Every cinema-goer has their thing, that particular sweet spot that all but guarantees they will buy a ticket. For some, it’s the promise of Tom Cruise chucking himself from the top of a skyscraper to land in a golf cart. For others, it’s anticipating just how bleak Michael Hanneke is feeling about the world in any given year. For me, it’s two simple words: “starring Cher”.
In recent times, opportunities to fling cash at whichever cinematic Cher vehicle is around have been few and far between; the last time was for Burlesque, in 2010, an overcooked story about an ambitious dance troupe that also starred Christina Aguilera and that somehow, despite that, ended up not being camp, which was not a decision that worked in its favour.
What a treat, then, that Cher is back to save the day in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, a film into which she is literally helicoptered in to “get the party started” (and to release an album of Abba covers).
Time and again, Cher has proved herself to be excellent on the big screen. She told Graham Norton recently that when audiences saw the trailer for her debut role in Silkwood, alongside her Mamma Mia! compadre Meryl Streep, they laughed out loud at the idea of her as a serious actor. “And I got nominated for an Academy award [for it],” she told Norton, dryly. She won one a few years later, for Moonstruck. She’s a deserved scene-stealer in The Witches of Eastwick, while Mermaids remains one of the great films of the 90s.
I interviewed her a few years ago, a fact I like to mention within the first couple of minutes of meeting anyone, and I asked her why she wasn’t acting as much as she once did. “I’m too old to be young and I’m too young to be old, so I have to be used creatively,” she explained, then she slagged off Burlesque (“horrible”), which was hugely entertaining.
There has been much to enjoy about Mamma Mia 2’s arrival, from the meme-fication of pictures from the premiere to Christine Baranski, forever Diane Lockhart and so much more, going viral after being told she has Big Dick Energy. But the fact that Cher is barely in it, really, and that at 72, she’s playing the mother of Meryl Streep, 69, shows that casting directors are still not sure quite what to do with her, other than to let her be Cher. That’s a spectacle I’m always happy to see, but nevertheless, it’s one that leaves me wanting even more.
Salute her for refusing to grin and bear the groping
One spectacle more satisfying than any blockbuster appeared last week in the form of a brief clip of CCTV footage, which showed a customer in a pizza restaurant in Savannah, Georgia, casually grabbing the backside of a waitress as he passed her, not bothering to look at her or look back.
Emelia Holden, the 21-year-old on the receiving end, was not having any of it. In a flash, she turned around, grabbed his T-shirt, put him in a headlock, superhero-style, and pulled him to the floor. She told him off, then asked her colleagues to call the police.
There’s no sound on the tape, but it’s possible to imagine what she shouted as she pointed her finger at him and gave what looks to be a furious dressing-down. The groper, who was said to have been having dinner with his wife, has been charged with sexual battery. Holden has set up a Go Fund Me page to direct the attention she’s been receiving towards raising money for a cat shelter.
I have devoured this story like a novel. The initial scenario is so familiar and recognisable – ask any woman if she’s had her bum pinched or grabbed or slapped in a public place, and how many times she has, like me, ignored it or shrugged it off – but the ending is new. To see an unfamiliar outcome, in which an act that seems so easy to the perpetrator is not treated as a small irritant, as something to be put up with, is strange and thrilling and necessary.
Holden told the Inside Edition TV show that even she had been surprised by the force of her reaction: “I didn’t even know I could do that.”
Anyone for a dip with Bear Grylls and Jaws?
Bear Grylls has put his name to a new theme park-style “adventure attraction” due to open at Birmingham’s NEC this autumn, where visitors will be able to go on “one of the most extreme days out you can ever imagine”. (If that’s all it takes to be an adventure attraction, I should start selling tickets to go clothes shopping with my mother.)
As celebrity endorsements for theme parks go, Grylls makes more sense than most. He’s an ex-SAS adventurer so hard that when he was stung by a jellyfish, a Spice Girl weed on his hand. He was trying to eat the jellyfish at the time, so beast truly triumphed over man, in that case.
Not everyone is booking their advance tickets. A change.org petition has been set up to protest against plans to offer diving with sharks, though organisers argue that the attraction will give part of its proceeds to conversation charity the Shark Trust. At least the sharks should fare better than the animals on Grylls’s Channel 4 series The Island, which are slaughtered on camera for contestants’ “survival”, when a better way of surviving might be to not near-starve people for entertainment on TV.
• Rebecca Nicholson is an Observer columnist
