Like the smash Broadway musical that spawned it, Mamma Mia! would not exist without ABBA. The movie is simply an excuse for the famous likes of Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters to run around like lunatics on a beautiful Greek island, stopping every few minutes to belt out another classic ABBA ditty such as Dancing Queen or Take a Chance on Me.
BOOK REVIEW
LIFE WITH MY SISTER MADONNA. Christopher Ciccone and Wendy Leigh. Simon Spotlight Entertainment. 342 pages. $26. Life With My Sister Madonna, Christopher Ciccone's whiny memoir about growing up in the shadow of his world-famous, world-class neurotic older sister, accomplishes something nothing else written about the singer has managed to do: It makes you feel a little sorry for her.
SMALL SCREEN Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal (9 p.m. Monday, HBO) -- Nevada rolled out the welcome mat for the Mafia goombahs who invented Las Vegas and the busted-luck gamblers who made it pay; for the mad Strangelovian scientists who needed a place to test-fire their nukes; even for all those space aliens who annually abduct countless innocent Americans and fly them to Area 51 to be buggered with random anal probes. But Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam? Heaven forfend! This sad, funny...
Alice's House is actually a crowded Sao Paulo high-rise apartment where Alice (Carla Ribas) suffers the indignities of her adulterous cab-driving husband (Zecarlos Machado), keeps the peace between her three rambunctious sons (Vinicius Zinn, Ricardo Vilaca and Felipe Massuia) and tends after her aging mother (Berta Zemel).
Take the exclamation mark in the title of Mamma Mia! as a warning. In practically every scene of this glossy, saucy adaptation of the Broadway musical, the actors talk to each other at such a high pitch, you wonder if every line in the script ended like this! Or this!! Or this!!!
DVD SCANS
British actor Jason Statham may be known primarily as an action-film guy (The Transporter, The Italian Job, War), but he has also proven himself more than capable of holding his own in movies that don't require cast members to have black belts in karate. In the excellent caper The Bank Job (Lionsgate, $30 DVD; $35 two-disc DVD; $40 Blu-ray) Statham stars as a used-car salesman who, working off a tip from an old flame (Saffron Burrows), hatches a complicated bank heist that has unexpected consequences...
The Dark Knight is such a moody, dramatic, dead-serious affair that it feels more like a noirish crime thriller than a superhero movie. Everything in the movie is played straight and aimed at grown-ups (or at least older kids). There is no geeky joy in Gotham City, no trace of the gee-whiz wonder most comic-book pictures trade on for effect. At times, when Batman pops up onscreen in all his high-tech gothic regalia, you wonder, ``What's that clown doing here?''
Even before shooting had wrapped on The Dark Knight last year, the movie already seemed destined to become the defining film of the 2008 summer season. Anticipation was building for director Christopher Nolan's sequel to his well-received Batman Begins, which had salvaged the durable Batman saga from the pop-culture junkyard of passé camp and made Gotham City hip and menacing.
The title of Hellboy II: The Golden Army makes the movie sound like something intended primarily for people who saw the first Hellboy movie -- which was OK but not exactly memorable -- and can get excited about another one. It's a dry, mundane title. It's also the only thing about the film that doesn't blow your mind right out of its comfortable, I've-seen-all-this-before rut.
DVD SCANS
The DVD and Blu-ray discs of The Ruins (Paramount Home Entertainment, $35 and $40) sport the word ''Unrated'' in letters almost as big as the movie's title. But the only difference between this cut of the film and the one released to theaters in April is a three-second shot that doesn't add a drop of blood to the movie's already considerable gore quotient.
BIG SCREEN Hellboy II: The Golden Army (PG-13) -- How do you follow up a slew of Oscar nominations? If you're writer-director Guillermo Del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth), you stick to your fantastical roots and make another installment in the adventures of the red-skinned comic-book hero Hellboy (Ron Perlman) to defend our planet from an invasion of otherwordly baddies.
Walking in to see Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, I was unaware the movie was spun off from a popular line of toy dolls -- more than 14 million of them have been sold. Nor did I know about the anticipation and excitement many little girls have for the movie, which is the fourth in the series (the previous three, made for TV, are available on DVD).
BIG SCREEN BIG SCREEN Hancock (PG-13) -- A cranky, alcoholic superhero (Will Smith) hires a publicist (Jason Bateman) to help him repair his public persona. Charlize Theron co-stars for director Peter Berg (The Kingdom). Early reviews have not been kind, but Smith movies and the Fourth of July holiday are an unbeatable combination. Opens Wednesday.
The idea for WALL-E, the ninth and arguably best film from Pixar Animation Studios, was born during a 1994 brainstorming session in which the company's founders knocked around ideas for follow-up movies to their upcoming debut, Toy Story, which was nearing completion.
In Roman de Gare, French filmmaker Claude Lelouche throws down the gauntlet to viewers who can spot any plot twist, no matter how illogical or impractical. Never seen a murder mystery you couldn't outwit? Here is your movie.
''Do not scorn a weak cub,'' reads a proverb at the start of Mongol. ``He may become a brutal tiger.'' Genghis Khan, of course, is more than brutal; he will eat tigers for breakfast. The legendary 13th century conqueror, who controlled a fifth of the world at the height of his power, has been the protagonist of two previous Hollywood films. In one, he was played by John Wayne; in the other Omar Sharif. Neither film is remembered today, for good reason.
DVD SCANS
BY RENE RODRIGUEZ ''I believe that once the work is completed, the artist has nothing more to say,'' reads a statement from director Milcho Manchevski on the DVD of his 1994 debut film Before the Rain (Criterion Collection, $40). But the Macedonian filmmaker then admits he is going to go ahead and talk at length about his film anyway, ``simply to keep a few things from being forgotten.''
SMALL SCREEN Hopkins 24/7 (10 p.m. Thursday, ABC) -- You shouldn't watch this six-part peek inside Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital just because network documentary units are dying out and this might be the last chance you ever get to see one in action. You should watch it because it's fascinating and dramatic stuff: The family of a comatose little girl struggles with the decision to disconnect life support. A young doctor punctures a patient's lung during a routine procedure. And a top brain surgeon...
MOVIES
Foreclosure, divorce, the economy and the workplace may not sound like the building blocks of a riotous comedy. But as filmmaker Steven Conrad points out, just because you're trying to make people laugh doesn't mean you can't sneak in a little drama, too. In The Promotion, the directorial debut of the screenwriter of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, Conrad incorporates all of the less-than-amusing subjects above -- and still manages to be funny.
SMALL SCREEN Penn & Teller's Bull- - - -! (10 p.m. Thursday, Showtime) -- America's most hilariously debauched investigative report returns for a sixth season, with erstwhile magicians Penn and Teller screaming insults (well, Penn screams; the silent Teller makes faces) and ruthlessly pranking their interview subjects as they trample on conventional wisdom and sometimes even human decency. (I exaggerate not; they actually trashed Mother Teresa one week.) On the season opener, they bash censorious...
Having produced a series of box-office smashes that redefined their respective genres (The Terminator, Aliens, Armageddon, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) has given Gale Ann Hurd considerable clout in Hollywood.
Careful not to repeat the past, The Incredible Hulk does a lot of things Ang Lee's 2003 The Hulk didn't: It's lighter and faster-paced, it's funnier and it embraces (instead of ignoring) the 1970s TV series that furthered the character's popularity. Even the requisite (and often tiresome) business of recounting the hero's origin is dispensed with over the opening credits. When the movie proper starts, it already feels like you're into the second chapter of the story.
With The Happening, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan bounces back from the turgidness of The Village and the idiocy of Lady in the Water. The movie has a great, Shyamalan-esque hook: One otherwise normal morning in Central Park, everyone starts to commit suicide, and then the behavior starts to spread, as if it were airborne, throughout the Northeast.
Hollywood comedies have been so loud and broad for so long now that when a quieter one comes along, audiences often don't know how to respond. That's what happened to 2005's The Weather Man, the melancholy comedy about a TV weather man juggling family and career written by Fort Lauderdale native Steven Conrad: The film was rarely obvious in its humor, and it was not afraid to occasionally edge into sad or even dark territory.
MY KIND OF TOWN
Since becoming a movie star for playing the lewd and crude Stifler in the American Pie movies, Seann William Scott has traveled the world over. But aside from a brief visit during the taping of an MTV special in 2003, the actor hadn't spent any time in Miami until this week.
SMALL SCREEN Army Wives (10 p.m. Sunday, Lifetime) -- In the final scene of last summer's surprise hit, the air was full of smoke, screams and body parts as an explosion rocked the unfortunately named Hump Bar, where the show's characters hang out. As the second season kicks off Sunday, we learn if anybody survived or if the screen will just stay blank for 19 weeks in a row. Hey, David Chase tried it, and people are still talking about the end of The Sopranos.
''A hair-homo'' is what one of the Zohan's old friends calls him after bumping into him on the streets of New York. Once revered as Israel's butchest, most unstoppable Mossad agent, Zohan (Adam Sandler) faked his own death and moved to New York, adopting the new name Scrappy Coco and setting out to fulfill his life-long dream of making people ``silky smooth.''
Movies about the Iraq War haven't exactly been luring audiences to the multiplex, and a documentary focusing on the Abu Ghraib photographs depicting prisoner abuse and torture is inevitably going to be an even harder sell.
MOVIES
The succinctly named Kung-Fu Panda delivers exactly what its title promises: Lots of kung-fu and lots of panda. The movie has the same lean, to-the-point simplicity, which is refreshing in an era when so many films take needlessly bloated, talky routes into their story (for more on this, see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull).
DVD SCANS
One of the funniest moments in Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show (New Line, $30), a documentary following four stand-up comics and some famous actors on a month-long bus tour across the American heartland, happens not onstage but inside the bus.
The old saying claims a picture is worth a thousand words. But in his new documentary Standard Operating Procedure, Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris argues that a thousand words aren't always enough.
SMALL SCREEN In Plain Sight (10 p.m. Sunday, USA) -- Watching this new crime drama about the federal witness protection program, you can pretty much toss a coin about who you want to root for: the lousy murderous scum trying to hide out under new identities or the lousy murderous scum trying to kill them for squealing. Well, there is that nice Mary McCormack (from The West Wing) playing a U.S. marshal. OK, problem solved.
''What you are about to see is based on true events,'' warns a stern, ominous voice at the start of The Strangers -- a voice that sounds eerily like the one heard during the opening credits of TV's Law and Order. The movie that follows is entirely a work of fiction -- to be clear, none of this ever happened -- but first-time writer-director Bryan Bertino, who is gunning for a raw, unforgiving horror picture in the style of 1970s shockers, knows that claiming his story is true is automatically going...
In 2000's The Cell, the directorial debut of filmmaker Tarsem Singh (or, as he prefers to be called, just Tarsem), Jennifer Lopez chased down a serial killer by walking through a series of elaborate sets best suited for a Bjork music video.
DVD SCANS
The Will Ferrell basketball comedy Semi-Pro was a box-office disappointment when it was released in February, leading many to wonder whether it was the R rating that cut into the film's audience or if Ferrell had simply gone to the Anchorman/Talladega Nights/Blades of Glory well once too often.
There are no Wookies in the Sex and the City movie -- no Vulcans with pointy ears or hobbits with oversize feet or aging archaeologists fond of bullwhips and fedoras. Heck, there probably isn't a single computer-generated special effect in it, although it's a safe bet its overwhelmingly female target audience will be oohing and aahing through it anyway.
SMALL SCREEN Recount (9 p.m. Sunday, HBO) -- Just in case you were starting to forget how much fun the 2000 election was -- Hanging chads! Butterfly ballots! Everybody hates Florida! -- HBO has thoughtfully repackaged every painful moment as a movie, with Kevin Spacey, Ed Begley Jr., Laura Dern and practically every other star in Hollywood except Flipper and Gentle Ben, who, on account of being South Floridians, are still under a cloud of suspicion about the whole thing.
''The river knows everything,'' the Nobel Prize winning author Herman Hesse once wrote. ''One can learn everything from it.'' Up the Yangtze, director Yung Chang's lovely, engrossing documentary largely set aboard a cruise ship sailing on the titular river, doesn't teach you everything, exactly. But its range of subjects and emotions cuts a surprisingly wide swath.
MOVIE REVIEW
''What are you, like, 80?'' a brash young man asks the intrepid archaeologist Dr. Henry Jones Jr. in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's as if the kid were reading the audience's mind.
SMALL SCREEN Final Approach (8 p.m. Saturday, Hallmark Channel) -- Dean Cain plays a cashiered FBI agent. He's a passenger on an airliner. It gets hijacked! Whoooa, didn't see that coming. But wait . . . that flight attendant . . . doesn't she look familiar? Yikes, it's Sunny Mabrey, from Snakes On A Plane! Oh, man, don't open the overhead bin!
