I’m not going to tell you that Mamma Mia! (2008, dvd, MC-51) is a good movie, but I rather enjoyed it and you may too. The stage show might be even more engaging, but I was won over by the film’s exuberant silliness. I’ve never really listened to ABBA, but one absorbs such popular music by osmosis. The story, such as it is, is a flimsy armature on which to string the songs, but for the first time I could make sense of the words, not that there’s a whole lot of sense to be made. Set on a picturesque Greek island (and some unconvincing stage sets), the film features Meryl Streep as the single mother of a 20-year-old bride-to-be, played by Amanda Seyfried (of Big Love), who invites to her wedding each of the three men who might be her father. Both women are highly appealing and decent singers, with Meryl having a lot of unabashed fun dancing and emoting her way through the songs. The prospective fathers are Colin Firth, Stellan Saarsgaard, and Pierce Brosnan, the last of whom is ridiculous but touching as he tries to croak out “S.O.S” and other songs, braver than James Bond ever had to be. Meryl, as the ungracefully aging but still beautiful hippie, has two old girl group pals in Julie Waters and Christine Baranski, and their antics are fun to watch as they fool around. Some may feel left out of the fun, but as part of the same age cohort, I was into them. Now that I have a better grasp of ABBA’s songlist, I want to go back and watch Muriel’s Wedding again, re-catch Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths at the start of their careers.
As Happy-Go-Lucky settles into my memory as the best film of 2008, I happened to notice that a PBS Masterpiece Theater presentation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion that I TiVo’d long ago also starred Sally Hawkins, now destined for a Oscar nom but then unknown. I hadn’t felt moved to watch at first because the 1995 Roger Michell version remains my favorite Austen adaptation of all. But Poppy does Jane was irresistible. She made a truthful and endearing Anne Elliott, but could not supplant Amanda Root in my affection. And the Wentworth had nowhere near the Caesarian strength of Ciaran Hinds (though Rome’s Brutus does turn up as Anne’s scheming cousin, and Buffy’s Giles as her father.) I found the roughness of the semi-documentary style of filming to convey a better sense of place and period than glossier attempts to package the Divine Jane for present-day consumption, though at 90 minutes the adaptation was rather abrupt and overt.
In the interests of completeness, I should mention a worthwhile documentary called The Spirit of the Marathon, which follows six runners at different levels as they train for and run in the 2005 Chicago Marathon. It’s quite well done, and enters the lists as an elite sports doc, but you may have to have some connection to a marathon runner to really enjoy it. My son ran London last year and is now training for Boston, so it was a bonding experience to watch this film with him.
And for complete completeness, there are two more films I should mention, depending on whether you have a taste for serial killer comedies and musicals, even though I definitely do not. For each, you can go by Metacritic or you can go by my definite non-recommendation. Memories of Murder (2005, MC-82.) had been on my DVR for more than a year till I broke down and watched it. Made by the Korean director Joon-ho Bong, who also made the well-received creature feature The Host, which I didn't care for either, mixes humor with the truth-based story of a sensational sex murderer in Korea, a mix that did not take for me despite some understanding of what others saw in it. I also watched Sweeney Todd (2007, MC-83.) in the interests of playlist maintenance, and liked it no better than I expected to, despite the "Universal Acclaim" Metacritic assigns to it. If you go down their listing to my two favorite reviewers, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker and Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, you will find my opinion expressed. Neither Johnny Depp nor director Tim Burton convinced me that this film should have been made, nor did the stripped down Stephen Sondheim music.
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