Selected Reviews by Subject:- Film, TV, DVDs, CDs, media critics | Health, Medical | Jews (Frauds, Freemasons, Religions, Rules, Wars) | Race | Revisionism | Women | Bertrand Russell | Richard Dawkins | Martin Gardner | H G Wells
According to the credits, this was mainly filmed in Shepperton (west of London), plus Bordeaux and Stockholm. The island, with the red-roofed Hotel Bella Donna on a hill, is said to be Vis, which is off Croatia's long thin coast in the Adriatic, and no doubt helps explain the many Croat credits. The film has the usual puzzling collection of trademarks: Universal, Comcast, Legendary, Perfect World Pictures, Littlestar, Playtone.
Ten years later, the original actors look rather older; one of the side-effects of colour movies and excellent sound recording is the increased awareness of slow changes of people with time. A technical thing, somewhat analogous to the introduction of passports when photography was of good quality. The six newbies must have been very hard to cast: I couldn't work out which of two males was the young Firth and young Brosnan. And the young Julie Walters and Meryl Peters (my guess) seemed unlike their more mature models. Perhaps in the trade it's accepted wisdom that young actors have ineradicable mannerisms of their era.
Amanda Seyfried begins the film by singing a mournful song. Her voice seemed processed. Her eye separation looks unusually large; I wonder if she has enhanced stereo vision. She misses 'Sky'. Who is being trained in the 'hotel business', not as a manager. The point here is the smuggled-in assumptions of money coming in, from what was a barely-surviving business. This is a Jewish attitude, I supposed based on ownership of the Fed and the Bank of England, to name but two. They might have had Jews shipping low-IQ aliens in, then getting rent from the Jewish-controlled state, building up debt for the locals to pay off over a few centuries.
Anyway. A few establishing shots of Seyfried, as the boss, getting pictures adjusted and issuing commands, which the manager is to carry out. And here's the the manager, a bearded type like Fernando Rey, and Spanish rather than Greek.
And "I'll be thinking of you tomorrow. At the grand opening." The moods of Abba songs are usually simple; a couple of minutes doesn't allow much emotional variation and conflict. So there's a tendency for moods to seem fixed, until some future song. There are confusing intervals when it appears that one or other of the couples might or might not stay together or split.
Flashback time, to an Oxford college graduation ceremony, presumably supposedly in about 1960—the age difference between Seyfried and Peters is impossible—in a wainscotted room with a stage at one end, and an collection of seated ensemble performers wearing gowns and what are still called mortar boards. ('Ensemble performers' is a phrase from the end credits). Two of the elderly supervisors are—I think—the Abba keyboardist and guitarist.
And here we have another Jewish meme, the joke of modern universities, stuffed with 'Jews' with little knowledge of anything. I was reminded of the lightweight provincial girls supposedly aiming for a business career with Alan Sugar's money. Up comes the one undergraduate "selected by his or her peers" and "you're going to do great things, Donna" says an actress from Harry Potter. Donna, degree subjects mercifully unstated, says "this place has taught me so much .. about friendship .. love.. and most importantly of all, that the very best things happen unexpectedly." Or something like that.
A lesser-known song When I Kissed the Teacher followed, with its trademark mechanised beat. As with (say) Busby Berkeley's progressively odder arrangements, one has to wonder what the choreography is doing. Perhaps an ironical comment on energetic but mindless activity; or an even more ironical comment on unspoken secretive controllers behind the scenes, pied pipers directing people to destruction.
Following that is a bridging scene, with young Donna presented as the natural and automatic leader of three girls, though not leaderly enough to plan her future. She's not going home, but going away. Then a scene with what may be the Eiffel Tower blurred in the background.
And Seyfried, singing how 'they passed me by/ all those great romances', in absurd contrast with part 1 of 'Mamma Mia'. 'Laying in her bed/ staring at the ceiling/ Wishing she was [pause] somewhere instead'.
And the dead Donna's two friends: "We have to be strong for her .. what she doesn't need is you crying every time someone mentions Donna".
The myth of strong women is pushed. More oddly, the myth of three fathers seems to be pushed—all of a piece with the Jewish nonsense of non-existent races and fluid genders and multiple sexuality and legally-enforced pronouns. I'm uncertain whether it's being suggested that a person can in fat have three fathers, but I think so.
And now the hotel manager, perhaps based on Fernando Rey. Seems to be Spanish, not Greek. There's another typically Jewish piece of theatre, in which all the actors agree with each other, in the way that Jews group supporters of a war they want and all issue the same message. "Be still my beating vagina!" says one of the women, as Fernando makes his little jokes ('the exquisite structure of your bones', 'wisdom of a flamingo') to moisten her lovegroove.
And a meeting between young Donna and young Harry (Colin Firth) in a hotel. The actor does his best to combine acute shyness with instant propositioning. "When you fall you fall." Cue their action version of Waterloo, complete with actor playing Napoleon, and the same queries on choreography. The cheerful indifference to European wars, Napoleon, Wellington, Jew financing—as though Sweden, itself initiator of at least one huge war, and close enough to Finland and mass murders in the USSR—comes near to disgusting me.
Anyway, a post-sex scene. And then the younger version of the Swede (if he is a Swede) Skeleton Kamprad or whoever announces he suspects a storm etc and offers the young Donna a ride in his boat. Incidentally the supposed identical twin brother (liked by Jewish fakers) of the sailing Swede appears at an award ceremony—with special fat face effects—announces that "the only important thing is family". Of course.
I must have missed the assignation with young Brosnan. Anyway, in due course young Donna has a child, a daughter (possibly to avoid embarrassing circumcisions scenes), and the opportunity for a song about being deceived and abandoned.
Apart from remarking on Cher's voice—like a bass ocarina—and the long list of credits (chargehands, but no hammerhands) and suggestive names (Josh Dylan? Michelle Clapton?) and the songs with stock cliché phrases, in European languages, not exactly simple English—I'm left with the reflection that, where realism is worked for, most people have little evolutionary immunity to visual misrepresentation, from paintings, to photos, to the most recent video techniques.
RW 2018-12-06