Avid readers of my blog know that I like ABBA quite a bit. When my daughter asked me if I had any songs in Swedish, I could honestly answer yes. All of my children above the age of 5 are also devoted ABBA fans (unfortunately I have never been able to convert my husband.) Last fall, my oldest son and I were blessed to have some extra money and the opportunity to go see the play Mamma Mia!, which is based on ABBA's songs. We loved it! When I heard that a movie was coming out, I immediately wrote it on my calendar. Robert and I went to see it last Saturday, and again, loved it.
However, when I told my mom how much I liked it, she was surprised and told me I should read the review from Time Magazine by Richard Corliss. So I did. Um, did he see the same movie? My son refused to finish reading it - it was that bad! Last night, while trying to go to sleep, I thought, "I should write a review of the review on my blog!" When I told my son this morning, he burst out laughing and told me to. So here it is. I will quote the review in italics and write in my comments.
Now the big genre challenge: musicals. The very form is antique. Young filmgoers often have to be told why the people in these movies are suddenly singing instead of speaking. And nothing dates faster than musical styles.
My children like musicals - I don't understand why the "very form is antique." Maybe it's jaded Manhattan reviewers who need some explaining done. And then he goes on to even mention High School Musical!
So who'll go see Mamma Mia!, the new movie based on the 1999 stage show with nearly two dozen songs by the Swedish pop group Abba that were hits some two decades earlier? One guess: a lot of the women who saw Sex and the City, plus kids who loved High School Musical, plus some gay guys. And, a big plus, most of those who saw the original musical, which by now has grossed over $2 billion--more than any movie has ever earned in theaters.
By my count, that's four guesses. At least he spelled the name of the play right and got the exclamation mark in there, even if he doesn't know that it's not "Abba" - it's "ABBA." The name of the group comes from the first initial of each of their names: Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, and Anni-frid (usually known as Frida). I have never, nor do I ever want to, see the TV show he mentions or the movie spawned from it. I liked High School Musical, but I'm not a kid, and I obviously don't fit his third category! His last guess, is of course, right on, which suggests that the rest of the world gets something, to the tune of $2 billion, that he seems determined not to get.
But making a mint could be a struggle. The other big film musicals of this decade--Chicago, Dreamgirls and Hairspray--had casts of mostly young actors. The Mamma Mia! contingent is different, as will now be proved with a précis of the movie's plot (a knockoff of the 1968 comedy Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell) and a few actuarial stats.
From the LA Times: "Last weekend, amid all the hubbub about "The Dark Knight," this frothy film set a record of its own. Its domestic gross of $27.7 million edged out "Hairspray" by $200,000 to become the movie musical with the highest-grossing opening weekend ever. And in its first two weeks of international release, "Mamma Mia!" has made an additional eye-popping $72.6 million." Enough said?
Donna (Meryl Streep, 59), an American who runs a little hotel on a remote Greek island, has invited two old friends, Tanya (Christine Baranski, 56) and Rosie (Julie Walters, 58), to join her for the wedding of her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried, who is, all right, 22). Sophie, who doesn't know who her father is, has found Donna's diary from the summer she got pregnant. Her dad must be one of the three men mentioned in the diary. Sophie lures them all to the island--Sam (Pierce Brosnan, 55), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard, 57) and Harry (Colin Firth, the baby at 47). They arrive the day before the wedding, and intrigue ensues. Who's the real father? Will Donna be able to cope with three thorny reminders of her wild youth? And how will the movie shoehorn such Abba hits as Waterloo and Money, Money, Money into this far-fetched farrago?
OK, she doesn't actually "lure" them to the island - she invites them to the wedding as if Donna was inviting them. "Lure" is just a bit too strong of a word there. As for his last question, anyone who has done his homework would know that the play was written around the songs, not the songs "shoehorned" into the plot. Actually, "Money, Money, Money" fits into the story quite well, and "Waterloo" pretty much sums up the whole plot. At least they didn't try to put "Fernando" in there - it's like my least favorite ABBA song.
The last question is the easiest to answer. Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, the boy half of Abba, may have been writing for the Top 40, but their songs explored a gamut of dramatic situations, from the vagaries of celebrity (Super Trouper, Does Your Mother Know) to the wistfulness a woman feels as her daughter grows up (Slipping Through My Fingers). And since Abba's vocalists were women (Anni-Frid Lyngstad and Agnetha Faltskog), the guys composed enough hits over the group's nine-year run to accommodate all the female characters in Mamma Mia!
Um, where do I start LOL? Has this guy ever listened to "Does Your Mother Know?" It has nothing to do with the "vagaries of celebrity" and IT IS SUNG BY A MAN! In the play/movie, they have changed it so that a female character sings it. But Bjorn and Benny did their share of the singing in ABBA. And while they wrote many Top 40 hits, they also wrote many deep, interesting, soul-searching songs. Also, there are actually the same number of male and female characters in the movie.
We'll say this once, then run for cover: Abba was not just the top-selling group of the '70s; Andersson and Ulvaeus created the smartest, most buoyant body of work from any pop group since the Beatles. Their gaudy gear, with the spangles and spandex, made them easy to deride, but their real sin was that they lacked "depth," which is to say they didn't pretend to be miserable. Instead, like pop performers from an earlier age, they pretended to be happy. Their music did too. The lyrics to the song Mamma Mia confess to erotic obsession and serial masochism, but the perky melody puts the pain at an ironic distance. It was heartache you could disco to. That's why millions of people, not all of them idiots, felt better listening to Abba's music. Hearing it now, people still do.
Huh? Their real "sin" was that Americans never got them. They didn't want to tour here until they had a number one hit and I don't think they ever had one. Again, if one actually listened to an entire album (and I am not talking ABBA Gold here), one would hear lots of depth. ABBA is definitely more than disco! And what is this about "Mamma Mia" being about "erotic obsession and serial masochism"??? It's about being in love with somebody who hurts you. I suppose I could see the "serial masochism" part, but honestly, it's just a song. And what is this snide insult "not all of them idiots"?
That's the mood the Mamma Mia! movie tries to tap, but with a sledgehammer. The cast, especially the older women, is given to giggles and girlish body language. You're meant to think everyone making the film had a great time, so you should too. At one point, Streep shouts, "Let's go have fun!" But the bonhomie is oppressive; the high spirits are not impromptu but imposed: Listen, people, you vill haff fun!
It is fairly normal for friends to act silly when they get together. Didn't your alien leaders tell you that? (Stealing that line from The Ref!) I don't know if the actors had a good time making the movie, but I sure had a good time watching it. I plan to get the DVD specifically to watch when I am in a bad mood! Hmm, somehow, I haven't heard anyone who has seen the movie describe it as "oppressive" - there isn't much that includes a sunny Greek isle, lots of great songs, and Pierce Brosnan that could be described as "difficult to bear, harsh" or "tyrannical" or "weighing heavily on the spirit or senses" (the three definitions of oppressive according to my dictionary). And what is the German accent supposed to evoke there? Images of Nazis telling you to watch Mamma Mia! and have a good time? HUH?
The chief exponent, or perp, is Streep. She's lively and limber, executing a saddle jump to gymnastic perfection while bouncing on a bed and singing Dancing Queen. But she also spends a long part of the film in a strenuous simulacrum of pleasure. She has the laughs the way a consumptive has the coughs. You worry that when Streep dies and goes to Actor Heaven, the recording angel will say, "On this scale we have decades of transcendent performances, and on this scale, that Mamma Mia! thing. Begone!"
I honestly have no idea what he is talking about here. She spends half the movie upset and trying to figure out what the three men from her past are doing there. And does every role have to be weighty?
One problem is that the creators of the stage show--producer Judy Craymer, writer Catherine Johnson and director Phyllida Lloyd--gave themselves the job of turning it into a big movie, but none had ever worked on one, and the inexperience shows. A small point: the glare of the Greek sunlight is punishing to the face of anyone over 30. A larger one: the dance numbers are edited so choppily that the rhythm and feeling of the songs suffer.
Maybe they didn't want experienced movie-type people ruining what the public loves about the play - I was pleasantly surprised at how similar the movie was to the play. I actually thought all the actors over 30 looked great, especially Streep at age 59! They are supposed to be older. To me, it's actually OK if older actors look older than the younger actors. But maybe I am weird. Again, I have no idea what he means about the dance numbers being choppy - they did not seem that way to me.
The inanities multiply. Firth's character has a reverie song, Our Last Summer, but it's about Paris, not Greece. And all the chat about the year Sophie was conceived evokes hippies and flower power, which suggest 1967, but the film is set in the present, so that ecstatic summer was more like 1987, when the cry was less "Free love!" than "Let's not have sex because we might die."
If he was paying attention, he would have heard Firth's character explain that he met Donna in Paris and liked her so much he followed her to Greece. Nowhere does the movie say it's set in the present, and hippies and flower power continued into the 70s. The play was written in the 1990s, twenty years after the seventies, which is when ABBA was performing. The timeline works fine unless you are just looking to criticize wherever you can. And, I didn't hear anybody saying that in 1987 either!
Eventually, as Donna and her gal pals don trashy frocks to do Abba's greatest hits and a Greek chorus of villagers materializes as a backup group for practically every number, Mamma Mia!'s flouting of narrative and visual logic starts to suggest a cunning subversion. The film is not failed kitsch but triumphant Dada. It exists in an alternative universe, an Abbaworld, where 40 years telescopes to 20, the Seine is the Aegean, and Streep's outsize cheerfulness is the expression of a soul in mortal panic.
Did he miss that, back in the past, Donna and her two friends had a group called "Donna and the Dynamos", and what they wore were actually stage costumes? I found the Greek villagers very funny. The rest of this ridiculous paragraph I dealt with in the last section, but I have to say again, where is he getting this idea that Streep is always cheerful in this movie? Did he see the movie?
In the end, the movie beats down even the most stalwart viewer's resistance, in a Guantánamo of giddiness. The supporting actresses help out. Baranski, slim and large-mouthed, and Walters, wizened and hiding behind shades, might be Mick and Keith in a Rolling Stones girl tribute band, and they lend all their show-biz savvy to vivid renditions of, respectively, Does Your Mother Know and Take a Chance on Me. Seyfried, from the HBO series Big Love, is in full control of Sophie, the film's one sensible character. And Streep comes back to earth in a handsomely calibrated rendition of the power ballad The Winner Takes It All. By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo.
How on earth is Sophie the movie's one sensible character???? This is the girl who thinks that she will know just by looking at them which one is her father, the girl who all along declares that she wants to marry Sky more than anything and then changes her mind, the girl who invites the possible dads and thinks she can hide them from her mom until the wedding. What about her, exactly, is sensible?
The older ones, anyway. For them, this is prime nostalgia. For those too young to remember the Abba years, it's just faux-stalgia. But even that has its allure. It can turn a hapless movie into a fun one. And if you don't like the Mamma Mia! film, you can still hum those tunes all the way home.
It was as if the U.S. sent out an sos and Abba supplied the perfect rescue vehicle.
Thankfully, mercifully, this is the end of the review. And the review of the review. If you like ABBA and want to see a fun movie, go see Mamma Mia! If you don't, don't, but unlike this reviewer, please keep your cranky thoughts to yourself. The rest of us are busy enjoying the movie!
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She brought him over to talk to me because he just HAD to tell Ms. Dee what a good boy he was being. I guess later in the day he was asking if he could go back to be with Ms. Dee (probably because he got away with more when with me). Ms. Carol said, "Nope!" So now I get to still love on T when I see him, but I don't have to be responsible for him. 
And Knight #2 made a new best friend with one of the little boys in my crew! 
