Mamma Mia!
Hot on the heels of it scooping best musical at the National Movie Awards in London on 8th September, and its star Meryl Streep being named as best actress in the nationwide poll recognizing the year’s blockbuster movies, cinemagoers across Europe are finding out - Mamma Mia! - what all the fuss is about.

Somewhere, over the rainbow, there may be someone who doesn’t know the plot, so here goes – 20-year-old Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) is preparing to marry her boyfriend Sky (Dominic Cooper) at her mother's hotel on a Greek island. She seemingly has it all - a carefree life, a loving fiancé, and happy friends, but one thing is missing - a father. To fulfill her lifelong dream of being given away by her Dad at her wedding, she reads the diary of her mother Donna (Meryl Streep) and discovers that she has three possible fathers (Stellan Skarsgård, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth) – she secretly invites all three to her wedding, to find an answer before the chapel bells chime…

Taking its cue from the world’s most popular stage comedy musical (which has already earned some 2 billion dollars worldwide), the film features the music of ABBA sung by the cast members (with Brosnan apparently not being Pavarotti’s successor). Leading British theatre director Phyllida Lloyd is in her first feature-film director’s chair, and she would appear to have made a splendid first effort, if box-office receipts and (largely) favourable reviews are anything to go by. Even the customarily curmudgeonly Philip French, writing in The Observer, acknowledges being “bludgeoned into submission by the energy and exuberance and came near to embracing the camp frolics and calculated pseudo-artlessness”. That’s a rave review from old Frenchy…

And the cast’s vocal abilities? Streep has already proven that she can sing (Postcards from the Edge (1990)), but, as for Brosnan’s much-mocked efforts, ABBA singer Benny Andersen hit back at critics in an interview with The Sun newspaper: "Everybody complains that Pierce can't sing and it pisses me off. I think he has a great voice. He couldn't sing Nessun Dorma but neither could I - and I was in ABBA. It's like saying Bob Dylan can't sing. It's just not fair. He has a good voice."



So there you have it – recommendations don’t come much better than that. Get yourself along to see Mamma Mia! – you know that everyone else will…
108 mins.

Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad)
A semi-fictional account of the BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), the Special Police Operations Battalion of the Rio de Janeiro military police, director José Padilha film scooped the Golden Bear at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.

Padilha, who had previously directed the acclaimed hostage documentary Bus 174 (2002) was drawn to the original book Elite da Tropa by sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares and two former BOPE captains, André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel, with the script written by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani.

It is a grimly intense examination of Rio de Janeiro’s notorious favelas, the volatile, dangerous slums to be found at the edge of the city. Set in 1997, the story is an intimate take on the city’s huge web of corruption, with drug traffickers holding near-complete control within the favelas, while the police run their own rackets elsewhere. The elite BOPE combats drug trafficking, and BOPE Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) is in crisis: as well as fighting a daily battle in a war zone, Nascimento is looking to train his own replacement so he can get away from the violence and be closer to his wife, who is about to have their first child…

Unfortunately, while exciting and well-intentioned, the film revels in the police violence and corruption that it purports to be condemning. The narration by Nascimento character (Wagner Moura) is a touch oppressive, while the film seems clinically removed from its material. Nascimento seems little more than a passive observer at times and, as the story cuts between the violence in the favelas to police rookie Matias (Andre Ramiro) bouncing off lighter-skinned intellectuals, the alleged realities of how people are divided along racial and economic lines seem patronizing.
118 mins.

James Drew

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Expatica 2008