Have you seen The Devil Wears Prada? If that's not a good comic performance, then I don't know what is.

Meryl Streep IS great. It's the PICTURES that got crappy...

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.

There's your first mistake.

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".

"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.

"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?

"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.

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.

Stephanie's review is beneath criticism. Way beneath.

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! :-)

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.

Stephanie,

Is "Mama Mia" really "bad" directing, or simply directing in the wrong media?

The film director also directed the stage musical version of "Mama Mia," which plays in 2000 seat theatres. Live theatre, particularly live musical theatre in cavernous venues, requires big gestures and broad acting, so that the gestures and emotions can be communicated to the back row. What requires "jazz hands" in a musical might be communicated with a lifted eyebrow in a close-up movie frame.

While there have been successful musical- to-movie adaptations, it's a trickier feat than one would expect. (Stephen Sondheim, for example thinks "West Side Story" doesn't work on film, because guys dancing in the "real" NY streets on film looks foofy, while guys dancing on stage before a live audience looks menacing).

"Mama Mia" as a stage musical is campier than to begin with, and relies on the audience reaction to keep the whole thing energized and fun. Maybe part of "Mama Mia's" problem is that the director didn't know how to finesse the translation from stage to screen. (To see how *that's* done well, watch Tim Burton's incredible film adaptation of "Sweeney Todd").

Still, I'm gonna go see it. (As I told my husband; "I've sen enough car chases, explosions, knock-out battles, and movies with "Man" in the title for the summer. Bring on the dancing gay chorus!)