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A three-minute alternative to "Mamma Mia!"
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So I saw "Mamma Mia!" tonight. My needs are few, OK? I just wanted to watch a bunch of scantily clad people running around a Greek island singing ABBA songs. Give me a sun-kissed, middle-aged heroine surrounded by shirtless Mediterraneans, and I'm content. After all, I'm the guy who shamelessly went to see that yuppie-porn masterpiece "Under the Tuscan Sun" like five times because of the sequence where Raoul Bova swills Limoncello on the Amalfi coast. (Hey—I may be a hyper-critical bitch, but I never claimed to have any taste.)
Unfortunately, it would've taken a lot more shirtless Mediterraneans to save this inept and embarrassing spectacle. Sure, Meryl Streep acquits herself just fine, but this is a woman who practically acquitted herself in "She-Devil." Nothing else works: not the choreography (some of which is so literal that it doesn't resemble dancing so much as charades), not the storyline (you'd produce a more compelling narrative by putting "ABBA Gold" on shuffle), and definitely not Pierce Brosnan (boy howdy, is he a wretched singer).
If you haven't seen it yet, please don't be tempted by the sunny ad campaign or the lure of warbling Oscar winners or the bespangled evergreen charms of Swedish pop stars. Please, please just avoid it. ("The Dark Knight," on the other hand, is just as good as the critics claim; it's probably the best comic-book adaptation I've ever seen, and the praise for Heath Ledger isn't merely respect for the dead. From here on, whenever people talk about the great movie villains, they will always mention his performance.)
But back to "Mamma Mia!": as a public service, I thought I'd direct your attention to a far more satisfying dose of ABBA from one of my all-time favorite movies. Here's Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths singing "Waterloo" in "Muriel's Wedding"—a sequence that imparts more joy in three minutes than "Mamma Mia!" manages in nearly two hours. Behold:
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