My holiday down under ended in a whimper when I finally caved in and decided to watch Mamma Mia! on Cathay's little TV Screen. Think RoadShow without annoying females called Yannes and Vanni making vaguely obscene hand signals at you in between the ad for skin whitener and the revolting one where you get to see someone's skin being sheared off as their wrinkles are ploughed up and filled with Polyfilla.
Mamma Mia! has got to be one of the flimsiest films ever made. Flimsy, as in the nightgown some fifty-something-year-old with saggy mammamiaries wears, regrettably, rather than a negligee you slide off the nubile shoulders of a hot teenager.
The movie is little more than a Meryl Streep vehicle – A Streepcar Aimed No Higher. I like Meryl Streep as an actress. I loved it when she was going through her accents phase: Pohliish in Sophie's Choice, awfry English as The French Lieutenant's Woman, and a real sheilah as Lindy Chamberlain in the dingo movie. (Did you know dingoes are an endangered sub-species, owing to the fact that they like doing it with other dogs?)
She even gave a creditable singing performance in one film, whose name escapes me, where she belts out a number in the finale. Unfortunately, this went to her head and when the offer came to sing and dance her way through this menopausal "hen flick" she jumped at it. If there's one type of film I can't abide, and can't understand, it's the musical sung by amateurs. Think Moulin Rouge, where Nicole Kidman and Ewan Macgregor had a ball at the expense of the audience.
Of course, lots of people (mainly women of a certain age and state) love the film, which manages to trivialise and sanitise divorce, marriage and growing old, while attempting to raise mediocrity to an art form. Piers Brosnan's singing is so bad that you have to wonder if he's on Meryl's hormones. Together with the other two "men" in the movie, some boring Swede playing a boring Swede and Colin Firth playing Colin Firth – he gets to wear gay swimwear rather than the Bermudas that the others are given – Brosnan is so wet that when the three of them leap into the Aegean, their state doesn't change – the sea just gets wetter.
No one, but no one, must upstage Meryl, so the only one who can sing (Meryl's screen daughter), is played by a dwarf whose forthcoming nuptials never actually happen because the vicar receives a communication at the altar from her fiancé's bushy eyebrows, telling him that he must return to the Himalayas to marry the Abominable Snowwoman.
Meanwhile, the Abominable Showwoman gets her "man", Colin Firth goes gay, frumpy Julie Walters woos the boring Swede with an unusual version of "Take A Chance On Me", and the slutty one (the obligatory Kim Cattrall character) makes whoopee with her toy-boy, who bears a startling resemblance to the Robertson's Marmalade Golliwog after 40,000 volts have been put through his afro.
Mamma Mia! has got to be one of the flimsiest films ever made. Flimsy, as in the nightgown some fifty-something-year-old with saggy mammamiaries wears, regrettably, rather than a negligee you slide off the nubile shoulders of a hot teenager.
The movie is little more than a Meryl Streep vehicle – A Streepcar Aimed No Higher. I like Meryl Streep as an actress. I loved it when she was going through her accents phase: Pohliish in Sophie's Choice, awfry English as The French Lieutenant's Woman, and a real sheilah as Lindy Chamberlain in the dingo movie. (Did you know dingoes are an endangered sub-species, owing to the fact that they like doing it with other dogs?)
She even gave a creditable singing performance in one film, whose name escapes me, where she belts out a number in the finale. Unfortunately, this went to her head and when the offer came to sing and dance her way through this menopausal "hen flick" she jumped at it. If there's one type of film I can't abide, and can't understand, it's the musical sung by amateurs. Think Moulin Rouge, where Nicole Kidman and Ewan Macgregor had a ball at the expense of the audience.
Of course, lots of people (mainly women of a certain age and state) love the film, which manages to trivialise and sanitise divorce, marriage and growing old, while attempting to raise mediocrity to an art form. Piers Brosnan's singing is so bad that you have to wonder if he's on Meryl's hormones. Together with the other two "men" in the movie, some boring Swede playing a boring Swede and Colin Firth playing Colin Firth – he gets to wear gay swimwear rather than the Bermudas that the others are given – Brosnan is so wet that when the three of them leap into the Aegean, their state doesn't change – the sea just gets wetter.
No one, but no one, must upstage Meryl, so the only one who can sing (Meryl's screen daughter), is played by a dwarf whose forthcoming nuptials never actually happen because the vicar receives a communication at the altar from her fiancé's bushy eyebrows, telling him that he must return to the Himalayas to marry the Abominable Snowwoman.
Meanwhile, the Abominable Showwoman gets her "man", Colin Firth goes gay, frumpy Julie Walters woos the boring Swede with an unusual version of "Take A Chance On Me", and the slutty one (the obligatory Kim Cattrall character) makes whoopee with her toy-boy, who bears a startling resemblance to the Robertson's Marmalade Golliwog after 40,000 volts have been put through his afro.
12 comments:
Yes, but Brosnan was still better in M. Mia than he was as James Bond.
Ouch!
thank you - the outlaws (i.e. my parents) gave my husband a copy of Mama mia after me dissing it in my blog, I managed to suffer through about 5 minutes of it inbetween trying to read and then just left the room it was so poor.
have to put the dvd on ebay!!
Hm! I almost want to see it now! Almost.
You'd have fun, Cess, deciding which of the three leads you most resemble.
you can have our copy
Probably the swedish guy. A little bit depressed, bored ... Scandinavian ....
Hallo, Gweip! I said ALMOST. No, I still have a stack of good movies bought in Shenzhen I have to go through but thanks all the same.
GP, why don't you leave it at the Reception of the Cricket Clu? My wife can watch it on these long winter nights when I'm being thrashed in the Mixed Tennis League. (She likes it. Tsk!)
I"ll do so when I'm next there and send you a mail.
Postcards from the Edge. She sings a cowboy number at the end. Awesome film, with some great lines.
That's the one! Trust you enjoyed Saigon.
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