MAMMA MEOW!

As Cashetta (who sent me this) says, "This is what I call writing." For those of you who (like Cashetta and I) are too bitter to ever enjoy Mamma Mia or even Abba, you'll LOVE this review of the film by Alan Lane from the New Yorker. He surely has fun picking it apart. Here are a few excerpts from EURO VISIONS.

Like many people, I was under the impression that the new Meryl Streep film was called “Mamma Mia.” The correct title is, in fact, “Mamma Mia!,” and, in one keystroke, the exclamation mark tells you all you need to know about the movie. Billy Wilder tried the same trick with “Avanti!,” in 1972, but that felt like late Chekhov compared with this ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer. From the opening minutes, in which Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a young pleasure seeker on the eve of her wedding, greets her two bridesmaids as they arrive on a jetty, yelping with delight like unweaned puppies, you can tell that everyone in this story is just going to have the best time. Ever.



Sophie resides on a Greek island—an island like any other, where gnarled old ladies drop whatever they’re doing in the olive grove and tunefully join in on nineteen-seventies Swedish pop songs.


There is no delicate way of putting this, but anyone watching Brosnan in mid-delivery will conclude that he has recently suffered from a series of complex digestive problems, and that the camera has, with unfortunate timing, caught him at the exact moment when he is finally working them out.


Just to blur the issue, all three of them proceed to sport multicolored Lurex pants during the final credits, the better to launch into “Waterloo”—the song no plot could contain. Be warned, though: you also have to watch Streep march to the front of the screen, as if to invisible footlights, and scream at us, “Do you want more?” “Thank you, but no,” I replied, as politely as I could, but I don’t think she heard. Everybody around me was screaming back. They wanted more.


READ MORE: NEWYORKER