MAMMA MIA! (2008) ***1/2 The greatest fan letter ever written, the ultimate fan letter. If the gods have anything good to say about humans I suspect that it comes out something like this. The motion is incredible; the massive choreography, the graceful cameras. None of the singing is going to make you forget ABBA, but beyond that it gives you the sense that nothing ever could. It's such a beautiful film visually: Greece, Amanda Seyfried, Ashley Lilley, the beach, the boat, Christie Saunders, the bar, the hill, the water, the church, Philip Michael, Dominic Cooper. It's all about Meryl Streep, it all revolves around Meryl Streep, it's all about what people call the sixties but really includes most of the seventies and scenes from the eighties, it's about being young, it's all about feeling young. Meryl Streep is actually a really good singer, but I think that Christine Baranski has to be the very best part, the funnest and funniest. I admire Pierce Brosnan for standing there acting like that, this is my favourite Brosnan role by far. I am proud to have been a part of the ABBA revolution: one of millions of kids descending on the record shops of Europe every time there was a rumour of a new ABBA single. I love this movie, I know that millions of people love it, some even more than me. But I doubt that anyone ever had a better time watching it than my daughter Alexandra: in a theatre full of Russian exchange students singing along "like Dracula, 'Dancing Qveen, yong ant sveet.,' they obviously didn't even know what they were saying" and "dancing around like idiots." She knows, I know, you have to you, you have to..there may be no more human expression than dancing around like an idiot while you have no idea what's being said.
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