more snowflakes in a few days

As predicted, I'm behind on the Snowflake challenge, but catching up is going to have to wait a bit. Still, I don't want to get entirely out of the habit of posting, and I don't want (and nor, I suspect, do you) every post to be all about my kid all the time. So today I will talk about the movies I watched on the plane to and from Minnesota (obligatory kid content: He called it "Mommysota") last weekend.

I think I have been to the movies in a movie theater twice since the kid was born, both to see Star Wars films (so - Rogue One and then The Last Jedi? I think? I think TFA was earlier in 2016?), so the fact that Delta has a pretty extensive library of new and not-so-new entertainment is a feature. (Is it only that way in Comfort+, for which I paid extra out of my own pocket "frequent" flier miles just so I could pick a seat closer to the front of the plane and thus get off the plane quicker once we landed? Which is all I care about, frankly. If they put the comfy seats at the back of the plane, I'd still want to sit near the door. Anyway, if that's the case, then that's two reasons to shell out for the upgrade - I'm short enough not to mind much about the leg room, but I want to be able to get off the plane with a soonness and I want badly not to be bored.) So on the way up I watched Ocean's 8, which was fine. I was entertained. My investment was pretty low and I didn't feel that my time was wasted. (I mean. I was on a plane, so what was I going to do if I hated it, get up and walk out?) I was surprised by the "twist," but I acknowledge I shouldn't have been, if I'd bothered to count noses in the preceding hour or so and realize that there must be a reason the thing wasn't called "Ocean's 7."

On the way back I watched Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again, whose title amused me but whose existence had me rolling my eyes just a bit when I saw it advertised in the spring and summer. But you know - the plot, I thought, was dumber than the original and worked harder to fit the songs in; but the performances were actually quite a lot better? - The singing, whatever, these guys aren't ABBA and nothing's going to change that, and the only time the singing in a jukebox musical has been better than the original album is at the end of We Will Rock You, the Queen musical, where they're able to do "Bohemian Rhapsody" live with the called-for dozens of voices. But the acting was better, I thought. Less silly. Even though whole pages of the script were totally silly but the movie was taking itself pretty seriously. I don't know; maybe the facts that (a) I was exhausted at the time because I'd had a weekend of running a curling competition and the alarm had gone off at 4am that morning to begin the journey home, (b) I have been exhausted for the past two years because kid, (c) I am always a sucker for baby stuff these days because (c') kid and (c") ongoing Stuff about wanting another kid and (d) I always miss my dad have combined to make me precisely the mostly uncritical target audience for "I've Been Waiting for You" sung by a pregnant young woman who's lost her mother, with flashbacks to her mother giving birth to her almost all alone But They Will Always Have Each Other. I don't know, you guys. I know it's played, but I legit cried a little in my window seat. I think my middle-seat neighbor was asleep the whole time, but I don't care if she woke up and judged me. I was also profoundly satisfied with the full-cast "Dancing Queen" as the boats came in, which in the first movie I didn't quite care for (because in the stage show that number was a really supportive moment for Donna from Rosie and Tanya, and bringing in every woman in the whole place made it way too much Grrl Power for me at the expense of the very important Friends Forever/You Got This).

Anyway. I was particularly impressed with the performances of the three young men who were supposed to grow up to be Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, and Colin Firth. I thought they were very well cast for type and each did a nice job with his older-dude mimicry, showing enough behaviors and mannerisms to be convincing but not trying to do a whole imitation. (They may have done better than Ewan McGregor did as Alec Guinness? It's hard to say. He did good vocal work but the more times I see the original Star Wars the less I am awed by that aspect of Episode 1. [About the rest of Episode 1, obviously, the less said the better.] You know who did a great job with this kind of assignment was Kirsten Nelson as the younger Mrs. Landingham in the "Two Cathedrals" episode of The West Wing. These kids weren't up to that level, but they were very good.)

Okay, did I say the movie had whole pages that were silly? Cher, everybody. I can't say it was unrelieved silliness from Cher's appearance until the end, because the aforementioned "I've Been Waiting for You" is after she arrives, but dudes. And although we had to know Andy Garcia's Señor Cienfuegos was going to turn out to be Fernando, because why else would a character in this movie on a Greek island have a Spanish name and be played by Andy Garcia?, the moment when Garcia and Cher are Reunited At Last was utterly preposterous and I loved it. I'm not sorry.

Of course I'd known Cher was coming, because I'd seen the commercials, but because I haven't been out of the house to see a film but a couple of times in the past two years, I was unprepared for the Meryl Streep character to be dead (speaking of this movie taking itself more seriously than the original, I guess). Given that the Stellan Skarsgård and Colin Firth characters were not coming to the long-expected party, I spent a lot of the first hour or so of the movie thinking Well, I suppose the three of them may not have been available?, although it seems like a bold move to make a Mamma Mia! sequel without half your headliners?, and then of course the two dudes' unavailability was a "plot" point and along they came, so that's fine, and not entirely unexpected. But when they Showed Up After All and she was still dead, I thought, wow, this is what they had to do to get around the fact that the whole cast agreed to do another except Meryl, huh, I guess some Oscar winners are one-and-done with frivolous musicals, what are you going to do. (Side note: Colin Firth and CHER are also Academy Award winners, which is kind of a lot more bling than you'd expect in this sort of movie, isn't it?) Anyway, so I was genuinely surprised and pleased when she turned up as a Force Ghost and sang a duet with Amanda Seyfried.

And! Then I may have loved the curtain-call "Super Trouper" on this movie more than I loved the curtain-call "Waterloo" on the (first movie and) original show. I liked that they did it in the style of a curtain call, with the respective trios of women and men coming along in sets; and I liked that they went ahead and met up the older ones with their younger counterparts; and I liked that they put the generations of women (Sophie and Donna and CHER) together in a set as well; and I admit it, I liked that they put the couples together too - and gave Dead Meryl Streep the line "the sight of you will prove to me I'm still alive." (What. I still appreciate irony.)