Mama Mia - film review

SPOILER WARNING – I give plot details below.

Normally I hate, loathe and detest musicals. I hate the cheese, and I hate people randomly bursting into song in the way real people don’t. But I’ll make an exception for Mama Mia.

This is mainly because I have always been an Abba fan. So I went to the cinema with the expectation that I was basically seeing a music DVD, a load of songs with a good video. In this case, the video linked the various songs in a common story and a common context. Approaching it in that way, it did not seem like a musical, and I was able to sit back and enjoy.

And the songs were indeed good. They sat well in the story, and with a few exceptions did not seem contrived. Julie Walters was particularly good at making the lyrics come to life in the context of the story.

The men can’t sing to save their lives. But starting from that assumption, they did a lot better than I had been led to expect. Abba always had a gay following, so I should not have been surprised that one of the ‘Dads’ was gay, or that at the end there were lots of men dancing in the fountain with no shirts on.

The plot is full of holes, mysterious characters that appear and disappear without explanation etc. It mystified me that the film starts with two girls arriving at the island to be bridesmaids, with only a couple of small bags. What woman travels that light in normal times, let alone such an important role in a wedding? On a deeper level, I wanted more explanation of how the men reacted to being asked to give her away, only to find someone else was doing it. I was also disappointed that it ends with a wedding and a postponement, rather than two weddings. (Or 4).

But despite all the plotholes, I really enjoyed the movie. The overall story was good, the locations excellent, and the photography superb. It was very cheesy, but it was supposed to be. Abba is cheesy, and so the film had to be cheesy to be true to the music and the songs and the band, and setting out to be cheesy it was 100% successful.

I loved it.

So was the bit at the end, dancing in the fountain of a pagan goddes, constitute advocating her sexuality - have fun regardless of marriage comittment? Or did the church wedding of the main protagonists overide that message?

Christian Calendar

I have always been brought up with a non-conformist view that much of the so called Christian calendar revolves around the Christianisation of pagan festivals. As Christianity expanded and pagans were converted, they needed a substitute for their pagan days, and something to celebrate when their still-pagan friends were having fun and revelry. I thought that the church took the pagan festivals and applied Christian meanings to them. My parents took a quasi- Jehovah’s Witness position that we really shouldn’t do these things at all, but I have moved away from it saying that the Kingdom of God is advancing and taking ground form the Kingdom of darkness, and I’m not going to let the Devil keep any of it, least of all the fun bits. However, this weekend, while reading the Church of England newspaper, my position has changed again. It was an article regarding the dating of Christmas, which pointed out that neither the winter solstice (21 Dec) nor the Roman Saturnalia (17 Dec) fall on December 25th. The article went on to say that the date of Christmas was derived very early, and was based on an idea prevalent at the time that the OT prophets died on their birthdays. Therefore, having evaluated the date of the crucifixion to be 25th of March, Jesus would also have been born on 25th of March. But since Jesus was a special case. It was his incarnation ie conception that was counted, rather than emergence form the womb. Thus, 9 months later, he was born on 25th December. Now I still think that the fundamental premise about the prophets dying on their birthdays is almost certainly flawed, but it is good to know that the date of Christmas was set based on theological thought rather than simply adopting a pagan festival.