Review: Mama Mia! Here We Go Again (2018)

* * *
Director: Ol Parker
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Lily James, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters

The Mama Mia movies are the sort of works that force you to examine your own taste in art. In a purely objective sense, you're aware that they're not "good" and that, in fact, they don't even really come close to the normal standard of what makes a movie good. They are, if you are being brutally honest with yourself, barely movies at all in any traditional sense. Their narratives are thin as air, existing merely to connect a series of songs to each other, not always accomplishing that in the most elegant of ways. And yet. Isn't the aim of art to stir something in the audience, to touch some emotion and heighten it through the experience of consuming it? If the goal of the work is to bring the audience joy and it succeeds in doing so then isn't it, by definition, a "success" even if it does so in a fashion that might generously be described as "clumsy." This is all a round about way of saying that Mama Mia! Here We Go Again is as terrible and wonderful as the first film and I loved every minute of it.

Review: The Love Punch (2013)

* * 1/2
Director: Joel Hopkins
Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Emma Thompson

On the one hand, it's sort of unfortunate that a film like The Love Punch can attract such an overqualified cast; it's the sort of fluffy, unchallenging, and inconsequential movie that disappears from your memory almost as soon as you finishing watching it. On the other hand, the people who finance movies are so disinterested in films about people over "a certain age" (unless they're well over a certain age and you can put a bunch of them in a hotel together) that if you want to see actors like Emma Thompson or Pierce Brosnan in anything, you kind of have to see them in things like this. Personally, I'd rather see something with Emma Thompson in it than nothing with Emma Thompson in it, which is how I came to see The Love Punch, a proudly middle of the road movie that ends up being more entertaining than it has any right to be, given its low ambitions, but manages to coast a long way on the charms of its cast.