-proclaimed “ardent film buff, with a particular love for 1940s and 1950s movies,” as he noted in the press release, writer/director Ira Sachs crafted a wickedly funny hybrid of both film noir and women’s weepies of the same two decades with his woefully underrated stunner Married Life, now available on DVD. Co-written with Oren Moverman and based on John Bingham’s vintage pulp novel Five Roundabouts to Heaven, this sumptuous period film set in 1949 tells a deceptively simple story that—in the hands of anyone else—would’ve seemed entirely predictable. Summed up best by Sachs himself in the release, he relishes in the smile-inducing, one-sentence version of “a gentle, middle-aged man who falls in love decides to kill his wife because divorce would cause her too much pain.”

Needless to say, it’s the type of risky plotline sure to send audiences running in precisely the other direction to see the latest over-the-top blockbuster where the lines between the heroes and villains are as defined and clearly outlined as the characters themselves, yet I was consistently amazed by my inability to predict any and every plot twist throughout Sachs’ film. Additionally, I was mesmerized by not only the film’s beauty but its wickedly funny screenplay acted to perfection by a truly gifted quartet of performers including Pierce Brosnan, Patricia Clarkson, Chris Cooper, and Rachel McAdams.

Sadly, despite playing to rave reviews as well as being screened as an Official Selection at both the Toronto International and New York Film Festivals, Married Life is one of those hidden gems that seemed destined to become forgotten. This is especially apparent when you witness the baffling marketing campaign that didn’t really serve the comedic texture offered up by the filmmakers. As co-screenwriter Oren Moverman himself told friend Ryan Gosling in a Fall 2007 Filmmaker Magazine interview entitled “The Overachiever,” the complicated “film sort of found itself in the editing,” (pg 45) which may in fact be the reason the film’s trailer didn’t exactly manage to capture the spirit of the finished result.

Married Life Trailer

Noting that additional voiceovers were written and the evolving shape of the piece changed during the post-production, Moverman continued offering his admiration for Sachs’ “enormous amount of confidence” and willingness to change things in “a really great process discovering what the film could be through the editing,” (Filmmaker, 45).

With subtly intimidating roles in films such as American Beauty and Breach, by now actor Chris Cooper has sort of cornered the market on playing a deceptive everyman whose true demons lurk just below the surface. In Life, he plays Harry, a hardworking businessman and devoted husband, father, and grandfather who reveals a secret to his best childhood friend, Richard (Pierce Brosnan) shortly into the film. While to the casual passerby, Harry’s picture-perfect marriage to Pat (Patricia Clarkson) seems to be the envy of all, his wife’s emotionally cool exterior and belief that sex is the sole key to happiness along with affection and compassion has left her husband with the dire wish and need for true love. Yes, get that non-stereotypical gender characterization—a man wants love and a woman wants sex.

Of course, predictably, Harry’s wish has been filled when he falls for a beguiling younger woman who seems to love him unconditionally and he tries to explain his situation to the notorious bachelor Richard who in his narration throughout reveals his belief that “marriage is an illness like chickenpox,” to which he is immune. However, despite this, passion and love is something to which Richard’s entirely susceptible as he becomes taken with Harry’s beautiful, blonde mistress Kay (Rachel McAdams) upon her entrance which seems to echo Vertigo due to not only the use of a green dress but also a breathtaking and unabashedly romantic score by Dickon Hinchliffe.

Committed to ending his relationship with Pat, Harry makes great conversational strides one evening before his wife experiences a panic attack. And after a fateful encounter with a hitchhiker, Harry makes the bizarrely macabre and overwhelmingly egocentric decision to conduct a mercy killing to spare his wife any further grief. Although the audience realizes far before Harry does that there’s much more to Harry’s plans than meets the eye as we discover that Pat too is looking for love elsewhere. And in a revolving door of romance, Richard has decided not to let something as precarious as a lifelong friendship get in the way of trying to seduce Harry’s girl. Soon, torn between two men, the introverted Kay with a tragic past, finds herself pursued in two varying ways via a more intimate, stay at home approach with her married lover and the boldly freewheeling, on-the-town, overwhelm of Brosnan’s dashing Richard.

Harry and Kay: “I Want to Love You.”

Richard and Kay: Date Night

Richard’s Request

And as all characters grow increasingly fixated on pursuing their own desires, the playful tone of Married Life grows much tenser and wildly unpredictable as it makes its way towards an inevitable, yet completely unexpected conclusion. While the entire cast turns in uniformly excellent performances, I was especially charmed by Brosnan who actually plays the film’s most deceptive character in the end, knowing as he himself reveals enough information to set everyone free but chooses not to for his own gain.

Yet, it’s Harry who has the most complete arc as Sachs noted in the press release since he “starts off in the beginning of the movie knowing the least about the other characters,” but intriguingly “by the end, he knows the most.” Sure to elicit endless discussion, Married Life is one of those works that in a way may benefit from its sleeper status as it plays infinitely better on a smaller screen and when shared with others, as you may wish to rewind segments, pause and chat, predict, and obsess throughout.

While it may be risky viewing for certain married couples suffering through their own melodrama, Sachs adamantly refuted the idea that it’s a cynical look at marriage, stating that to him, long-term relationships are “always a great, even noble, challenge.” And also as he shared in the release he hoped Life would be considered as “a humanist approach to a genre story, so in the end, it becomes perhaps not really a genre picture itself.” Additionally, attempting to offer up a tale to “make people feel less alone,” when viewers are “in bed and… feeling slightly alienated from your wife or loved one… [you can] realize that… [you] are just like the person in the next house, who’s also coping with these kind of questions,” Married Life is sure to play even better on a second and much less nerve-wracking viewing.

So in the end, while it’s impossible to predict what the heart will want next, Married Life serves as a wise, inventive reminder that we’re all in this together, falling in and out of love and realizing sometimes that our wandering eyes are just that. Yet optimistically, we stay tuned for the next offering—whether it’s Mr. or Ms. Right or a sensational DVD just around the corner. And while, as far as this reviewer’s concerned, I’m still waiting on the gentleman but for right now, I’ll happily settle for the DVD.

Mamma Mia! (2008)

Director: Phyllida Lloyd

I was raised in the era of “please and thank you,” “sir and ma’am,” The Golden Rule, and the firm belief that if one doesn’t have anything nice to say, one shouldn’t say anything at all. It’s a thought that goes back centuries to Jane Austen’s time when the women were advised to stick to the topics of either inquiring as to another’s health and/or restricting their comments to the weather.

Unfortunately, as a film critic, I seldom have that luxury and while I feel I’m far gentler than some critics who curse, berate, exaggerate and figuratively crucify films they loathe—although this being said my favorite critic Roger Ebert summed it up best in the title of a new book, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie—instead, I turn from those manners implanted in me from my youth and go to an old Hollywood standby.

It’s become a movie premiere joke that if an attendee dislikes a film but doesn’t want to say this to another’s face, they usually begin by complimenting its cinematography in the fierce hope the topic will soon change. It’s a strange custom—“I really loved the cinematography” in Hollywood can be code for “I’d rather have a root canal than sit through that thing again,” yet cinematography is one of my favorite aspects of filmmaking.

However, in the case of the dreadful Mamma Mia! which is only slightly better than another ghastly film I’ve just seen but can’t even bring myself to review (Ellen Page in The Tracey Fragments which is so dreadful that it makes you start to rethink Page’s performance in Juno) but yet still worse than the mirthless comedy The Promotion, the only thing I can think to praise is the cinematography.

And the sad fact is, I’m not even being ironic or coy—director of photography, the amazing Sleuth and Venus lensman Haris Zambarloukos actually topped his underrated work on last year’s Sleuth. His picturesque, exuberant, and breathtaking Mamma Mia! shots that were so jaw-droppingly gorgeous, they helped detract from the much-crucified sadly giggle-inducing awfulness of Pierce Brosnan’s singing. Additionally, like a morally questionable yet talented plastic surgeon, they helped make a film I can only call shockingly “ugly” just by its direction, odd choreography, and off-putting humor, seem like any given frame could be clipped out of the reel and hung in a museum. Indeed, the travel board of Greece’s island Kalokairi, may want to think about hiring Zambarloukos to film any future travel commercials, yet I feel it’s probably superfluous as the monstrous hit, Mamma Mia! has probably garnered enough fans who’ve decided to visit just on their appreciation for the Broadway musical alone.

Before I even begin to address the film itself, let me preface this by saying—at great risk to my already nerdy reputation-- that in the late 90’s, there was no bigger ABBA fan than yours truly. Their greatest hits album Gold and its sequel had a permanent place in both my home and car CD player and I was often busted at stoplights by drivers in other cars who saw me singing my heart out along to the lyrics penned by Sweden’s greatest export, which was especially embarrassing when this very incident happened not only one block from my college but I was caught by my crush of the week who luckily found it charming, yet proceeded to tease me the rest of the semester by belting out the chorus of “Take a Chance on Me” whenever he saw me walk down a hallway. (Naturally, I took this as an invitation!)

In fact, super-fan that I was, I annoyed my DJ cousin for ABBA requests at receptions he worked until he clued me in that in the DJ world, there’s nothing less hip than a woman requesting “Dancing Queen.” While I told him that any other track would suffice, all I got was an eye-roll and a pat on the back but fortunately, after viewing ABBA: The Movie far too many times on VH1, I began to outgrow my love of the band… until-- that is--word came ‘round that their music had been used throughout a new Broadway hit, Mamma Mia!

It took a few years until I saw the show in a touring company in my hometown and while indeed it was fun to see others enjoy ABBA’s music (despite the overabundance of misguided middle aged men and women dancing and singing along in the aisles which instantly cured me of any major worship of the band), I couldn’t get over the feeling that the show itself was a bit forgettable and overrated.

Yet, to misquote the old Elvis slogan, I assumed that millions of fans around the globe can’t be wrong so when I learned it was going to be adapted to film, as a huge Hollywood musical lover (I know, I just get geekier by the minute), I hoped for the best. Initially, I was skeptical when I heard that Meryl Streep had been selected for the lead role of Donna, the film’s heroine whose soon-to-be wed twenty-year-old daughter Sophie (the adorable Amanda Seyfried) has unbeknownst to Donna-- after discovering her mother’s vintage diary--invited her three possible biological fathers to the wedding with the hope of identifying which one is her dear old dad.

While Streep is hands-down one of the finest actresses in the world, I just didn’t see her as the singing, dancing, earthily sexy, free-spirited Donna, imagining someone like the musically gifted Michelle Pfeiffer for her role. Thankfully, Streep's actually quite good in the film, managing to nail not only every required emotion but hit the notes in a nice way that never overpowers, and manages to win over any doubters with the showstopper “The Winner Takes It All,” for which IMDb reports the vocals were recorded in Sweden in just one take.

No, the problem isn’t with Streep—although she’s given some of the most unflattering, unfeminine, and downright ugly direction ever captured in a musical, with pratfalls aplenty and cannonballs into the sea. However, far more irritating is the continuous choreography that finds her landing with her legs in the air numerous times as though she’s overdue for a pelvic exam. This seems all the more grotesque when this is precisely the way that Mamma’s original stage director Phyllida Lloyd (who also helmed the film) decided to have her first encounter her three former lovers, as though she’s figuratively readying herself for a fertility exercise or about to give birth just as they arrive... complete with—and I kid you not—a Lamaze type breath out the side of her mouth to blow her hair off her face.

Yikes, baby, we’ve come a long, sad way from Cyd Charisse wooing with her sexy legs, or a flirtatious laugh by Ginger Rogers, or a come hither look by Catherine Zeta Jones in Chicago. And while the actors all try their best—even poor, pitiful Brosnan who always seems like he’s staring off in the distance, longing to leave the set and go home to his family, not to mention his James Bond residual checks— they’re given very little with which to work in an uneven translation from stage to screen-- making the fault lie squarely with Lloyd.

In the end and despite casting such excellent talents such as up-and-coming hunky British Generation Y star Dominic Cooper, the underrated Stellan Skarsgard and my favorite version of Mr. Darcy, Colin Firth-- overall Mamma Mia! is one over-the-top, bawdy, Fellini like carnvialesque freak-show. I'm not sure about Greece but in the tacky land of Mamma, often the women shriek for no apparent reason (including a wasted Christine Baranski who nonetheless kills in her one showstopper “Does Your Mother Know”) while playing dress-up complete with quirky props that probably would never have even made it into the far campier yet more successful John Waters musical turned film Hairspray from 2007.

In addition, don’t even get me started on a downright embarrassing and desperate sequence featuring Julie Walters crooning “Take a Chance on Me” to a nearly terrified looking Skarsgard, who-- par for the course of male stars in the film-- spends a majority of his time like Firth and Brosnan, trying his damndest not to look at his watch in the hopes that the madness will end sooner rather than later (probably much like a majority of heterosexual males dragged to the film).

And as someone who still knows every single word of every one of ABBA’s classic songs (yes, even the forgettable ones like “Money, Money, Money”), not to mention a film buff who truly makes an effort to champion musical filmmaking in the hopes that we’re given more quality musicals to rival the golden age of those unforgettable MGM classics, it breaks my heart to say that the film is one of the biggest disappointments of the summer.

However, it’s one that I can also say in complete honesty and without just trying to politely evade critique, that man, did I love that spectacular cinematography.