Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

[1.5 stars] [IMDb Link]

[Amazon Link]
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The Netflix algorithm thought I'd like this a lot better than I did. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood.

The story is that Donna (Meryl Streep in the first movie) has kicked the bucket, leaving her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) and widower (Pierce Brosnan) bereft. The movie also does an origin story, describing how Young Donna (Lily James) came to be impregnated with Sophie and wind up on that picturesque Greek isle owning a hotel. There's a lot of bouncing back and forth between past and present.

Oh, and Cher shows up, playing Donna's mom, Sophie's grandma. Also: Andy Garcia as (ta da!) "Fernando". What's he doing here? C'mon, guess. I bet you're right.

And mostly it's just an excuse for big dancing/singing production numbers with more ABBA songs. Unfortunately, they used all the really popular ABBA songs in the first movie, so the ones here are mostly second-string; I didn't even recognize some of them (but I am not really an ABBA fan).

Still it's kind of a hoot to see Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, and Colin Firth try to dance and sing. They look like they're having a good time. (Although whenever I see Stellan Skarsgård in a movie, it makes me want to watch The Hunt for Red October again.)


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT

URLs du Jour

2018-12-19

[Amazon Link]
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  • You may have noticed what people (for example, Slashdot) are calling a "Senate Report" that hypes Russian pro-Trump interference in the 2016 election. At Reason, Nick Gillespie unhypes: Yes, Russian Trolls Tried To Influence the 2016 Election. No, They Didn't Win It for Trump.

    Perspective here is key. When it comes to foreign influence, the CIA says that Moscow has been trying to influence presidential outcomes via covert propaganda since at least since 1964, when Nikita Khrushchev threw his weight behind Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater due to the latter's higher level of bellicosity toward the Soviet Union and communism in general. The amount of impressions, likes, retweets, shares, and rubles that get thrown around in the reports sound fantastic until you zoom out to the bigger picture. As TechCrunch reported a year ago, for instance, Clinton and Trump spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads while the IRA ponied up $46,000, or 0.05 percent as much.

    Today's Amazon Product du Jour: Russian nesting troll dolls. And I noticed that Amazon says the "Manufacturer recommended age" is "36 years and up". Consider yourself warned, young people.


  • At Cato, Jeffery Miron asks the musical question: Should the Government Manufacture Generic Drugs?. It's in response to a recent Elizabeth Warren proposal to … um … do that.

    […] Warren’s suggested policy - more government, rather than reduction or elimination of existing patent protection - fits the standard progressive approach: assume the fix to imperfect government is more government, rather than less.

    Note: as near as I can tell, Jeffrey's proposed solution, patent reform, wouldn't do much to alleviate the alleged problem with generic drugs, since they aren't under patent protection.

    The issue is outlined in this Marketplace article that describes a causal chain: once a drug is genericized → its price drops → profits decrease → companies stop making it → competition decreases → the remaining companies increase prices.

    My free market spider sense tingles: So ordinary market forces don't work for generic drugs? I suspect there's a deregulatory solution somewhere, but I don't know enough about the details to point it out.


  • At National Review, Ben Shapiro writes on Anti-Semitism & Alice Walker: The Left Excuses Hatred of Jews.

    This week, The New York Times Review of Books printed an interview with Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple. The interviewer asked Walker to list the books on her nightstand. Most were unobjectionable. One was not: a book titled And the Truth Shall Set You Free, by David Icke. Walker described the book thusly: “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.”

    As Yair Rosenberg of Tablet noted, this is a bit of problem. As it turns out, Icke is a rabid anti-Semite, and And the Truth Shall Set You Free is a tome of vitriolic Jew-hating garbage. Rosenberg explains that in the book, “The word ‘Jewish’ appears 241 times, and the name ‘Rothschild’ is mentioned 374 times. These references are not compliments.” The book itself suggests that the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax tract written in the late 1800s, was indeed genuine.

    Back in 2006 I read Jon Ronson's book THEM, which had a chapter on Icke. Back then, it was an open question whether he was antisemitic, or simply a nut that believed that the Secretive Controllers Of Everything are not Jews, but actual alien lizards.


  • Our fair state makes the Volokh Conspiracy: ACLU (N.H.) Challenging Criminal Libel Statute. The case was apparently brought due to the brief arrest of an Exeter citizen for claiming on a community website that a retiring police officer was "the dirtiest most corrupt cop" and that the current police chief was covering up for him. (Local TV station story about it is here.)

    Eugene Volokh comments:

    But I'm skeptical about it: The "tends to expose to public hatred, contempt, or ridicule" test has a long history to it, and the Court has taken the view that a "knowledge requirement of [a] statute further reduces any potential for vagueness." Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010). The definition isn't mathematically precise, but it doesn't have to be, under the Court's precedents. (Note that in Ashton v. Kentucky (1966), the Court did strike down a common-law criminal libel rule on vagueness grounds, but that rule was considerably broader and less precise than the New Hampshire rule.)

    So we'll see what happens.


  • And we haven't embedded a Michael Ramirez cartoon lately. Let me remedy that:

    (I did a number of "embed.ly" embeds from MPR's website in the past. Unfortunately, they are no longer functional for some reason.)


Last Modified 2024-01-24 11:52 AM EDT