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Mamma Mia!, I am Not Allowed to Pick Movies Anymore


Which is what my sweet husband would say if he didn’t have better control of his inner voice than I do.

Normally, Rob is the one who makes the questionable picks, but this last Wednesday, my number finally came up in the library queue for Mamma Mia!, the Movie with Meryl Streep. Did you know that she can’t really sing?

And sadly, she was the main character, so it was her or no one, but I can’t cast aspersions on her vocal talent without noting that aside from the girl who plays her daughter, the Greek chorus and Christine Baranski, who plays one of Streep’s best friends, no one in the film can sing.

I loves me some musicals. I have no problem suspending my belief long enough for characters to burst into song or dance in the pursuit of coherent story-telling. Musicals though weave song, dance and acting together to create a world for characters to inhabit. Mamma Mia took pop songs and quilted a story around them in a way that resembles a spiderweb after a thunderstorm. There is but a semblance of the beauty.

“I saw this,” Mick commented when she saw the dvd on the kitchen counter Thursday evening. “It was disappointing.”

She had wanted to see the movie when it was in the theatres. We’d even talked about going. I had requested it from the library at the beginning of June in hopes of having it when Mom and Auntie came in July.

Rob sighed. He watches chicky flicks for me only. He considers it a husbandly duty. When he found out it was a musical on top of a chick flick, he visibly braced himself.

“I am exercising my right to veto if this sucks too much,” he informed me before we snuggled into bed to watch it on the laptop.

But despite the fact that it was horrid from the first number, neither one of us gave up on it. Mostly because the premise of the story is that Donna (Streep) slept with three men the summer she got pregnant with her daughter Sophie who has invited all three men to her upcoming wedding in hopes of discovering who her father is.

SPOILER: She never finds out and neither do we.

Hours worth of butchered 70’s pop and for what? No daddy reveal. A tone deaf cast. Pierce Brosnan singing – which I assure you is every bit as awful as the earworm it gave me – and Colin Firth (one of the potential daddies) discovers his true sexuality and hooks up with a pretty Greek boy at the end. Not that there is anything wrong with a gay dad, but why couldn’t it have been the unattractive Swedish guy instead of Mr. Darcy? It could have been a stereotype breaker.

Speaking of stereotypes, I will give the movie props for not airbrushing or otherwise emaciating Streep and her friends. They looked like middle aged women and it was wonderfully refreshing.

The finale has everyone dressed for a special appearance on the Midnight Special in Kiss like platform shoes and stretchy polyester that glittered appropriately under the disco lighting. Enough said.

Mamma Mia is one of the worst movies ever. It is also the highest grossing film to date in the UK and we are moving there, but I will reserve judgment. It could have been a bad movie summer there that year and the earworminess of ABBA cannot be denied.

If you haven’t seen it, don’t bother. Life is too precious to waste like that.

#1000


One thousand posts. And it only took 3 years, 2 months and 30 days. Not to mention, a dead husband, a new love, quitting my job of 20 years, emigrating, remarrying, being an immigrant, pursuing a new career and all the details in between.

How many words is a thousand posts? If I average them to about 600 words that’s 600,000, so in author terms, I’ve blogged roughly six novels.

Let’s stop and be impressed with me for a moment, shall we?

Rob pointed the impending milestone out a few weeks ago and asked what I might do to mark the occasion. Aside from pointing it out to you, my dear readers, I haven’t any other plan. My 500th post was a link to a piece I’d written for the now defunct Moms Speak Up. The only time I’ve acknowledged a number milestone was when Rob sent me email #500 during the LDR part of our relationship. It was equally low-key, so this quiet acknowledging is in keeping with me and my blog.

In a way, my blogging has been memoir-ish, which is fitting I suppose. Someone emailed me recently and asked if I didn’t have the blog in an ebook form. It would easy to read that way. I am working on that.

This last week has blurred by, and I think it might be setting an early tone for November. Sometimes when life is hurtling past me from every conceivable direction, I wonder vaguely if I am missing the bigger picture. Will I look back like Emily Webb and lament not having taken the time to savor? And I wonder what, if anything, is the point or picture I think I am missing.

New job is hectic, and very journalistic, which is an odd thing for an op-ed person like me. I think though that it is a crucial step on my journey to … something I am supposed to do … so I am as pleased as I am a tad overwhelmed and frightened of falling squarely on my slightly off-center nose. I am in the process of writing three separate pieces. Interviewing and gathering facts and links. My editor sent out a style sheet for everyone today and I am still trying to pin down the proper browser/WP program because formatting snafu’s make me crazy. It’s exciting to be in on the ground floor. It’s amazing that I have done this myself – networked and written myself to this opportunity. I have felt that my writing career was levitating with all the wheel spinning I’ve done in the last year, but it was purposefully after all.

“Now you will have to stop dicking around and work,” Rob noted.

And so the memoir progresses. I finished my revisions for the appendix to Suzy’s paper back book edition- I will let you know when it is released, and I will put up the Proust questionnaire she asked us (me and two others from the book) to answer when it hits the stores. It was fun in the introspective way that writers have fun – sometimes.

No one has H1N1 here – yet – and hopefully, it will stay that way because as of now our decision on vaccination is still to do nothing and our holiday is booked for November and flu would dampen the experience. Dee and I haven’t see the Pacific, traveled by ferry, holidayed on an island, and I don’t want to miss any of it.

When I started the first version of this blog in July of 2006, I was adrift. Believe it or not, I had a plan that I followed with a scary amount of precision through my late husband’s illness and after his death. But it only took me through July of 2006. Really, it did. Blogging was a multi-purpose endeavor meant to get me back to writing – which I had discovered through my pursuit of my education masters was really my true calling – and to help me sort out my feelings and find redirection. I guess, judging from how things have turned out, I can call the whole blog thing a success, wouldn’t you agree?