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• Friday, July 18, 2008 05:11 AM

  Shouting in a hurricane

  Critics always run the risk of being tiny voices in a storm, and any negative review of "Mama Mia!" will be such. I say this only because the play got rotten reviews, got re-done, and still got mixed reviews, and yet it was a hit. The commercials are already running with quotes from "critics" about how much "fun!" this film is. This is unsurprising, because the play did the same: it advertised heavily as a fun and safe and tourist-quenching product to buy tickets to in New York. The play was a hit, because it promised to be a Fun-Sized candy bar for people who hadn't been to the theater.

  When the movie version of the stage version of the movie "Hairspray" actually got good reviews, it made little difference, except to supply the vocabulary of the exit interviews, and a bad review of "Mama Mia!" will not do much. However, word of mouth (second week tickets) will show. Tourists in New York aren't coming back to the theater the next week, won't tell their friends to go see "Proof" instead, but movie goers are different.

  Still, this is a hit because it was a hit by design, and, while it will get terrible marks on IMDB and Netflix in a few months, all those tickets will have been sold, and all those DVD's will have shipped, and those foreign markets will have been sucked into the vaccuum of planned entertainment all the same.

  I don't have to hate ABBA to hate this film: it's enough to hate studios telling me that they have 92 minutes of emotional manipulation and market surveys for me to watch.

  —Geogre Read Geogre's other letters
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