Mama Mia and other films

Earlier this week Spouse & I joined our friends Dave & Scott at the theatre to see "Mama Mia - The Singalong Version". Its the film "Mama Mia", but with the lyrics of the songs at the bottom of the screen, changing color when they are to be sung, like karaoke. Audiences are encouraged to sing along.

This sounded like a lot of fun, for several reasons. Spouse & I both love Abba music. We saw Mama Mia in Las Vegas (from 5th row seats) on my birthday in 2004. I have sung karaoke several times. See? It seemed like the perfect recipe for a campy, gay ol' time!

Only, it wasn't.

Maybe it was my fault for agreeing to go on a Tuesday night. There were only about 12 people in the theatre, and only 2 of them appeared to be gay, excluding the 4 of us. We should have gotten a big group of queens together and gone to see it on a Fri or Sat night. We sang along to some of the songs, but I didn't hear anyone else singing. It just seemed like one of those great, fun ideas that somehow just didn't turn out.

We still had a good time, but not the campy, gay ol' time I was expecting. Now, about the movie...

All the actors were too old for the characters they portrayed except Sophie and Sky. Meryl Streep is supposed to be this early 40's single mom whose 20 year old daughter is getting married. Only Meryl Streep is 59, not in her early 40's. Same goes for the 3 possible fathers, whom we would assume are close to the same age, early 40's. But they're not, they're 57, 55, and 48.

Normally I wouldn't get all hung up on the age thing, but the songs, dialog, and choreography were all designed for actors in their early 40's, so it almost borders on comical to hear and see these older actors saying and doing this stuff.

And who committed the tragedy against the world of telling Pearce Brosnan that he could sing? Sweet baby Jesus, that was bad. Couldn't they have cast an actor (closer to his early 40's) who could actually sing?

But the music was fun, and the Grecian setting was absolutely beautiful. I doubt this film will win any awards, but it was cute, and I bet the actors had an absolute ball making it.

Speaking of films, I recently came across AfterElton.com's list of 50 greatest gay male films. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised that "Brokeback Mountain" took the top spot, although it is not my favorite. The #1 spot on my list would be "Torch Song Trilogy". Other surprises to me were that "Priscilla: Queen of the Dessert" came in at #10, and "Too Wong Fu: Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar" came in at #27. I would have ranked them both in the top 5.

So if your Netflix queue is nearly empty and you want to restock it with some good gay films, check out the list.

Crush du Jour: Will Fennell