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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Critics always run the risk of being tiny voices in a storm, and any negative review of "Mama Mia!" will be such.
Reviews by "top critics" at rottentomatoes.com are running negative by a 3-to-1 margin. I don't care. I'm going tonight and I'm going to enjoy myself, dammit! :-)
Stephanie's review is beneath criticism. Way beneath.
This may not be a movie that I will ever see, but I can't believe its primary failings are either Pierce Brosnan's singing or Meryl Streep's dancing. Brosnan did a fine job on a few Irish numbers in 'Evelyn' (good enough that I've downloaded them), but perhaps those were in his wheelhouse. As for Streep, I've been lucky enough to see her on stage several times, first when we were at Vassar together and then when she appeared in Brecht's 'Happy End' on Broadway in about 1978. Meryl is one of those rare performers who can do it all. A true American treasure.
I remain puzzled by the rage and bitterness that I read in Ms. Zacharek's reviews, but I appreciate their overall intelligence. Keep it up.
"Isn't "a cast ready to break into joyous song and dance every minute" the very definition of a musical?"
If so, SWEENEY TODD and CHICAGO need redefining...:). Even in a musical there is a level of reality you have to have for the fantasy/musical part to work. SINGIN' IN THE RAIN didn't have extras and stars looking constantly cheerful and ready to burst into song every five minutes--or knowing that they were in a musical. The numbers mostly grew out of day-to-day movie studio operations and believable situations. From the trailer, everyone in MM seems all-too-aware they are in a musical and are gonna entertain us no matter what it takes, and that kind of self-consciousness and overload is a musical buzzkill.
"This is supposed to be a FUN movie, not "Sophie's Choice 2", so everybody please lighten up."
Boy, that is a stupid criticism. For the nineteenth-eleventh-zillion time, a movie does not have to be serious to be good. And it doesn't have to be jukebox junk to be fun. The most enjoyable musicals are ones that are fun _and_ good.
"Batman Begins" was a turgid mess of bronzy pretentiousness topped off with killer steam. None of the previews made me want to see "The Dark Knight", and I found Heath Ledger's Joker to be flat and boring. Score two for Stephanie. I'm sure "Mamma Mia" will be cinematic Spam, and putting a stage director on a movie set is usually a recipe for disaster.
I guess the sheer number of annoyed letters here and in the Batman review are part of the selection bias: if you agreed with the review, you're not gonna post an angry screed, are you?
"I can only add that several weeks ago, when my son took his 8 year old niece, my granddaughter, to the latest Indian Jones movie, they showed the trailer for "Mamma Mia!", which caused Zara to proclaim that she absolutely HAD to see it. Uncle Marc quickly quashed that, as well he should have."
Wow - crushing an little girl's spontaneous enthusiasm to reinforce his hipster cred. Nice. You must be so proud.
We'll have to agree to disagree on this. I think it's a lot more realistic for people on a sun-drenched Greek island to spontaneously burst into song (Mamma Mia!), than it is for women locked up in prison awaiting their murder trials (Chicago).
You are judging Mamma Mia! based on a 90 second trailer, whereas I've seen the entire movie, and I didn't perceive it as musical buzzkill at all. Yes, it's camp and unrealistic, and probably not Oscar material, but it's the most enjoyable film I've seen in years, which in my opinion very much makes it "fun_and_good".
There's your first mistake.
I remember watching Willie Mays, in a Mets uniform, falling down while running from first to second base and later stumbling around in the outfield. It was so sad to see a great player reduced to that. That's how I feel about Ms. Streep in this horror show--I choose to turn away and remember her back in the day when she was great.
Meryl Streep IS great. It's the PICTURES that got crappy...
Have you seen The Devil Wears Prada? If that's not a good comic performance, then I don't know what is.
Someone just wrote: "..Someone who hates film wouldn't be so passionately moved when presented with a crappy film, surely...."
My first response is "Maybe so, maybe not". But, then, for various reasons (one of them being that I've usually, by mid-morning, read at least two or three publications that are rather more "solid" than Salon.com...and I'm gathering that Ms. Zacharek does the same), I'm also inclined to consider that Ms. Zacherek's reviews seem, also for varous reasons, calculatedly reactionary-----which is to say that (as with a lot of the writing at Salon these days) I can almost hear the careerist wheels spinning.....
If Ms. Zacharek LIKED the movie (or any of the movies she's disparaged in the past year or so)?...well, she'd be lost in a chorus of approving voices. So, how will she distinguish herself and be, if nothing else, the recognizable writer who gave a ROTTEN REVIEW?...
That's easy....just be the person who writes well (she usually does), but hated the movie. If nothing else, "Rotten Tomatatoes" and amazon.com (once the DVD's available) will boldly (in terms of typeface) feature her NAME and "SALON.COM" (!!!!!)
and, thus, are the careers (usually sufficently lucrative, if utterly predictable) of professional contrarians and curmudgeons made.........Kingsley Amis and Evelyn Waugh and Dorthy Parker were doing this sixty or seventy years ago......
Waugh, Like Zacharek, was also a master of the affectedly-wistful, but still stinging "Oh...I just don't know...I was so EXCITED when I heard about someone was doing/making/writing it...but the movie/book/play just left me feeling...oh?, like SOMETHING was missing.... you know? It's just so ODD, after all I'd expected!...."
The main "thing" is to GET YOUR NAME OUT THERE....
Zacharek does this very well, asnd my third impulse is to say "More power to you!" Rent does need to be paid.
Still, I read this review and was reminded of her review of "Sweeney Todd". I'm no remarkable fan or connisseur of Sondheim or, for that matter, musicals in general, but I read her review and wondered why she didn't recuse herself....since she obviously did't like Sondheim to-begin-with or musicals (or, as should have been embarassing for her after reading the letters, KNOW much about them either).
I read this reveiw and thought that pretty-much everything she disliked about the movie could be applied to the musical (if not, then she didn't make that sufficiently clear). In short, my impression was that she'd dislike seeing the musical....so why would she want to review the movie of the musical, unless she wanted to have her name at the top of the "Rotten Tomatoes" list of supposedly influential critics (albeit those who hated the thing)?
Oh well, I'm sure she'll stay in work. There are various ways of jump-starting a career as a critic, and she seems to have settled on one of most time-proven ones.
Sincerely,
David Terry
www.davidterryart.com
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