Buy Or Don’t Buy

I’m willing to bet that I am the only writer here at BODB who would actually go see Mamma Mia, much less enjoy it.  Yeah: I’ve seen the stage show twice.  It never stops being dumb, but it also never stops being really, really fun.

Hence Mamma Mia is absolutely a love-it-or-hate-it kinda movie.  For fans of the musical and the Swedish pop group, it’s a veritable ABBAgasm, and you will be in a fantastic mood for the next 6 hours, unable to get the titular song out of your head.  For non-fans, it is completely intolerable.

Luckily I happen to love ABBA, and Meryl Streep, and Amanda Seyfried, and running around beautiful Greek islands while a flowy scarf trails after me. 

No doubt – this is a bad, bad movie.  But in a completely awesome way (again: only if you are the sort of person who knows every verse to “Take a Chance on Me.”)  A plotline with all the tensile strength of angel hair pasta.  Meryl Streep rolling around a rooftop in overalls.  Ron Weasley’s mom in sequined spandex.  Pierce Brosnan as an American…who has an English accent.  A gratuitous shot of Stellan Skarsgard’s ass.

For such a simple premise (a girl invites three men who are possibly her father to her wedding), Mamma Mia’s plotholes and logical inconsistencies are gaping – Streep is at least twenty years too old for her role, and I’m pretty sure that flower children and punk rockers never coexisted (especially not in 1988, which is when her character must have had her dalliances with hippies and headbangers alike, if we’re to believe that her daughter is 20 years old.)  Seyfried’s character inexplicably has two British best friends despite the fact that she grew up on an isolated Greek island.  And who the hell has a bachelor party the night before his wedding?

I guess that’s what happens when every single damn thing in your movie is based around a bunch of ABBA songs.  The songs are not a natural extension of the script; they are the script, and any other dialogue is just a set-up to the next song.  (Example:  Colin Firth’s character is named Harry, and works at a bank.  For no reason other than that “Our Last Summer” has a line that goes, “Now you’re working at a bank, and your name is Harry.”)

But that’s okay, because there really is no purpose to anything that happens in between the sweet, sweet ABBA.  Some of the actors fare better than the others – Amanda Seyfried is definitely the best singer, and Meryl Streep sounds good, too – but no one in the cast is actually a bad singer except for Brosnan.  He’s so bad, in fact, that it’s hilarious.  Win-win!

So, yeah.  You could just stay at home and secretly listen to ABBA in your bedroom (admit it, haters, “Waterloo” is really fucking catchy and you totally have “Dancing Queen” on your iPod.)  Or you could buy a ticket to Mamma Mia and have pretty people sing to you while dancing on a pretty island – it’s a guaranteed happiness booster.  I know which option I’d choose.