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| Official Mamma Mia!: The Movie thread! | |
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| Topic Started: Jul 2 2008, 12:56 PM (1,455 Views) | |
| Deleted User | Jul 9 2008, 08:58 AM Post #41 |
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doesn't come out here until the 18th but I can't wait to see it |
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| Riverwide | Jul 9 2008, 11:47 AM Post #42 |
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I agree with all of that EXCEPT for the bit about them being superior to and more influential than The Beatles. I'm sorry, but I just *cannot* agree with that in any way, shape or form. |
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| Vancho | Jul 9 2008, 12:56 PM Post #43 |
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I don't think what The Beatles sang was pure pop. On the other hand, ABBA was the band which really defined the word POP MUSIC. |
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| Riverwide | Jul 9 2008, 02:38 PM Post #44 |
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The Beatles were THE band of the 60s. ABBA were THE band of the 70s. As Karby would say, it probably makes no sense to compare them really! |
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| FuckBuddy | Jul 10 2008, 12:32 AM Post #45 |
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greek box office over the past weekend 1. Mamma Mia opens with 131,200 tickets countrywide, equalling to profits of 0.984m euros sex and the city, which is the biggest movie of the summer season so far, has managed 2m euros in over 4 weeks. Edited by FuckBuddy, Jul 10 2008, 12:36 AM.
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| Riverwide | Jul 10 2008, 09:13 AM Post #46 |
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Terrible review from The Guardian: Peter Bradshaw Thursday July 10, 2008 'A great need to vom' - Mamma Mia! I've been cheated by films since I don't know whe-e-n, Ta-da-da-da-da; ta-da-da-da-da. This one's got one good point: it must come to an end. Ta-da-da-da-da; ta-da-da-da-da. Look at me now! Will I ever learn? I don't know who ... thought Pierce Brosnan should sing in it. How on earth could it not... be... shit? One more smirk, and then I knew it would bomb, One more scene and I'd a great need to vom', Oh-woah... Mamma Mia! There they go again. Bringing us a movie based, with chilling calculation, on a hit stage show franchise, this one being laboriously structured around the songs of the once mocked, then ironised and now adored 70s pop legends Abba. The most transcendent type of film, they say, leaves a subliminal image imprinted on your mental retina, an image which you only see fully on leaving the cinema. After Michael Haneke's Hidden, we asked ourselves: "So what did happen outside the school gates?" Ten minutes after this film, I suddenly gasped: "Ohmigod, was Colin Firth's character supposed to be gay?" Of this, more in a moment. Struldbruggs among you will remember the 1994 film Muriel's Wedding, with Toni Collette as the big, goofy woman who is obsessed with Abba and dreams about a white wedding. (That ecstatic-bride logo for the Mamma Mia! stage show, on display outside theatres from Antwerp to Las Vegas, owes a great deal to the Muriel's Wedding poster.) Muriel's Wedding was however conceived during the affectionate-irony phase of Abba's reputation, when it was entirely appropriate that a nerd should be obsessed by the band, but that the nerd should be gloriously empowered and transformed by the sheer zinging power of Abba's tunes. Mamma Mia! The Movie is very different. Everything has been squeaky-cleaned up. It too has a feelgood wedding motif - but there is no irony, no heartache, certainly no paralysing illness, no dramatic plausibility, and weirdly, no hint that the characters know whose songs they are singing; there is no sense of perspective on the music. In Mamma Mia! Abba is everywhere and nowhere. This is Planet Abba or Abbaworld. The characters are forever dancing and smiling and bursting into Abba songs like Stepford cyborgs when you flip the secret panel behind their heads and press the Life-Affirming Behaviour button. An Abba instrumental is even used when the bride walks up the aisle, instead of Handel. And nobody ever says: "Oh for Gawd's sake, just for a change, can we sing something by the Carpenters?" The story is ... urh. No film has ever had a more irrelevant story. Is it, you ask, a musical account of the true story of how Abba singer Anni-Frid Lyngstad was born in 1945 as a result of a Nazi plan to boost the Aryan gene pool by mating German soldiers with Norwegian mothers? No. The film and stage show are very loosely based on a 1968 Gina Lollobrigida movie called Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell. Meryl Streep plays Donna, a former hippie and free spirit who runs a B&B on a horrendous Shirley-Valentine-style Greek island. Her 20-year-old daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfield) is about to get married. Donna has invited her best buddies Rosie (Julie Walters) and Tanya (Christine Baranski) to the event. But how about Sophie's long-lost father, the guy who had his way with Donna and scarpered all those years ago? Sophie has life-affirmingly discovered the existence of three of her multi-shagging mum's old lovers who may have supplied the DNA at the time. Life-affirmingly, she invites them all to her wedding without telling her mother: Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgård) and Harry (Colin Firth). All three guys show up with cute old photos of them in hippy-ish or punky garb. Bill even waffles about his love for Donna having taken place in the era of peace and love. Huh? Assuming the film is set roughly in the present day, and Sophie is 20, then their love was in the era of Westland and privatising British Gas. Anyway, all three guys are still plausibly dishy. But there is something odd about Colin Firth. Of the three, his paternity claim appears to be the weakest; he talks about having no children, only a pair of dogs, and in the final group-dance-hug scene, appears to cop off with someone of the same genital group. Could it be that Colin's enthusiasm for womankind is now limited to his mamma-mia? Is this the movie attempting, in its simperingly inclusive way, to acknowledge the band's gay fanbase? Either way, it's a coy sort of outing which leaves the character deeper in the closet than ever. Mamma Mia! ties itself in knots trying to shoehorn in every single famous number, and each time, the beginning of an Abba song triggered in me a Pavlovian stab of pleasure, cancelled after a millionth of a second by a backwash of rage that this soulless panto has done nothing to earn or even understand the good feeling. Some songs are easier to incorporate than others. Waterloo is saved for the closing credits, perhaps because screenwriter Catherine Johnson didn't grasp its metaphorical quality, and that she would not in fact need a vast Napoleonic army to troop across the island. But there is one very famous Abba number which is entirely omitted. That is a crying shame. I have an idea for the way in which it could yet be included, should an extra scene be needed for the DVD. There's a six-year-old boy on the island called Fernando, and caring Meryl Streep suspects that poor little Fernando could be hearing-impaired. She sits the little lad down, takes out a set of drums and bangs them close to his ears; with tears pouring down her cheeks, she sings to him a single, heart-rending question ... 1 out of 5 |
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| Riverwide | Jul 10 2008, 09:14 AM Post #47 |
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Wow! By the way, wasn't Indiana Jones bigger than SATC over there?!?! |
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| Riverwide | Jul 10 2008, 10:32 AM Post #48 |
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I'm going to see this later on. Woo!! ![]() I hope it's not shit. |
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| Riverwide | Jul 10 2008, 10:45 PM Post #49 |
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And....it was shit. The script was *apalling*. The kind of humour that little old ladies with blue rinses might find amusing. The direction was flat as a pancake and the film looked bloody awful. Aside from the magnificent songs, it was *staggeringly* bad. |
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| FuckBuddy | Jul 10 2008, 10:57 PM Post #50 |
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oh, come on riv. it was never supposed to be the best feel good movie ever. it's just a happy little summer getaway thing. the stage musical was neither that good, too. i think u're being a bit too unfair. how's the weather in ireland these days? if it's not hot and sunny, i can see why u're not favouring the film, but still...oh come on, it's an abba musical shot in a greek island, it really cannot get much better than that. yes, it could have been somehow different but then nobody gets to see mamma mia by expecting it to be a masterpiece. i demand u change your mind right away. Edited by FuckBuddy, Jul 10 2008, 10:58 PM.
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| Riverwide | Jul 10 2008, 11:38 PM Post #51 |
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I'm fully aware that it wasn't meant to be remotely serious or worthy or intelligent or any of those things, but NONE of that excuses the apalling script. It simply wasn't funny. I didn't even chuckle once. A few silly girls in the audience laughed a few times, but that was it. Even taken as a silly piece of fluff, it failed. I was expecting a witty film, and given the cast I'm sure they could have pulled it off. As I said, the songs are magnificent and for the most part, well performed. The incredibly OTT acting took some getting used to at first, but in terms of script and direction, it was an unmitigated *disaster*. The woman who directed it directs operas. She should NOT have been allowed to direct a movie. There's a rather huge difference, and by God it shows. Despite the gorgeous locations, it remains a very, very ugly film. It's one of the clunkiest major movies I've seen in a long time. You know there's a problem when over an hour into the film, people are still tittering when the cast launches into a song. It was all handled so clumsily and without any lightness of touch whatsoever. Even the dance sequences are *horribly* filmed and edited. The woman should be ashamed of herself. I'm honestly not trying to rain on your parade! I was really looking forward to it myself, and I'm glad you liked it, but I simply refuse to change my mind about this. I thought it was shit. That's my honest opinion! |
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| Riverwide | Jul 10 2008, 11:56 PM Post #52 |
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I completely agree with the 2 star review in The Independent: For all I know, Mamma Mia! may be a terrific night out for all the family. On a Friday night in a crowded cinema, with a decent proportion of children and the mildly inebriate, and it seems perfectly plausible that you will have a great time. Unfortunately, I saw it in circumstances particularly unconducive to suspension of the critical faculties – a cold and wet Monday morning in a large, mostly empty auditorium, the audience consisting of critics who are for the most part even more jaded than I am. And, in the cold light of day, it looked like absolute cack. How could a beloved stage musical make such an unimpressive film? The answer consists of three words – "beloved", "stage" and "musical". Theatre is a collusive art-form – the audience colludes with the actors, and its reaction becomes part of the performance – which means that things that objectively are unbelievable can be swallowed whole; incredibility even becomes part of the fun. Film puts a distance between actors and audience, even as it offers a far closer focus on what the actors are doing, and because of that it has a built-in bias towards naturalism. The film is directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who staged the original West End production and who has never directed a feature film before; lacking any developed sense of what is inevitably lost in the shift to the screen, or what might be gained, she seems to have fallen back on the elements that made it beloved in the theatre. Result: silliness unredeemed by wit or polish. Much of the trouble lies with the source material. Whatever else you say about Abba, they did turn out some damnably hummable tunes, but the words didn't always live up to them. Here, they have to carry burdens – a plot, highly specific emotions – that they can't cope with. The problem pops up early on as young Sophia (a pretty but dull Amanda Seyfried) lays out the plot for her friends: brought up by her mother, Donna (Meryl Streep) in the hotel she runs on a remote and beautiful Greek island, Sophia has never known who her father is. On the eve of her wedding, she read Donna's diary and worked out that it must be either Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Harry (Colin Firth) or Bill (Stellan Skarsgard). Convinced that she'll know him if she sees him, she has invited all three to the wedding. A montage shows the three receiving their invitations, and speeding Greece-wards. To emphasise the haste, you hear a succession of rushing up-and-down glissandos – the opening to "Gimme Gimme Gimme": what does finding a man after midnight have to do with this? What follows is all amiable farce, close in tone to the Cliff Richard vehicle Summer Holiday, though lacking that film's tight narrative and political edge. The fathers turn up, are unsuccessfully concealed from Donna, engage in a little friendly rivalry, feel paternal and romantic stirrings. Donna gets emotional, has to be comforted by her best friends, Rosie and Tanya (Julie Walters and Christine Baranski), and realises that she still carries a torch for one of the men. There is some dancing on the beach, and a hen party that turns quite Bacchanalian. Amanda and her fiancé, Sky (Dominic Cooper, of The History Boys), have a crisis. And everything is resolved more or less satisfactorily, though I still don't know why Firth's character suddenly turns out to be gay. Pre-publicity has emphasised Streep's unbuttoned, full-throated performance, and it's true that she throws herself into the singing and dancing. But this isn't necessarily a good thing. Her rendition of "The Winner Takes It All", for instance, is genuinely extraordinary, full of nuances of deep feeling; but it makes everything around it look silly and shallow. It didn't make me think, "gosh, Streep's all warm and passionate under that chilly, over-intellectual exterior". It made me think, "how come Streep doesn't get meaty dramatic starring roles any more?" Elsewhere, the choreography is often perfunctory – a yacht-based fantasy sequence for "Money, Money, Money" boils down to a bunch of extras in sailor suits saluting in unison: Lloyd should watch Busby Berkeley's work in Gold Diggers of 1933 to see how it's done. And the pervading boosterism for sexual liberation is spoiled when the Walters character, having taken a shine to the Skarsgard character, sashays down the table at the climactic wedding banquet, singing "Take a Chance on Me". Maybe this is meant to look empowering, the woman taking the initiative and all, but Skarsgard's panicked flight put me in mind of the man-chasing harpies of Carry On films. 2 out of 5 |
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| Deleted User | Jul 11 2008, 12:09 AM Post #53 |
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sorry but I completely disagree...the stage musical is fantastic...pure feel good fun...I havent seen the movie yet, but maybe the transition to the screen doesnt work (especially that applies to the encore which is pure fun in the theatre but I am sure it wont work in the screen) ...to be fair there was never any serious script in the musical and thats completely logical if you consider that the ABBA songs were the sole motive for the creation of 'Mamma Mia'...and I am suprised that they hadnt altered any majour part in the script, as I was always sure it was going to be slaughtered by the film critics (which most of them dont really care about the Abba songs or the magnificent scenery) |
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| Riverwide | Jul 11 2008, 12:11 AM Post #54 |
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I haven't seen the stage musical either, but I'm sure it works a lot better there than on the screen, for the reasons in The Independent's review above. They needed to revamp it to work on the big screen, but it looks like they didn't bother. It'll still probably make a pile of money, but it won't be because it's a good movie. |
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| Riverwide | Jul 13 2008, 07:37 PM Post #55 |
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Word is that it has made £12m in the UK on its first weekend. That's huuuge! |
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| FuckBuddy | Jul 14 2008, 11:32 PM Post #56 |
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that's HUGE indeed. my guess is this will be the biggest film in europe this summer. but then, it was always destined to become a grand success in the continent. at the end of the day, who cares about reviews when a film is based on abba songs? it's all about the songs really. |
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| Glamorama | Jul 16 2008, 01:26 PM Post #57 |
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I saw it on the same Thursday for the 8.20 show at the big multiplex on Parnell Street. What show did you see it at. Perhaps we were in the same cinema. |
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| Glamorama | Jul 16 2008, 01:30 PM Post #58 |
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It was quite good I thought. I wanted to pull the husband to be's Speedo's down and rim him rotten though. |
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| Riverwide | Jul 16 2008, 01:57 PM Post #59 |
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I was at the 5:50 showing I'm afraid! I didn't know you lived in Dublin?? |
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| Riverwide | Jul 16 2008, 01:57 PM Post #60 |
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Yeah. He's actually sort of ugly, but very, very sexy. I sooooo would. |
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