The Fabulous Four (2024)

Though it's not very good, I downloaded this fluffy chick flick about female boomers gathering for one of their weddings, and enjoyed it on a long airplane ride last month. It has some laughs, lots of star power with Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, and great production values and wardrobe. Bruce Greenwood makes an appearance in the second act. I see in the credits that Midler's daughter Sophie von Haselberg plays Amanda but I don't remember her character and I don't plan to watch it again to check who she was. In her smiling headshot, though, she looks just like her mama.

Jocelyn Moorhouse directs, from a script by Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly, and cast Midler as her usual brash narcissistic character, but Mullally's character is way more unhinged and, surprisingly, she is the singer in the group, not Midler, though Midler sings for a minute in one number. Singer Michael Bolton has a cameo as himself in act three.

I'm streaming the lighthearted score by David Hirschfelder with my subscription to Apple Music (his son Sam is credited on the musics apps but not on imdb). With 45 producers, this movie is in second place in my Producers Plethora Prize. And since I mentioned production values, shout out to production designer Catherine Smith and costume designer Marie Schley.

Midler was last blogged for Coastal Elites, Sarandon for 3 Generations, Mullally for Smashed, Greenwood for The Post, and Moorhouse and David Hirschfelder for The Dressmaker. Ralph is best known to me for 65 episodes of Abbott Elementary (with an Emmy) but she has been working steadily since the mid 1970s, including on Sister Act 2 (1993). She can sing too, but she didn't in this movie. This is Smith's first time heading her department on a feature, though she has some TV on her resume, including 41 episodes of Transparent and all eight of Lessons in Chemistry. Schley worked on four other features and has plenty of TV costume experience, including 42 of Transparent.

The far-from-fabulous 25% average from critics on Rotten Tomatoes kept me from watching this when it first came out, but now I'll go along with its audiences' 71%. I downloaded it for that plane ride on February 11 from Paramount+ with our subscription, but it's also now available for rent.