Mamma Mia!

Here you go, dorks:

http://www.greatstufftv.com/movies/?p=703

I watched it on Wednesday. It was fine...not great, not terrible. I got through it by watching Firth and Brosnan.

 

Hopefully this thread goes away quickly so that damn song will get out of my head.

 

It is now my mission to find new things to post about it every several hours.

 

ABBA is an acronym of the first names of members Agnetha Fultskog, Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Anni-Frid Lyngstad.

That's all I got. This movie looks like it sucks. Where are the explosions and/or car chases?

 

I was reading somewhere that film industry types are torn about what will happen at the box office. They can't decide whether it will completely flop in the wake of Dark Knight mania, or get a surprise bump as moms/wives go see it while their families are watching Batman.

 

I'd bet the latter.

Batman will gross like $560 million (OK, more like $150 million) and Mamma Mia! will take second with $45 mil or something.

 

Based on my old clubbing experiences, I'd say this movie is going to be a hit. Everytime the dj played dancing queen or some other abba song, every girl in the club went hysterical. Abba's right up there with Oprah and Sex in the City.

 

I liked it -- not as much as I liked the show -- but it was fun. Streep was excellent. There was one Brosnan song that made me cringe, but overall, it was fun.

 

Is "Does Your Mother Know?" in it? That's the song Benny and/or Bjorn sang. One of ABBA's best.

 

Yes, it is, Bubbler. Christine Baranski does a good job with it.

 

Saw it today: Some observations (scroll on by if you wish to avoid possible spoilers):

--The first part kind of dragged with too much plot exposition and not much musical exuberance. The plot is so irrelevant to this enterprise; what the movie was trying to do was go on and on about how tough Donna had it on her own. The play got the point across much quicker without the wallowing.
--Things started picking up with the song Mamma Mia; the larger tableau that a movie allows over a play helped here. Then Dancing Queen was the first real shop-stopper, about as good as it was in the play.
--Colin Firth had a good singing voice. Too bad he had only one song and Brosnan had three. Why they didn't dub a real singer over Brosnan is a mystery. He's asked to sing perhaps Abba's hardest song to sing, SOS. And he didn't really have chemistry with Streep.
--Speaking of Streep: Acting is also beside the point in the Mamma Mia franchise, and Streep was smart to recognize this, and to pick her spots. During the song where she is helping Sophie get ready for the wedding, she uses expressions and gestures to get across far more than what most actors can with words. And her singing voice was more than decent too. Her take on The Winner Takes It All, much more subdued than the belted-out version in the play, worked a lot better than the play's version.
--The Sophie character was as perky and appealing as the stage version, and she recognized that character isn't asked to go beyond that.
--The wedding scene, with a couple of bonuses you can do in a movie but not a play and very good performances, was better than in the play. A strategic switch in order of I Do I Do and Take a Chance on Me worked out very well.
--The movie had basically the same anticlimax ending as the play, and the postperformance music was truncated and not as good as the play.

 

Time magazine posed an interesting theory.

A nation's love of ABBA is in indirect proportion to its importance in the world.

America hated them (well, not me) when we were on top.

But as we have lost some of our swagger, we have begun embracing them.