eis uma crítica, enfatizada por mim, que prova a validade prática da minha teoria - fazer como se fossem fáceis as coisas difíceis é a única maneira de as tornar fáceis.
Even those of us who habitually favor serious, austere, aesthetically correct drinks — single-malt Scotch, green tea, pomegranate juice, whatever — may occasionally indulge in a frivolous cocktail bedecked with fruit and umbrellas and served in a bulbous, sugar-rimmed glass. The next morning’s headache seems a small price to pay for the rush of cheap liquor and uninhibited conviviality. As long as you don’t operate heavy machinery or wake up in the wrong bed, or operate heavy machinery in the wrong bed, what’s the harm?
All of which is to say: Don’t be afraid of “Mamma Mia!” (That exclamation point, by the way, is part of the title, and it’s by far the most understated thing about the movie.) You can have a perfectly nice time watching this spirited adaptation of the popular stage musical and, once the hangover wears off, acknowledge just how bad it is.
Actually you don’t have much choice on either front. If you insist on folding your arms, looking at your watch and defending yourself against this mindless, hedonistic assault on coherence, you are unlikely to survive until the end credits (which may, by themselves, kill you all over again). Surrender, on the other hand, is easy and painless. It’s Greece! It’s bellybuttons! It’s Meryl Streep! It’s Abba!
See that girl! Watch that scene! If you change your mind, I’m the first in line. Mamma Mia, here I go again. Like me, you may have spent the last 30 years struggling to get lines like those out of your head — and wondering what they were doing there in the first place — but you might as well have been trying to compost Styrofoam. Those shimmery, layered arrangements, those lyrics in a language uncannily like English, those symmetrical Nordic voices — they all add up to something alarmingly permanent, a marshmallow monument on the cultural landscape.
(...)
The story (by Catherine Johnson) is more or less an early Shakespeare comedy reimagined as an episode of “Hannah Montana.”
(...) in matters of craft and technique “Mamma Mia!” proves to be remarkably shoddy, a tangle of clumsy cuts, mismatched shots, bad lighting, egregious overdubbing and scenes in which characters appear to have been haphazardly Photoshopped into the scenery.
(...)
It is safe to say that Ms. Streep gives the worst performance of her career — safe to say because it is so clearly what she intends, and she is not an actress capable of failure. There is a degree of fascination in watching an Oscar-winning Yale School of Drama graduate mug and squirm, shimmy and shriek and generally fill every moment with antic, purposeless energy, as if she were hogging the spotlight in an eighth-grade musical.
(...)
I know: I promised you a good time, and I’m describing a train wreck. But it’s hard not to share the evident delight of most of the performers. Ms. Streep overdoes it, yes, but you can’t accuse her of condescending to the material any more than you can fault her for taking it too seriously.
(...) Really, this movie is incapable of harming anyone, except moviegoers with the good taste and bad manners to resist its relentless, ridiculous charm.
A. O. SCOTT, no NYT
3 years ago
