Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie

Year 17, Day 248 - 9/5/25 - Movie #5,132

BEFORE: If I'm posting late I apologize, I slept late on Friday morning (afternoon) and had one of those really long dreams that just kept going, and clearly the movies and TV I watched this week must have triggered something. It was a mix of elements from "Maggie Moore(s)", "Mean Girls" and the "MasterChef" semi-finale. In the dream I was hanging out with people from the theater when I got caught up in a search for Gordon Ramsay's brother, as I had apparently been the last person to speak to him before he disappeared. Then I was on a bus going somewhere with people from my trivia team, and I was saving all of the receipts from places we ate because I had to fill out an expense report. Then I woke up, so I guess now I'll never find out what happened to Chef Ramsay's brother.  

Jon Hamm carries over again from "Mean Girls" (2024). I think maybe I had programmed this one once before, but I could not verify that Cara Delevingne appears in the film, Wikipedia says she does but IMBD does not. I can't take that chance of possibly breaking the chain. 

While we're on the topic of fame and events and weird happenings, I just joined Instagram a few days ago, which is probably going to be the sign that it's no longer a cool place to be, so I expect a lot of people will be leaving the platform, now that I'm there. But I started posting the old convention photos, like me with Carrie Fisher and me with Natalie Portman, for #FlashbackFridays. I'm going through all my Flickr photos and picking only the BEST, but still, it's going to take a long time for me to catch up, as I have encountered a LOT of celebrities at various events. 

THE PLOT: After attracting both media and police attention for accidentally knocking Kate Moss into the river Thames, Edina and Patsy hide out in the south of France. 

AFTER: I know there's American TV and then there's British TV, and those are two different animals, even they may show SOME of theirs here and SOME of ours there. But really, I haven't watched a lot of British TV, not since "Fawlty Towers" back in the day. Maybe a little bit of "Are You Being Served?" but before that, just a bunch of "Benny Hill" when I was a horny pre-teen. I've heard people talking about some good shows like "Luther" and "Fleabag" and then the next level down on my radar, "Slow Horses" and "Baby Reindeer", but I just don't have the time to binge any of it when I'm so backed up on "Only Murders in the Building" and then after that, two Marvel shows and like 3 Star Wars shows (I finished "Andor", how much more does this franchise demand from me?). "Peacemaker", "The Sandman", new episodes of "King of the Hill", I can't even watch all the American TV I want, and now I'm supposed to fit in "Peaky Blinders" somehow? 

But I caught a few episodes of "AbFab" over the years, back when I was taping TV for a living. I think they used to run it on Comedy Central?  But geez, it was on the BBC for, no lie, 20 years, 1992 to 2012, so binging all of that would take some time, which again, I just don't have. Maybe there were some great ones in there somewhere, but now I guess I'll never know because I'm so backed up on TV. Anyway, I get it, two professional women who like to drink a lot and get high and fool around while their personal lives are collapsing around them. Yeah, in America we call that "Two Broke Girls", or before that, "Laverne & Shirley" and before THAT, "I Love Lucy". It just always goes back to Lucy and Ethel working in that candy factory, doesn't it? Wait a sec, there's only 39 episodes TOTAL in 20 years? British TV must be really different, because you could probably knock all of them out over a weekend. 

Anyway, the movie is designed to be the end-cap for the whole series, there are no plans to make any more stories with these characters unless Jennifer Saunders changes her mind. By now Edina Monsoon is a grandmother, but still acts like a teenager, and here she tries to land Kate Moss as a client when she hears that she dumped her old P.R. person and might be looking for a new one. The problem is, when her friend Patsy calls her with the plan, Edina accidentally has her on speaker-phone while she's in the middle of a lunch event with all the other top P.R. people. So it's a whole crowd of people who dash over to Kate Moss while she's sitting on a wall during a London Fashion Week event, and they all push her off the wall and into the Thames River. Edina gets blamed for it, and is brought in to the police as a manslaughter suspect. While the cops are still searching the river for Kate Moss' body, and Edina and Patsy are questioned by a detective, who just happens to be dating Edina's daughter, Saffy. 

The pair set out to prove that Kate Moss is still alive, by searching the river themselves, and then setting Edina's personal assistant, Bubble, floating down the river to see where she'll end up - presumably the current will take Bubble to the same place. But when they lose track of Bubble, now they fear they've drowned TWO people in the river, so they feel they have to flee the country. They hire a couple drag queens to come visit them, swap clothes with them and therefore get past the reporters outside, and leave the drag queens at home to watch TV in their place, fooling nobody. But they take a plane to Nice along with Edina's half-rican granddaughter, Jane, who she calls "Lola" for some reason - but the granddaughter has working credit cards, and they don't. (Some things never change, I guess...)

While in Cannes, Edina and Patsy devise schemes to make some money, which they're going to need if they're on the run and have to start their lives over somewhere that isn't London. Patsy tracks down Charlie, an old boyfriend (played by the man known for portraying "Dame Edna" in drag, so he's got TWO roles in this film) who owns a yacht, and once said that he wasn't the marrying kind, except he would consider marrying Patsy. Well, they find him, but learn that he doesn't want to be true to his word, because he's got a lot of much younger girlfriends now, and considers Patsy to be too old. Well, that's the smart move because Edina and Patsy were only after his money because he's so old, so they were going to either wait for him to die, or possibly find a way to cause his death. 

The next plan is for Patsy to disguise herself as a man and seduce an elderly baroness who might be the richest woman in the world. The plan works, and there's a quickie marriage that can't possibly be legal, but they're still going to roll with it, because they get to stay in a luxury hotel and enjoy a lavish lifestyle. However they were spotted by Emma "Baby Spice" Bunton at some point, who called her friend Lulu (you know, "To Sir With Love" Lulu) and Lulu finds the not-dead Bubble and flies out to Cannes to find them. Saffy and her police detective boyfriend also arrive in France, but they're looking for Saffy's daughter, who Edina and Patsy kind of kidnapped and then sort of - forgot about?  Oh, they left her with the cleaning staff of their hotel, you know, like you do. Well she may learn some valuable skills that way. 

The police close in on the luxury hotel, but when they search for Edina and Patsy, they only find Joan Collins, again and again (I once had a dream like that...)  Our heroes escape in a tiny delivery van, but the brakes fail and they end up in Bubble's pool, where Saffy and Bubble and Nick are waiting to put an end to all their nonsense. But then everything changes when it's revealed that Kate Moss isn't dead after all, she just got out of the river and went to a party and just lost track of time. So no body, no crime, and Edina Monsoon is back on top, cleared of all charges and ready to do business with her new client, Kate Moss. Everything gets wrapped up rather neatly, with the exception of Patsy's marriage to a woman - ah, but there's a twist there as well. 

This film's good for quite a few laughs, I mean the primary goal of any comedy should be to be funny, so why does it seem that some comedies either forget that, or seem to never get around to it? Plus this film gets to poke fun at the worlds of fashion, fame, publicity and even some gender-bending, for 2016 it was sort of ahead of its time. Gender's just an idea that was drilled into our heads by the previous generations, right? Now there are women out there who were once men, men who were once women, and a lot of folks who are hovering somewhere in-between. The conservatives wish they could just legislate all of that away, or pretend it doesn't exist, but I think the genie is now out of that bottle and isn't going back in anytime soon. 

Directed by Mandie Fletcher

Also starring Jennifer Saunders (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Joanna Lumley (last seen in "An Accidental Studio"), Julia Sawalha (last heard in "Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget"), Jane Horrocks (ditto), June Whitfield (last seen in "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells"), Indeyarna Donaldson-Holmes, Christopher Ryan, Mo Gaffney (last seen in "Desperados"), Kathy Burke (last heard in "The Sea Beast"), Helen Lederer, Harriet Thorpe (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Good Grief"), Robert Webb, Marcia Warren (last seen in "Leap Year"), Barry Humphries (last seen in "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey"), Lulu (last seen in "The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"), Emma Bunton (last seen in "Pavarotti"), Kate Moss (last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Wanda Ventham, Janette Tough, Mark Gatiss (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One"), Nick Mohammed (last seeen in "Maggie Moore(s)"), Chris Colfer (last heard in "Marmaduke"), Beattie Edmondson (last seen in "Bridget Jones's Baby"), Diana Green, Ben Roddy, Mina Renoir, Michael Momoh (last seen in "The Legend of Tarzan"), Jocelyn Jee Esien (last seen in "The Hustle"), Camille Ucan (last seen in "45 Years"), Sakaya Costa, Josephine McGrail, Jean-Philippe Serve, Glen Power, Lynn Blades (last seen in "The Gunman"), Vitali Malko, Shinji Ishigaki, Azuka Ononye, Daniel Cook, La Voix, Daniel Lismore, The Vivienne, Miss Orry, Xtina, Nathalie Veck, Svetlana Marlier, Jacques Thomas, Cedric Varley, Tim Donovan, Michael Addo (last seen in "Last Christmas"), Amrou Al-Kadhi (last seen in "Venom: Let There Be Carnage"), Alicia Robinson,

with cameos from Richard Arnold, Christopher Biggins, Ozwald Boateng, Judith Chalmers, Gwendoline Christie (last seen in "The Personal History of David Copperfield"), Alexa Chung, Abbey Clancy, Rylan Clark-Neal, Lily Cole (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Joan Collins (last seen in "My Mom Jayne"), Poppy Delevingne (last seen in "Elvis & Nixon"), Alice Dellal, Alesha Dixon, Oscar Dunbar, Jourdan Dunn (last seen in "Zoolander 2"), Ella Eyre, Dawn French (also last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Sadie Frost, Jean-Paul Gaultier (also last seen in "George Michael: Freedom"), Llewella Gideon (last seen in "Before I Go to Sleep"), Nick Grimshaw, Orla Guerin, Jerry Hall (last seen in "Freejack"), Jodie Harsh, Perez Hilton, Anya Hindmarch, Pam Hogg, Kelly Hoppen, Alex Jones (not that one), Joshua Kane, Jamie Laing, Geraldine Larkin, Kamil Lemie (last heard in "The Song of Names"), Kathy Lette, Bip Ling, Daisy Lowe (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Stella McCartney, Suzy Menkes, Graham Norton (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman"), Miquita Oliver, Pandemonia, Jade Parfitt, Jeremy Paxman (last seen in "The Kids Are Alright"), Sophie Raworth (last seen in "Amy"), La Roux, Camilla Rutherford (last seen in "Breathe"), Brix Smith-Start, Lara Stone, Tinie Tempah, Bruno Tonioli, Kirsty Wark, Suki Waterhouse (last seen in "Insurgent"), Rebel Wilson (last seen in "Bachelorette")

RATING: 6 out of 10 empty bottles of Bollinger champagne