Very Close to, if not actually in, the CD player:
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
seen/heard ° listen ° buy
You Can Jive
It's almost here! It's finally almost here!
Fanboys have been all in a tizzy! A tizzy! Critics have been ejaculating buckets full of descriptive phrases and opinionry! It's a movie! A movie that opens this week! A long-awaited movie you can see projected in a theater starting OMG2morrow (and then the next day, also the next day, and probably over the next week and for some weeks after that, and then in airplanes and on DVD and streaming over the internet and via cable subscription services and basic cable and regular broadcast television).
There have been advance ticket sales! Have you heard? Isn't that nuts? For a movie! A movie that's almost here!
The promos say, "It will have you dancing in the aisles!" Great! Because there's absolutely nothing that makes the moviegoing experience more enjoyable than having folks get up and dance in the fucking aisles. Hopefully, while singing! That'll l'arn the kids with their texting and talking to each other and faxing and shooting up during a film.
Mamma Mia! sounds like a sunnier, gender-swapped version of that old miniseries Lace ("Which one of you bitches is my mother?!") substituting Streep splits and ABBA tunes for Phoebe Cates' swearing (like, "Which one of you bitches is my mother?!").
Not a fair trade. Might come as a shocker, but: I will not be in attendance. Not unless I am kidnapped and waterboarded and promised an endless series of quality compensatory blowjobs while being showered with gold coin.
The critics agree! Crazy Armond White says Mamma Mia Exclamation Point "seems to be made by people who have no instinctive connection to pop music." That's not a very entertaining put-down! David Poland of Movie City News claims that it's worse than Rent, as if such a thing were possible. Glenn Kenny gushes, "Just about every production number looks like something you'd see on the satellite music video channel they have on all the time at that Uzbeki restaurant in Queens." But is the food any good?
Even Rex "Where Are My Tits?" Reed doesn't like it. "Bring earplugs," he says (in a very poorly written review, I mean, wow). Reed makes the unfortunate mistake, though, of wagging his finger at the film's musical fount. Of ABBA, he wags, "The popularity of the jukebox blather of this gang of no-talents is only slightly less understandable than the war in Iraq." Oh, Rex.
It's an easy trap in which to fall. My generation was taught to hate ABBA because it was overpolished and unAmerican and was associated with a sort of discoey ickyness. Luckily, there's a branch of music criticism call Poptimism that has come along and ordered us to reevaluate former musical prejudices. Now, if you don't like absolutely everything, you're a racist homophobe! That's much easier! Sign me up!
I'm not sure if any country is responsible for more overpraised, mediocre crap than Sweden. Try harder, UK! Indie kids will roll over for the most nonexotic exoticism. Aw, it's charming! Seriously: Fuck that whistling shit. But Swedes do good by the Big Pop Song - just recently: "Toxic," "4ever," "Since U Been Gone" - you know, ABBAish stuff. And if you need to strip away the sheen and the unfortunate 70's associations to get the Song, well, maybe this'll help:
The Yayhoos - Dancing Queen (mp3) (buy)
So now ABBA's an acceptable sort of exuberant. Where you get beer spilled on you but everything's still okay. Nothing shiny other than yr belt buckle. The Yayhoos are a roots rock band, a sort-of side project from a bunch of musicians who did time in outfits like (gasp) The Georgia Satellites. This record's from 2001. Their follow-up was in 2006. I think I noticed them swing through the Mercury Lounge last year, or the year before that. Backburner weekend fun.
They have a song called "Monkey with a Gun." Ain't nuthin' more American than that!
They also have this, which is awesome:
The Yayhoos - Baby I Love You (mp3) (buy)
I can almost feel the condensation from the can drip over my digits. Honey, where's the remote?
I found The Yayhoos through that song, which plays out over the credits of an actual good move, Slither. That's right: Slither. It stars Captain Shiny from Firefly and Henry of Portrait of a Serial Killer fame and the future Laura Bush (Elizabeth Banks deserves some sort of iconic role after being stuck as female hamburger in the Apatow grinder, but I'm not sure the Stone flick's the right fit) and a couple scenes with Pam from The Office who was married to the director at the time.
Slither's a very funny, properly gooey tribute to late-80's horror films. It also very adeptly switches POV a couple times over its running time. Smart script well played, despite the fact it comes from the dude responsible for writing that bad Dawn of the Dead remake. Underrated, overlooked, etc. Rent yourself that shit.
Oh, and don't forget that there's a new Batman movie. You might have heard about that one? Hurry! See it first to see it best! Because every time a print runs through the projector it loses a little magic, you know? If you don't see it right away, it might not turn out to be all that good!
(Also, you wouldn't be able to take part in culturally relevant discussions. Like, "Did you see that scene where the Joker did that thing? Man, that was crazy!" Or, "Wow! Action sequence!" Or, "I thought this superhero movie was better/worse than other superhero movie!" The shame!)
(I wasn't impressed with Nolan's first Batman flick. The Prestige was a better movie, Batman Returns was a better movie. But yeah, I'll see Dark Knight some time. I'll see it before Heath Ledger does.)