With apologies to Radio Lady, here is my review of "Mamma Mia."

First of all, I must tell you that I am now reconsidering my pledge to see every movie that Meryl Streep makes. After this experience, I am going to have to be more discerning, since one of my goals at this stage of life is not to waste any of the precious time that I have left on this planet. I am not expecting to depart soon; however, we never know what lies in store for us, so all the better to be proactive.

I hadn't realized, due to my lack of consciousness about much of popular culture, that this thing was laced together from ABBA's playlist of pop songs. As a result, each song had to have a rationale in the plot for having the characters sing it. So every last drop of gooped up, faux sentimentality supposedly concerning Life's Great Moments gets the treatment, played to its ultimate overacted, badly sung, incoherent, embarrassing limits. All of which is designed to have you weeping gently or laughing raucously (or, in my case, looking at my watch). I should have known what I was getting into. Well, shoulda, coulda, woulda.

A particular irritant was the so-called "choreography." I should not utter the word in the context of this thing. Choreography is what you got in "West Side Story." Or "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers." Or anything with Gene Kelly in it. Here you have people running for no apparent reason to the beach from their little Greek villa and then leaping about with what I assume is to convey Carefree Spontaneity so that we may experience How We Should Celebrate Life. Instead, the regard you need for the preservation of your sanity rapidly comes into play. And not a moment too soon.

But alas, if you are a determined fan of Ms. Streep you hang on just to see this brilliant woman do her brilliance in this role. And alas again, that hope is dashed. More of the same overwrought exploitation of your mind and emotions is repeated in the next musical number. And the next. (as I wondered how many songs did ABBA write, anyway). As Tennessee Williams once had one of his characters say, " Now I know how lucky dead people are."

I will not go into more instances of the film's relentless workovers save one: Streep's character in a homey rockiing chair with her 20 year old daughter in her lap, painting her toenails blue. You were now to cry on command as it is a Tender Moment of Mom and Daughter on Daughter's Wedding Day. It should have been my cue to quietly leave the theater while patrons were rumaging for their Kleenex. I had my chance for a getaway.

Perversely, I stayed for the Grand Finale. I say perverse because I knew what was coming: a reprise of "Dancing Queen" (which had been sung in one of the aforementioned run-to-the-beach Moments). At least the coda of this film had some degree of humor. I have always been fond of Disco's inherent goofiness, which has no pretension of doing anything but Dressing Up and singing badly.(It is why so many of us who are cranky find delight in Cher, even if she sings badly, which she does, but we are forgiving because it's part of the schtick). I am now persuaded that there is no choicer ecstasy than seeing Pierce Brosnan in platform shoes. The meaning of life must be divined in these moments so I am encouraged and take heart. I get positively cheerful at the prospect of finding my car in the parking lot and driving home.

:hide:

My daughter asked the same question.

I don't think I'd like it either. Excellent review!

I don't even think I want to see it on DVD... I'd rather retain good thoughts about Meryl.

Great review by the way! I give it an enthusiastic thumbs up! :thumbsup:

Thanks for enduring the pain in my stead.

Must be like my son said, "007 can get away with anything".

Brosnan must have been very much in need of work. I can't imagine tarnishing a career with that performance. They should have taught him songspeak.

Personally, I didn't think Meryl Streep was that bad. Clearly, she was just having fun.

And I thought Julie Walters was a hoot. Damned hard to steal a scene from Meryl Streep, but she did.

I am appalled by this kind of psychic exploitation of people for the glory of commercialism. It is offensive to me and I don't see any art coming out of this.

How in the world can an authentic narrative be made from something designed to be so exploitative? There is no soul here, no actual human emotion. Just cynical manipulation with the constant eye to the bottom line? I don't want to get into a lecture on aesthetics here, but I am offended when a film or a TV show goes after my emotional self in such self serving ways.

I am also offended when 90 minutes of my life have been effectively wasted. And if Julie Walters stole a scene from Meryl, then Meryl deserved it for consenting to do this thing in the first place.

I'm not an Abba fan. I am an admirer of Meryl Streep. I admired her singing performances
in Postcards from the Edge (check this out) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vbyg0ox1Ywc
and Prairie Home Companion.

I didn't think the movie was very good (I told hubby that as a musical it couldn't hold a candle
to West Side Story)but I think the actors were just having fun.

Isn't it ok to have fun? Does everything have to be art?

:shrug:

The difference is between the real thing and the fake. I hate to use the overworked term "authenticity" but I guess there is a reason that word is overworked, isn't there? One of my favorite silly movies is "Ghost Busters." I chuckle every time I hear the title song because I get a visual memory of the "Ghostmobile" and all of the inanity of that movie. The people in that movie were by definition goofy but that's ok because the movie's premise was, well, goofy.

Similarly, Roadrunner cartoons...(makes me smile as I type this)...

Woody Allen used to do films but he's been turning out movies for the last decade.

It's very tough to turn a musical into a film, but some Fred Astaire flicks qualify,
Cabaret certainly did, and of course West Side Story. I think even Chicago worked as a film.

I had very low expectations for Mama Mia (when I go to NY I rarely see musicals, I go to see plays)
since I'm not an Abba fan, so I guess I didn't have a problem with it being just a movie, not a film.
Most of the time, one expects to see Meryl Streep in films--and maybe that's the problem. Still, it
looked to me like she was just having fun and I have no problem with that.

dance pieces. Here is just one that I consider an example of pure artistry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1InfoCfipM

I posted others also but this one has a complexity that I like. Nice little montage at the end. Shot with low light, set in an alley with garbage can lids as props. Extraordinary.

That was an enjoyable--and well done--movie musical based on a stage play. It also won an Oscar and a Writer's Guild Award.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041716/

I was considering the lighting particularly, but also the set of the alley and the night time atmosphere. I am certainly not an expert on film techniques, but I do watch them closely. This one is done in a very interesting way. What I love about this is the low lighting, the alley setting and the garbage can lids as props! Out of this they made magic.
!

"The Sound of Music"..and only because it was ABOUT musicians.. there was a REASON for them to be singing all the time...

At our house, we get all "MST3K" when musicals come on, so we do eventually "enjoy" some of them, but not in the way the producers intended :evilgrin:

The Movie people keep trying to "revive' the musical, but it does not usually succeed.. People who like Abba or people who like a particular star in the film (as with the others), will go, but I don't see "THE MUSICAL" ever returning..

We were diferent back when they were "the thing"..

Most of the oldies musicals are now great comedies for cynics (like me)..:rofl:

The Prairie Home Pretentious Crap Suckfest Extraordinaire. :puke:

Partly because it was Altman. A bit atypical for him, but still Altman.

and had a long recuperation. After that, I vowed not to miss seeing any of Streep's performances.

I badly want to like Altman's output but so far I haven't had much luck. I like listening to him talk about films -- the highlights of some of the DVDs I've watched of his films in my recent attempt to get more conversant with his body of work were his commentaries and interviews -- and I think he was a really interesting and supremely cool dude, but I usually find that his actual film work does little for me. I wouldn't presume to call him 'overrated,' but I might be close to thinking that way. His reputation after 1970 ensured that he had the best people working with him, and lining up to do so, but even all that talent hasn't managed to make up for the ponderousness of some the projects I've seen, at least in my eyes.

I did like The Player a lot (I love films with inside jokes about Hollywood and film-making, and Tim Robbins was incredibly good in his role). To a lesser extent I liked McCabe and Mrs Miller (I liked the grittiness, the attention to promoting realism, and the atmospheric cinematography and Cohen's music added to proceedings), but I really didn't like M*A*SH* much (after all these years of waiting to see it, and my failure to be overly impressed by it -- even though I love Donald Sutherland, who was a thousand times more present and cool in Kelly's Heroes around the same time -- is not solely a result of having grown up on the TV iteration). And when I finally saw Pret A Porter I realized that watching the whole painful exercise of a film, in which potentially interesting subplots just sort of seemed to fizzle away ignominiously, got me no further than seeing the snippets I'd caught before and had the additional effect of just wasting my time (with the exception of catching onscreen the always-stunning Ms Loren and, again, all of the large cast's acting was of the highest quality).

I really want to like Altman's output, but so far he's impressed me a lot less than has the output of many of the less storied journeyman directors who laud him and his work. Maybe I'll catch Nashville before too long and see if my mind's changed by that.

Unfortunately, it just was like a slow form of torture for me. :banghead:

'tain't possible with me, even with powerful meds that would turn any normally sane person into a drooling zomby but merely keep me in a place where I can at least pretend to function in normal human society (such as it is...)

I liked the movie. It made me laugh. Even though it was an overwrought tale of various princesses and knights in shining armor, one knight whom in particular can't sing at all, but gamely makes the best of it.

It's completely demented to take this romp seriously. If it was me, I'd be jumping in that water NAKED!

:woohoo:

that has to tell me How Wonderful Jumping in Water Naked is. I'd just do it.

These cynical manipulators have your number. That is, they know how to push your (speaking generally of the movie and TV viewers, not you personally) buttons emotionally. So Jumping in Water Naked is #82 in their script and the viewer is sitting there, waiting for their next "cue."

That is what I am objecting to. I certainly don't mind a film depicting people bathing nude. Hell, I've been to a nude beach where everyone there was, at one time or another, jumping in completely naked. But this mindless, robotic Feel Good stuff substitutes the real for the fake so what we get is a faux thrill.

Hard to explain, I know...

He came trouping out in an outlandish blue-silver outfit, tightfitting, with hip high platform boots, a shirt open to his waist and, best of all, a rhinestone belt buckle spelling out SAM, his character's name. This is what I meant when I said I liked Disco...

but otherwise it was a stinker movie

I didn't take quite as much offense OVER ALL. But once again I was taken in by the hype around the opening of a movie, how STREEP and BROSNAN made the media rounds and were hailed to the skies.

The one review that stuck said that this was "the most satisfying musical since Cabaret."


That is my theme: Uh, "SINCE Cabaret" does not equate with "BETTER THAN Cabaret." Frankly, the ABBA music and how it would be put into a story line were the main attractions, not its being something profound. So let's leave Cabaret, West Side Story, Funny Girl, and, yes, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum out of all comparisons with this offering.

I see about one movie in a theater per five years or so. I was counting on just relaxing, and that's what I got. The best part of the acting was that it was restrained (except for the choreography). A couple of touching moments.

The #1 irritant was the frenetic choreography and the bridezilla hysterics, exploding a couple of sincere personal dilemmas into a supposedly Lear-Oedipus level.

There were eight white haired ladies sitting in the cineplex, all in a row in the middle, and me in the back seat. The volume was turned a bit down, back from when I saw Gladiator, and apparently the sound quality mechanics have improved.


As for STREEP, I will *oppose* the Oscar being given to her for this, which was a frequent accolade during her jams-and-jellies (credit Carol CHANNING) talkshow appearances, minding in this regard how much my opinion matters. I could never forget who it was in the role and that she was singing. She SALVAGED her participation by her skills and restraint, not so much deserves an Oscar for it.

I mean, please.

Excuse me for being so indisposed but really, this thing doesn't in any way add up to Oscar value. I just can't see it.

The finale was pretty good. Just straight Disco, over the top, just the way I loved it, great. That's the way this thing should be remembered!

for suspending disbelief in all other circumstances. There were times when, actually, some Greek spirit seeped and exploded through, hints of orgiastic rites, Dionysian women practically ripping lone captive males apart. That in itself was an accomplishment, given the Euro-mash the Greek setting had to break through, of Swedish music loaded with references to French (Waterloo, Napoleon) and Spanish (chiquitita), all in the name of '70s disco--like, what?!1

You see, there's your REAL Greek, not this godawful mishmash of pop goop.

Sorry to be so, well you know, awful about this. I AM crabby,you know...

Secondly, it is disconcerting to see these CHEESY ASS musical movies appear beside the more cerebral offerings of The Dark Knight and No Country for Old Men.

I haven't seen "Mamma Mia," but I give it three out of five pukes pre-viewing. :puke: :puke: :puke: