{"id":211,"date":"2008-08-12T16:12:00","date_gmt":"2008-08-12T16:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stallioncornell.wordpress.com\/2008\/08\/12\/mamma-mia"},"modified":"2026-07-01T12:34:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T18:34:00","slug":"mamma-mia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/mamma-mia\/","title":{"rendered":"Mamma Mia!"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the risk of opening up the whole \u201che\u2019s gay\u201d thing again, I admit, at the outset, that I went to see Mamma Mia<\/span> of my own free will and choice, and I\u2019d do it again. I saw it with my wife, my three sisters, and My Fianc\u00e9e, and a good time was had by all.<\/p>\n

I liked it. A lot.<\/p>\n

Glenn Beck has said that seeing Mamma Mia<\/span> more than once will make your testicles fall off, but I think he\u2019s speaking solely on his own behalf. I\u2019m one of a handful of heterosexual men who digs good musical theatre, and my libido has been surprisingly unaffected. Still, I can\u2019t imagine anyone not having a good time at this flick. It\u2019s genuinely cheerful, devoid of sneering irony or saccharine cynicism. It\u2019s impossible to walk out of this movie without having a smile on your face.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say it makes a lick of sense. The plot is wafer thin, and the whole thing is paced like a musical revue. Snippets of dialogue serve only to move the thing from one song to another, and if you think about anything for more than three seconds, it all falls apart.<\/p>\n

Consider: Meryl Streep plays Donna, a single mother who got pregnant one summer twenty years ago and remains shaky on her child\u2019s paternity. Apparently, Donna\u2019s mother was so upset with her that she kicked her out of the house when she found out.<\/p>\n

Meryl Streep is 59 years old.<\/p>\n

If I were her mom two decades ago, I\u2019d have kicked her out of the house, too. Pregnant or no, if you\u2019re pushing forty, it\u2019s time to spread your wings and fly. (Andrew Fullen, take note.) All of the potential fathers are the same age as Streep, and they sing about how they dated her in the time \u201cof the flower power,\u201d which would have been back around the time Meryl would have been the right age to play this role. It would have been simple to set the thing as a period piece back in the 80s, but they mention the Internet and other 21st Century staples and throw off the entire chronology.<\/p>\n

Then get to the issue of the men themselves. Each of them has achieved a significant amount of worldly success, yet they all drop everything when they get a bogus invite from Donna to come to her daughter\u2019s wedding on a remote Greek island. Two of them only had one-night stands with this woman. It\u2019s hard to believe that Donna could be so memorable as to derail three lives with the mere memory of her good lovin\u2019, but that\u2019s what you have to accept to make this movie fly. Then, when they show up, Donna\u2019s daughter tells them she wrote the letters, but please don\u2019t let her mom know. Incredibly, they all agree. So Donna just accepts that three of her old flames have all shown up at the island at the same time coincidentally.<\/p>\n

It strains credulity, I tells ya!<\/p>\n

And you don\u2019t care. About any of that. That\u2019s because the music is so much fun and everyone\u2019s having such a great time. I was never really an ABBA devotee back in the day, but I thoroughly enjoyed these songs. They\u2019re very theatrical, and they feel as if they were written in support of this story, not strung together haphazardly. They\u2019re actually more consistent than the flimsy dialogue. And they\u2019re always fun to watch.<\/p>\n

I should note that much has been made of the fact that Pierce Brosnan can\u2019t sing. That\u2019s not entirely true \u2013 he can carry a tune well enough, but vocally, he\u2019s amateurish. He\u2019s straining the whole time, as if he\u2019s trying to sing during a bowel movement. Yet he\u2019s so committed to the enterprise that his lack of talent is endearing. He doesn\u2019t shy away from what should be an embarrassing performance, and he ends up giving one of the most memorable performances in the whole flick. I don\u2019t think I\u2019d buy a Pierce Brosnan CD, but I certainly enjoyed him in this flick.<\/p>\n

I also enjoyed Orson Scott Card\u2019s recent review of this movie<\/a>, which argued that Mamma Mia<\/span> is great entertainment but a reprehensible social artifact. That is to say, the movie depends on the audience\u2019s respect and admiration for the traditional family while, at the same time, rejecting the necessity of marriage and fidelity. And he\u2019s right, although I think he overstates his case somewhat. True, the young girl who was planning to get married suddenly doesn\u2019t go through with it for completely arbitrary plot reasons \u2013 she has to get out of the way so that Donna can have the stage with her one true love \u2013 but there is a marriage, and Donna\u2019s family is more traditional at the end of the film than at the beginning. Card also laments the fact that one character\u2019s homosexuality is treated solely as a punchline, yet having read Card\u2019s review prior to seeing the film, I found this less disconcerting than I had anticipated. So I recommend reading his review prior to seeing the film so you can feel righteously indignant in advance.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not gay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Atthe risk of opening up the whole \u201che\u2019s gay\u201d thing again, I admit, at the outset, that I went to see Mamma Mia<\/span> of my own free will and choice, and I\u2019d do it again. I saw it with my wife, my three sisters, and My Fianc\u00e9e, and a good time was had by all. ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4852,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/4852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}