Letters to the Editor

"Mamma Mia!" Pierce Brosnan sings! Meryl Streep dances! Can't you hear ABBA's "SOS"? By Stephanie Zacharek [2008-07-18]

• Why didn't the sound engineer fix Brosnan's singing?

  They can do that today. They can over dub in another singer (a la Natalie Wood in West Side Story), they can add sound or play with the shape of the sound wave to make it sound "thicker", etc. Or they could have had a really good vocal coach teach him to sing from his chest and not his throat (his voice is thin because he is tensing his throat and singing from his throat.) His speaking voice is resonant, so a good teacher could have fixed this. I had a music teacher back in high school take a girl with a baby, nasally, whiny voice and in five literal minutes open up that voice to become full, rich, and without nasal whine. It's a technique, not a mystery.

  I heard him on the bumper during his appearance on the daily SHow and I was shocked. Was the thinnes supposed to denote his suffering or something?

  I don't get it.

  I don't expect Oscar worthy performances from this. But I will say that my husband liked Hancock, (another movie panned here) as did a lot of people I know. Salon's reviewer seem a bit pretentiously critical of decent movies (The Bucket List comes to mind as an example of that pretentiousness).

  -- domini
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