Super trouper
Wednesday, 9th July 2008
Mamma Mia
PG, Nationwide
Mamma Mia has to be the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Or is it off? When you get to my age, it’s such a struggle to remember. Either way, though, if you are now expecting this review to be subtly and cleverly interweaved with punning ABBA song titles then you can just forget it. My, my, how can I resist it? Easily, my dears; easily. Or, as Bubbles says, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight.’ Well, it just goes to show; you can live with someone for years and years and years and still not know everything about them.
Anyway, this is the film adaptation of the stage musical, which has already been seen by 30 million people in 160 cities across the world and proves what I have said all along or, if you are going to quibble, then at least since I was three: take those supremely catchy ABBA hits, construct the loosest of loose narratives around them, shake it all up with lashings of enthusiasm and just the right amount of cheesy, cheeky self-awareness and voilà! There’s your global smash. I do wish people would listen to me. It is very irritating, you know. And we could all have made a truckload of ‘Money, Money, Money’, which is always handy, it being a rich man’s world. (Sorry; won’t happen again.)
This loosest of loose narratives concerns Donna (Lady Meryl of Streep), who runs a small hotel on a small Greek island and has a daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), who is 20, about to get married, and wants her father to walk her down the aisle. Trouble is, who is her father? She’s never been told. So she reads her mother’s diary from that time and secretly invites the three men who, 20 years earlier, each enjoyed a ‘romantic encounter’ with her. I can see why the filmmakers opted for Mamma Mia as a title but, come on, it could just have easily been: Mamma Mia, What a Slag! (That said, you can tell Donna hasn’t had any for a while. She wears dungarees.)
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Make Celebrities History
July 11th, 2008 1:23am Report this commentOh for the film reviews of yesteryear! Admittedly British culture, such as it ever was, has been completely drowned out since the days of Graham Greene by the din created by the vulgarian promoters of "celebrity" pop singers . But isn't one still entitled to expect that in The Spectator, of all places, a reviewer would have some degree of literacy, and some remaining vestiges of classical allusion beyond the titles and lyrics of pop songs
Dylan, not Dillon, Thomas
July 11th, 2008 10:56pm Report this commentMake Celebrities History - Oh, you've hit my g-spot with that !
But if you will let a restaurant 'critic' loose in a cinema, what can one expect ? Last week she was dissing Keira and Sienna for having Welsh accents that made them sound like Indians.
What fatuous tosh ! I grew up in Dylan Thomas land, and whatever else one says about the film they made a truly creditable performance on the accent front.
I could almost fancy them, in their frocks, stockings and the wellies - if only they weren't so skinny ! They'd never manage with the milking like that - luckily they didn't have too -and one suspects that D. Ross has never even seen a cow, much less met a genuine Welsh person, in Crouch End.
There is a reason Peter Bradshaw writes for the Guardian - other media would be panicking about 'upsetting the advertisers'...
JohnA
July 12th, 2008 1:54am Report this commentHm, I always find Welsh people do sound rather like Indians, Dylan. I often test them with simple questions, such as, do you have Kingfisher? Can you give me a receipt? A receipt, from the till? The till - that thing you put the money in? And if they are obviously nonplussed, I realise they must be Welsh, and just leave them in peace.
It works for me.
That Dylan Thomas film was rubbish though. And no mango chutney either.
Make Celebrities History
July 12th, 2008 6:50am Report this commentThankyou Dylan Thomas. I did not see Deborah Ross's review of the film about your eponymous countryman, but I am surprised that she would even have heard of him. Which is a pity, because she could otherwise have enriched her "reviews" with allusions to, say, not going gently into that good night, or being up to No Good Boyo, or being young and easy under the apple bough. But on the subject of making celebrities history, I am sure that you and I are joined by many millions Britons in this desire. In case the movement ever comes to anything, I am preparing, like the man in "The Mikado", a little list. So far it contains the names of (Sir) Bob Geldof, Bono, Abba, Meryl Streep, Kylie Minogue (OBE), Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett, Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse, Pete Doherty, Jade Goody and all those untalented, ill-bred, uneducated, overexposed, vacuous charlatans, mountebanks and bores whose "celebrity" is the product not of talent or ability but of commercial promotion and the abysmal taste of the great British public.
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