Trailer Trash: Mama Mia!

Movies with an exclamation point in the title are always good except for Moulin Rouge! Oklahoma! Oliver! And Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!

This trailer came on in the theater when I was seeing that George Clooney football movie, and thirty seconds in I was seized with an urge to light myself on fire in order to dull the pain. But I was on a date and thought it might send the wrong message.

Meryl Streep's daughter (the kind-of-hot daughter from Big Love) is getting married. The bride-to-be doesn't know who her father is because Streep was fucking three guys at once: the second to last James Bond, the neurotic British guy that's not Hugh Grant, and the gay professor from Good Will Hunting. For some reason, they’re all British, except for maybe the Good Will Hunting guy, who I guess is European or something (who am I, Rand McNally?) In order to figure out who the real father is, the three gents are invited to the wedding in order to participate in a horrible train wreck of homosexuality.

Not only is Mama Mia a musical, but it’s a musical based on the music of ABBA, making this the gayest movie since El Paso Wrecking Corp. I thought we had all gotten together and decided that disco music was a big mistake and should be stricken from the public consciousness, like Minimalism and Abu Ghraib.

From the looks of the trailer, Mama Mia! appears to be 70% dancing, 20% wise cracks about what a slut Meryl Streep’s character used to be, and 10% of these two ancient British women gasping or doing something else British. Oh, and I guess there’s bound to be a lot of singing too, but they don’t show that in this trailer probably because they want people to actually go see this thing. Smart guys, these trailer people.

(Oh wait, there’s a new trailer of them singing here. I can’t watch the whole thing, it’s too painful).

I know that I'm not exactly the target audience here, but c'mon, couldn't the filmmakers have thrown my demographic (straight males- there are quite a few of us!) a bone here? Besides the daughter from Big Love? Couldn’t second-to-last James Bond get into a karate fight with the groom, or shoot someone in the head? Something? Anything?