Mamma Mia! What an experience…

I think I should start this entry by making the statement that I am a 43 year old man with an all female family – one wife and two daughters – it’s quite important that I get this point straight at the outset.

On Christmas Day our family acquired DVDs of various films. Since then, we have been working our way through the titles and, so far, we have watched four titles together. This probably sounds innocuous enough, but let me tell you the titles of the films first before you make a judgement  – in watched order:

1. Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging
2. Wild Child
3. Mamma Mia!
4. The Bee Movie

The first two titles were the selections of my daughters who had seen both films in the cinema with my wife a few months ago. They were adamant that I would hate them because they are basically films about teenage girls having crushes on teenage boys or running wild at boarding school. Consequently, there was much merriment at home as we settled down to watch the films and there were lots of sideways glances at me to try to gauge my reaction. The third title was a big favourite of my wife when it came out in the cinema and had been viewed at least once by everyone else in the family on the big screen but which I had somehow avoided at the time. Still, as the fastest selling DVD of all time (apparently) it is obviously a much loved viewing experience for many people. I was told that the film “would make me want to go on holiday to Greece” (where it is set), “would bring a smile to my face”, “would make me feel good” etc. The fourth title is an animation based around the premise that bees are being ripped off by humans, with the latter taking the bee-manufactured resource (honey) without compensating the bees for their hard-work. The main bee character talks, and falls in love with, to a human woman and leads a successful legal case against the major honey companies but the result is that the bees are then all put out of work, there is no pollination of plants and flowers and everything starts to die. Fortunately, it is realised just in time what is happening and the bess fly to the rescue and save the world. Wow.

So what did I think. Well, The Bee Movie was good in an “another clever animated film even it is rather contrived” kind of way but I have to say that apart from “Soccer Dog”, “Mamma Mia” was probably the worst film I have ever seen. My words at the end when asked what I thought were ” It was an experience” (with an accompanying muttered “dreadful” and private and prolonged shake of the head). Actually “Soccer Dog” (which is about a dog belonging to an american boy that joins a boy’s football team in Scotland and helps them beat an all-star team of professionals in a specially arranged match) was rather good fun because it was so bad that it was good (you can see the string that controls the ball in some of the action shots…). But “Mamma Mia”…? Truly dreadful, with almost no redeeming features. Even “Wild Child” had its merits – a plot and some dialogue for example. Better than either of the these two though, and actually quite good, was “Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging”, a film which made Eastbourne look like the sort of place it would be nice to live. The one real negative point of “A, T and P S” though, was that it gave a glimpse of what it might be like to live in a house with teenage daughters, something which will begin to happen in less than one month’s time. Save me.