Posts Tagged ‘Mama Mia’

MAMA MIA!: FIRST HOUR: 1 ½ STARS LAST THIRTY MINUTES: 3 STARS TOTAL: 2 ¼ STARS

Imagine if James Bong burst into song while pummeling the bad guys; or if Sophie’s Choice was a musical. Picture that and you’ll get how surreal it is to see Pierce Brosnan and fourteen time Oscar nominee (and two time winner) Meryl Streep prancing about a Greek Island singing the songs of 70s pop group ABBA.

Mama Mia! (their exclamation mark, not mine), the big screen adaptation of the wildly popular Broadway musical—apparently 30,000 people worldwide take in the stage show every single day—is a strange spectacle so unrelentingly sunny in its outlook viewers should take some heavy duty SPF 85 to the theater to prevent sunstroke.

In the film Donna (Streep) is a free spirited owner of a rundown B&B on the Greek Mediterranean on the alleged site of Aphrodite’s fountain of love. Twenty years previous she had summer romances with a trio of men—businessman Sam Carmichael (Pierce Brosnan), the uptight Harry Bright (Colin Firth) and slacker Bill (Stellan Skarsgard)—one of whom is the father of her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried).

After Sophie reads her Mom’s tell-all diary she realizes she has three possible fathers and becomes obsessed with finding the right man to walk her down the aisle at her upcoming wedding to Sky (Dominic Cooper). Unbeknownst to her mother, she forges invitations in Donna’s name to all three men. When the three arrive on the island, unaware of each other or Sophie’s existence, they spend the next twenty-four hours rekindling old romances, starting new ones and randomly bursting into song. Of course, Sophie’s choice is to decide which of these men is her real dad.

Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, who helmed the original stage show, Mama Mia! is a light and frothy confection that feels like a mix of High School Musical and Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 circa 1976. The silly story is buoyed by chart toppers by ABBA like I Have a Dream, Money, Money, Money and the title track but is let down by the director who fails to take advantage of the film’s beautiful island location with it’s crystal blue water, palm trees and clear skies. Instead she chooses to shoot the movie as though she was mounting a stage show. Maybe a better director—maybe, Julie Taymor’s Mama Mia!—could have opened this up some and made it more visually exciting.

That’s a picky little point though when there is so much else going on. Despite its idyllic vacation setting this is a movie that doesn’t know how to relax. If Meryl Streep isn’t dancing, she’s singing, if she isn’t singing she doing physical comedy. Ditto for the rest of the cast. As they say, if everyday was Christmas you wouldn’t appreciate it as much and the same is true at the movies when every second of a film is jammed with stimulus.

The unyielding pace mars the first hour of the film, cramming in too many songs, too many pratfalls and too much exposition. What probably works very well on stage with real actors loses some of its oomph when translated to the screen, although the abandon of the film’s Dancing Queen number is infectious and was probably a showstopper on the boards as it is in the movie.

It pays off, though, in the last half hour when, despite myself, I began to tap my foot to the songs and give in to the film’s cheery charms. The songs bring back a nostalgia for a simpler time when pop music was more fun than it is today—there isn’t a hint of gansta rap or emo in Mama Mia!—and the audience I saw it with were clapping and singing along with each musical number.

Mama Mia! starts off fluffy as Cool Whip on Jello, but develops a wistful feel in the last thirty minutes as the relationship between Sophie and her mother and three dads deepens. This is largely due to the performance of Meryl Streep.

Anyone who only regards Streep as a capital “S” serious actress may have to revise their opinion after seeing her play air guitar, sing to a fish or do a bang-on Celine Dion impression in The Winner Takes it All.

A project like Mama Mia! is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the films that made her famous, and even though this is likely part of her Robert De Niro Retirement Plan—she seems to have reached the juncture in her career where she leaves the interesting roles behind and takes only high ticket jobs—she commits completely and hands in a vibrant, energetic performance that is the emotional core of the movie.

I wish I could say the same thing about Pierce Brosnan. He’s fine in the film until he opens his mouth to sing. His vocal performance on S.O.S. is the kind of singing that people generally do when they think no one is listening and puts to rest the myth that all Irish people can sing.

Mama Mia! is a crowd pleasing confection that, for better or worse, will have you humming Dancing Queen as you exit the theater.  

Seyfried’s dual roles RICHARD CROUSE FOR METRO CANADA September 15, 2009

Chloe movie image Amanda SeyfriedSince shooting her breakout performance in Mama Mia! in Greece, 24-year-old actress Amanda Seyfried has spent a lot of time in Canada.

Her two TIFF films this year were both shot in Maple Leaf land, but on opposite ends of the country. Jennifer’s Body was lensed in Vancouver and Chloe, her film with director Atom Egoyan, in Toronto.

“We actually got to use Toronto as a real setting,” she said. “You don’t normally get to do that because you’re usually using it to cover for another town or masking it as a made up town.

“(Using Toronto as Toronto) makes everything feel more real. It’s difficult for anything to seem completely authentic when you’re on a movie set but this is as real as it has ever gotten for me.”

In Chloe, Seyfried plays an escort hired by Catherine (Julianne Moore) to test her husband’s (Liam Neeson) fidelity. It’s her first real adult role and one that proves she’s capable of more than teen musicals or comedies.

She credits working with Egoyan with pushing her to deepen the character by exploring every facet of Chloe’s life.

“I’ve never worked with anyone who has discussed the character so in-depth with me,” she says. “Atom would reiterate things to me with different descriptions and with a twist from what he had said last time. Every time we’d go for dinner or have lunch or sit down for coffee the first thing he would go to was, ‘I was thinking that Chloe would do this or that.’

“It was almost completely overwhelming in the beginning but he couldn’t have said less because I don’t think I would have captured it otherwise.”

Chloe is a complicated character with many notes to her personality but with Egoyan’s help Seyfried brings her vividly to life on screen.

“It’s a broad spectrum of emotions the audience feels about her,” she says, “and in order to make the audience feel that way you have to play it right and in order for me to pay it right I had to have Atom Egoyan.

In order for a movie like this to work you have to have someone like Atom Egoyan and there aren’t many people out there like him.

“Mr. Egoyan is a genius and he’s what good filmmaking is all about. I know it’s going to be difficult for me to choose my next project based on what I just went through with him. It has raised the bar into a very high place.”

Pierce Brosnan is much more than James Bond In Focus by Richard Crouse FOR METRO CANADA March 12, 2010

Pierce-BrosnanPierce Brosnan has never been nominated for an Oscar. He has a couple Golden Globe nods to his credit and an MTV Movie Best Fight Award statuette on his shelf, but so far the heavy gold has evaded him.

Perhaps because of his dapper good looks he doesn’t get spoken about in the same breath as Colin Firth or Morgan Freeman. Perhaps a resume dotted with films like Dante’s Peak knocks him down a peg or two in the Academy’s opinion.

Or maybe it’s his predilection for doing shamelessly populist fare like Mama Mia and this weekend’s Remember Me (co-starring as Robert Pattison’s father) that keeps him from being taken as seriously as say, George Clooney, another genetically blessed actor, who, like Brosnan, got his big break on television.

He could have been nominated for his work in The Matador, a little seen, but critically lauded film from 2005. In it, Brosnan plays Julian Noble, a jaded hit man, or “facilitator of fatalities” who finds a confidant in a struggling businessman, played by Greg Kinnear.

Brosnan’s performance as Julian, the hit man who develops confidence problems, is a revelation. We have seen Brosnan as the slickly comic private eye Remington Steele on television, the sophisticated James Bond and even as the suave jewel thief in The Thomas Crown Affair, but until now we have never seen him in Beatle boots and a Speedo traipsing across a hotel lobby.

His Julian is a manic creation — amoral, rude and unlike Bond, the character that has defined his career for the last decade, unshaven.

With this one performance Brosnan entered a new phase in his career, effortlessly leaving the urbane Bond behind.

Maybe next year he’ll finally get the recognition he deserves when the Academy gets a load of his work in The Ghost Writer. As ex-prime minister Adam Lang he embodies the role, like he was born for photo ops in front of private jets, waving to his constituents.

It’s good work that effectively erased the image of him as a half man / half horse in the recent film Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

Despite the odd misstep, he is an interesting actor who deserves more respect than he gets.

If the movie gods can allow Mon’ique to go from co-starring in Beerfest to winning a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, surely they can ignore Brosnan’s silly beard in an ill-conceived Robinson Crusoe remake, or the non-thrilling thriller Live Wire and finally give him his due.