Mamma Mia! (2008) and It's Complicated (2009)

The marvelous Meryl Streep is awash in aging men!  And lucky her, they're all younger than she is!  (save for the well preserved Steve Martin, 4 years her senior)

So... the best part of Mamma Mia! is when the elder women sing "Dancing Queen" and "Waterloo" just before and then during the end credits.  Amanda Seyfried and her beau are charming, but the actors cast as her potential fathers aren't very good singers, and this is particularly problematic in the case of Pierce Brosnan.  There's also an issue with the setting; at times I feel like we're in the Greek islands, and at times I feel like we're in the Caribbean (especially when Christine Baranski goes down to the beach and sings to the bartender).  Overall it feels like a story whose thinness works fine as a stage production but doesn't really make it as a film.

To clarify: it's not just that the plot is simple -- It's Complicated also has a relatively simple plot, but the script, the story, is not just a vehicle to get to the next musical number (or plot point), but gives us human reasons why the characters act the way they do without unnecessarily vilifying anyone... except perhaps the 5 year-old.  Yes, Agness gets vilified by Meryl's friends (and it was nice that in both this and Mamma Mia! that Meryl has a posse of aging women friends), but that's natural in the context of those characters in that moment; what I mean is that the script doesn't make her "the bad guy (gal)" and so you can actually feel some sympathy for her when she finally learns she's being cheated on.  Yeah, Meryl's ex is a jerk, but human.  We get to see a lot of him over the course of the movie, so we've seen his sleazy charms that attracted her to him at first and slowly experienced the behaviors that drove them apart.

Two other things of note:

• We thought John Krasinski, who plays Meryl's future son-in-low, was fabulous and did a great job supporting the "big three" in this movie.  Turns out he's a regular on the Office, so now I've convinced Sarahmac we should netflix it.  w00t
• It's interesting to note that Steve Martin acting as if he's high is identical to pretty much every video of Steve Martin from the 70's.  At some point he learned how to act reserved, and now he basically has two modes.