Mamma Mia! The Movie - It’s Finally Here!!!
The long wait is finally over, “Mamma Mia! The Movie” hits theaters in most of the world this month. The London premiere has officially come and gone and now it’s about to be unleashed onto the world in a major way this month.
The build up has been quite exciting and it’s been wonderful to hear on the ABBAMAIL mailing list the reports coming in from folks who’ve seen advanced screenings in the few days leading up to July. Finally, I am no longer the only one on the list to have seen the movie and I can finally chat with people about it beyond the context of what I had written in my test screening review. In fact, I was actually using Skype to chat online with a friend of mine following the Melbourne premiere in Australia. It was wonderful to get the feedback and hear that people love the movie as much as I did.
Universal has been promoting the hell out of it, which is wonderful to see. I was personally surprised to see a video made out of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” with Amanda Seyfried singing the song brilliantly in a video that had some reminiscent elements of the original ABBA video for the song. Designed to get airplay on music video channels and aimed at a young audience, I thought this was a brilliant strategy that I wasn’t expecting in the least.
Entertainment Tonight, basically a fluff Hollywood news show, has had a whole week devoted to “Mamma Mia!” with daily stories and even that’s been carried over onto a second week. It’s generating a lot of exposure especially in the United States which has traditionally been so behind the rest of the world with all things ABBA. Although the stage show has had unprecedented success in the US, it’s nice to see the movie generating extensive coverage in the media in a country that seemed to want little to do with ABBA when they were a group.
Even satellite radio is getting in on the scene to promote the movie with Sirius Satellite Radio transforming one of their channels into an all ABBA channel for two weeks beginning July 7th. The music mix will include ABBA songs, the original London cast recording of “Mamma Mia!” and the brand new movie cast recording sprinkled in with interviews of the two B’s of ABBA, Björn and Benny as well as the three ladies responsible for helping bring “Mamma Mia!” to life in the first place. There will also be interviews with music and pop culture celebrities commenting on how ABBA has influence their lives, such as Alanis Morissette and Per Gessle of Roxette.
ABBAMAIL’s Monique Hoevens from the Netherlands has been tirelessly reporting in every new article hitting the press from news agencies the whole world over and the publicity machine is just churning out almost all positive reviews of the movie. While it’s still too early to call but it seems like “Mamma Mia! The Movie” is destined to be a hit.
I managed to obtain a ticket to an advanced screening in San Diego on June 26th to see a showing of what looks like what will be the final cut of the movie and the audience was extremely responsive to the jokes in the movie and even responding with a loud and resounding “Yes” back to the screen when Meryl Streep’s character asks a question of the audience during the performance seen during the end credits of the movie. And the screening I saw, the audio mix was not quite set right, but it didn’t seem to deter the positive response of the audience.
And who can forget the most exciting thing to happen this month outside of the movie hitting the screen, the first English language cast recording that actually is worth listening to!!! Yes, you heard it here, the Original London Cast recording of “Mamma Mia!” is absolutely horrible and Björn and Benny ought to be ashamed that ever saw the light of day as it is. The true tragedy is, of course, the fact those bastards basically “cock blocked” any chance of any other English language cast recording from ever being made (except for the movie version) when there were far superior casts with considerably better talent than what was recorded as the soundtrack to the stage show.
While it sucks that there is no proper original cast recordings for the Canadian, Broadway, and Australian casts, the movie cast is soon to be the definitive English language cast recording for “Mamma Mia!” even though there are a few songs that didn’t make the transition from stage to screen and the cast recording will be completely missing the wonderful Overture and Entr’acte pieces. But that’s a small price to pay to have a cast album filled with the likes of Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski, Julie Walters, and even Pierce Brosnan, who’s singing while moderately okay, isn’t hitting the songs out of the ballpark like his co-stars. Of course, it helps the music was brilliantly left in the hands of our own Benny Andersson, who enlisted the help of several key musicians who helped record the songs the first time around. The music is exciting and I for one certainly hope an expanded version of the soundtrack gets released at the time of the DVD/Blu-Ray release of the movie because it would be criminal not to see the incidental music from the movie not get showcased.
I for one am going to savor the month and enjoy the exposure “Mamma Mia!” gets and maybe the world will finally be asking in a slight change to the title song’s lyrics, “Mamma Mia, how can we resist you?” Somehow I think they got it right with the Borg in Star Trek, at least when ABBA is concerned, “Resistance is futile.”