MOVIES: Mamma Mia! (Phyllida Lloyd, 2008)

The ABBA musical comes to the big screen.

Meryl Streep stars as Donna, who runs a small guest villa on a Greek island; her daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) is about to be married. Sophie has never known her father, but after stealing her mother's diary from the crucial summer, has figured out that there are three possible dads out there, and she's invited them all to the wedding.

Despite the fact that none of them has spoken to Donna in 20 years, or ever even met Sophie, they all show up (in the forms of Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan, and Stellan Skarsgard). Also arriving for the festivities are Donna's old sidekicks and one-time backup singers, Christine Baranski and Julie Walters.

There's lots of groups of three in this movie. Streep and her pals; the three potential dads; Sophie and her bridesmaids; the groom and his groomsmen (though we don't see too much of them). It all begins to feel vaguely Shakespearean, and you have the sense that the movie's going to end in some horrifying sextuple wedding. It doesn't go quite that far, thank goodness, but things are wrapped up in awfully tidy fashion.

Director Phyllida Lloyd doesn't have the slightest clue about the differences between directing for the stage and directing for the movies; she's instructed everyone here to give enormous performances as if they're emoting to the back row. Some of the actors have enough skill to get away with this, and manage to come off as merely charmingly hammy; Baranski and Streep come off best, and Seyfried isn't too bad. But most of the cast is overacting badly, gesturing wildly with every line of dialogue and clubbing us over the head with every obvious punchline; Walters is by far the worst offender.

As for the songs, they are (as they always were) entertaining, well-crafted bits of fluffy pop, but they've been shoehorned into a plot into which they don't always fit comfortably. The best numbers are those in which the characters just sing for fun -- a bachelorette-party performance of "Super Trouper" by Donna and the Dynamos is nicely done -- or which have absolutely nothing to do with the main plot -- Baranski steals the movie when she sings "Does Your Mother Know" to a beach full of shirtless young studs.

("Shirtless" reminds me in a sort of backwards way that the movie's costuming is one of its strengths, especially in its more flamboyant moments. During that "Super Trouper" number, Baranski and Walters wear epaulets that look as if Shih Tzus have died on their shoulders. There's a beautiful shot of Streep standing at the prow of a yacht with miles of fabric billowing behind her -- think Priscilla, Queen of the Titanic. And the outfits worn by all of the principal players in the closing-credits sequence are spectacularly gaudy rock-star creations.)

The cast varies in its musical ability, though they are all at least able to carry a tune reasonably well. The women come off better than the men, and Brosnan could have used a few sessions with a vocal coach, which might have gotten his voice out of his throat and made him sound less like a strangled frog.

But the movie's biggest problem is its tone. Mamma Mia isn't so much a movie to be watched as it is a movie to be endured. From the first frame, the movie screams at you: "This is a really fun movie, isn't it? Isn't it? Why aren't you having fun yet? Why? Why? Why??????" There are a few brief moments when the movie finds a comfortably campy style, but they are so few and so brief that the audience never has time to relax before the assault begins again. You'd be better off staying at home and digging out your copy of ABBA Gold.

MOVIES: Wall-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

Wall-E is the last of his kind, a trash collection robot left behind when Earth had become such an ecological nightmare that the human race was forced to abandon the planet. He spends his days stuffing garbage into his midsection and compacting it into tidy little cubes, which he piles up in heaps that are nearly as tall as the abandoned skyscrapers.

He has developed a fascination with certain types of human junk -- Christmas tree lights, plastic forks, a Rubik's Cube -- which he neatly sorts into storage bins in the large truck that serves as his home. Wall-E spends hours on end with his most valuable possession, an old video of Hello, Dolly from which he's learned all he knows about human interaction and love.

Wall-E is a little nebbish of a robot (surely the resemblance to Woody Allen -- the large eyes with heavy frames, the skinny neck -- is no accident), so we don't really ever expect him to find the love he seems to crave. But another robot does eventually show up, arriving on a gleaming spaceship. She is Eve, and it is her periodic mission to check Earth to see if the planet has recovered to the point that it can support vegetation.

The first act of Wall-E is virtually a silent movie, and it's gorgeously done. Wall-E and Eve are astonishingly communicative given their limited features; Eve is a particular animation challenge, being a solid egg shape with two glowing blobs of blue light for eyes.

The two robots do eventually leave Earth, and we find out what has become of humanity. This second half of the movie is a lot more conventional than the first, and a bit less satisfying. With the entrance of people into the movie comes the first significant dialogue, and there are fine voice performances from Jeff Garlin as the spaceship captain, Kathy Najimy and John Ratzenberger as a pair of typical occupants forced to adjust to new circumstances, and Sigourney Weaver as the ship's computer.

I enjoyed Wall-E very much, though I don't find it quite as satisfying as the very best Pixar movies (for me, that would be Ratatouille and The Incredibles); still, saying that a movie is "only" as good as Finding Nemo or Toy Story is high praise, indeed.

What keeps the movie from joining that top rank? I found it to be somewhat chilly and emotionally removed; the characters aren't as inviting or as engaging as they might be. Still, like all of Pixar's movies, it's beautifully animated, and the storytelling is always clear and efficient. Wall-E is a very good movie; it's just not a brilliant one.

Preceding the movie is a new Pixar short, Presto, a very funny tale about the battle of wits between a magician and his rabbit, an heir to the Bugs Bunny tradition of mischievious revenge. It's an absolute delight.

BOOKS: The Writing Class, Jincy Willett (2008)

Amy Gallup seemed to have such promise. Her first novels were published when she was in her 20s, and met with great critical success. The lack of corresponding commercial success, though, meant that the market for her work dried up. Now, 30 years later, she's become a misanthropic recluse, supporting herself by teaching night school writing classes at the local community college.

The new class looks promising. Most of the students seem brighter than her average group, and some of them can not only write, they can offer intelligent critiques of their classmates' work. But one of her new students is causing problems. It starts with mean-spirited practical jokes -- insulting parodies of another student's writing, obscene caricatures -- and gradually escalates to the point where Amy and her class need to figure out which of them is responsible.

There are a lot of characters here, and Willett does a fine job of quickly sketching them and giving each one a distinct personality. Imitating bad writing is a difficult thing to do, and Willett's writing samples are delightful to read; each one feels exactly like what that person would have written.

Since this is a writing class, Willett also gets to have a lot of fun by giving us class discussions of the very tools that she's using to misdirect us as we work through her mystery plot -- red herrings, unreliable narrator, distorted perception -- all of which only makes us even more suspicious of everything we're told by anyone.

The mystery is secondary here, and I'm not sure whether there are really enough clues along the way for the reader to have a fair shot at figuring out who the villain is. But the character sketches and the storytelling are great fun, and the interaction among Amy and her students is often very funny. Think of it as a comedy with a few mystery elements thrown in, and you won't be disappointed.

BOOKS: Dark Cities Underground, Lisa Goldstein (1999)

Ruth Berry is working on a biography of children's author E.A. Jones, who always claimed that her books were inspired by stories told to her by her son Jerry. Jerry is reluctant to be interviewed, as he has not been close to his mother, and does not like to talk about her. But when Ruth and Jerry are both approached by the same mysterious, menacing man, they begin to realize that there may be some element of truth in the Jeremy books; perhaps those far-fetched adventures really did happen after all.

Goldstein weaves a wild tale in which most of classic children's literature is, she suggests, about the real world entrances to the Nether World, where the figures of classic Egyptian mythology still battle over the fate of mankind. These days, the Nether World can most easily be gotten to through secret passages built into the world's subway systems.

Ruth and Jerry are immensely likable characters, and Goldstein has created a marvelous fantasy world. The villains are appropriately creepy; the helpful characters are frequently ineffectual ditherers, which only makes them all the more lovable (the Corn Sisters are particularly delightful creations).

Goldstein's inspiration runs short at the very end, and the resolution of the book is just a bit flat compared to what has come before. But for most of its length, Dark Cities Underground is a terrific blend of whimsy and terror, and I enjoyed it greatly.

BOOKS: Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris (2008)

The mid-1960s weren't a happy time for Hollywood. The studios had become adept at making blandly prestigious pictures that audiences would go to see, but for which no one felt much enthusiasm. The lists of Best Picture nominees from the era are littered with the likes of Becket, Ship of Fools, and The Sand Pebbles. These weren't the money makers, though; "what paid studio bills were James Bond extravaganzas, John Wayne westerns, Elvis Presley quickies, [and] Dean Martin action comedies."

Something new was needed, and in Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris describes the moment when that something new began to arrive. His focus is on the five movies nominated for the 1967 Best Picture Oscar, an odd list in which "half of the movies seemed to be sneering at the other half." You had two successful studio pictures that dealt, albeit tepidly, with the issue of race (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night); one big-budget disaster that would help to kill the movie musical for nearly forty years (Doctor Dolittle); and two smaller, more personal films that drew huge audiences of younger moviegoers (The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde).

What's most striking to me in Harris's reporting is the vividness of his portraits -- the insecurities of Dustin Hoffman (and the cruelty with which Mike Nichols used those insecurities on the set of The Graduate); the ambition of Warren Beatty, attempting to produce a film as a very young actor; the struggles of Sidney Poitier to balance his goals as an actor with the responsibility he felt to properly represent African-Americans on the screen.

The other thing that comes through with great force is just how difficult is to make a movie. The logistics, the number of people (and egos) involved, the financial challenges, the constantly shifting obstacles -- it's a marvel that any movie ever makes it to the multiplex.

The younger filmmakers in this book would dominate Hollywood for the next decade or so; the older ones are on the verge of fading into irrelevance. But of course, no one ever realizes in the moment that one is part of a historical sea change; every one is just trying to make a good flick.

Harris' reporting is detailed and thorough; his writing is always entertaining to read. I find myself wishing that he'd make this the first of a series, studying the Best Picture nominess from a different year in each volume. Pictures at a Revolution is a fine look at an industry on the verge of change.

MOVIES: Get Smart (Peter Segal, 2008)

Sharp casting does a lot to lift this one well above the average TV-to-movie adaptation. Steve Carell as Max, Anne Hathaway as 99, and Adam Arkin as the Chief are all just right for their roles; as are (in briefer appearances) Bill Murray as Agent 13 and Patrick Warburton as Hymie. Only Terence Stamp disappoints as Siegfried, playing the part a bit too straight and not quite getting the same comic tone as the rest of the cast.

There's one key decision in the setup that I think hurts the movie a bit. As the movie opens, Maxwell Smart is a skilled analyst for CONTROL, one of those guys who listens to the satellite chatter and writes long reports that no one bothers to read. But when the evil KAOS discovers the identities of all the CONTROL field agents, Max finally gets his chance to leave office work behind.

Making Max a first-time field agent changes the character from the incompetent bungler of the TV series to an inexperienced bungler; it's a subtle distinction, but an important one, and it creates a different brand of humor. It also changes the Max/99 relationship. No longer is she the long-suffering partner whose affection for Max gives her the patience to keep fixing his mistakes; now she's the annoyed partner who doesn't want to be teamed with a rookie and has very little patience for his blundering about.

On the other hand, the movie does a good job of mixing slapstick humor -- Carell has a charming comic dance scene with a hefty partner -- with a solid action caper. A climactic chase involving a small airplane and a race to Disney Hall works just as well as similar scenes in most of the serious action movies we've seen in recent years.

The movie's doing well enough that there will surely be a sequel. I'm hoping it brings a nice big role for Hymie.

BOOKS: The Black Dove, Steve Hockensmith (2008)

Third in the Amlingmeyer Brothers mystery series.

One of the nice things about having protagonists who are itinerant cowboys / ranch hands / laborers is that Hockensmith gets to use a different setting for each installment in the series. Holmes on the Range took place on a ranch; On the Wrong Track found the brothers working as railroad detectives; and in The Black Dove, Gustav and Otto are in San Francisco. To be precise, they are in "the most sinister section of the world's wickedest city" -- Chinatown.

It's 1893, and Chinatown is controlled by ruthless gangs; so long as their problems don't spill into the rest of the city, the police mostly leave them alone. The Amlingmeyers find themselves in Chinatown after the death of their friend, Dr. Chan (whom we met in On the Wrong Track), which the police write off as a suicide. Gustav's not buying that for a minute, and following in the footsteps of his hero, Sherlock Holmes, sets his own "deducifying" skills to solving the murder.

Along the way, they'll cross paths with vicious Chinese ganglords, visit a magnificently appointed bordello, and discover the secret of the mysterious Black Dove. Their old friend Diana Corvus plays a key supporting role, and she's a fine addition to the series; it's fun to watch how flustered the brothers get in the presence of a pretty woman.

Hockensmith's portrayal of attitudes towards the Chinese is appropriate for the era without being gratuitously offensive for contemporary readers; he does all he can to diminish the impact of the racist attitudes, largely by making Gustav and Otto a bit more open-minded than most men of their era and by putting the most egregious lines in the mouths of the biggest villains.

As always, Otto's narration -- he writes these stories down with hopes of selling them, playing Watson to Gustav's Holmes -- has enough period flavor to be convincing, but doesn't go so far overboard as to be distracting or irritating. The brothers are a likable team; their relationship, full of brotherly squabbling and teasing, is thoroughly convincing. There are perhaps a few too many minor characters and suspects this time around, and things get a bit confusing near the end. Still, even if it's not quite up to the level of the first two volumes, The Black Dove is a fine piece of entertainment, and I look forward to the further adventures of the Amlingmeyers.

MOVIES: Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne & John Stevenson, 2008)

Yes, it's another slacker-with-a-dream story, and parts of it are a bit familiar, but the animation is gorgeous and the voice cast performs with great wit, carrying you through the weaker moments.

Our hero is Po (voiced by Jack Black), a roly-poly (even by panda standards) goofoff who dreams of being a warrior and is eager to see the festivities at the Jade Temple. Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim) is about to select the Dragon Warrior, whose responsibility it will be to defend the valley against the evil snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane), who has recently escaped from prison.

Oogway's protege, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), fully expects that the Dragon Warrior will be one of his students, an all-star team of warriors known as the Furious Five (voiced by an all-star lineup of Angelina Jolie, Lucy Liu, Seth Rogen, David Cross, and Jackie Chan), and is dumbfounded when Oogway selects Po. But "there are no accidents," says Oogway, and Shifu reluctantly set out to train Po for the task ahead.

You know the rest of the story -- Po struggles, Shifu does assorted slow burns, Po finds his inner warrior and saves the day -- but it's executed with lively charm and terrific humor. A training sequence involving a dumpling is a marvel of comic timing, and the final showdown between Po and Tai Lung is a spectacular battle that would feel at home in a live-action kung fu flick; I especially liked the way it acknowledged Po's clumsiness and worked his blunders into the sequence of events. The fact that so many martial arts films now bend the laws of gravity and physics has the effect of making the battle sequences feel like the most realistic bits of animation in the movie.

The movie looks marvelous, with (of course) strong Asian influences in the style; an opening dream sequence is particularly impressive, done in a style reminiscent of the TV series Samurai Jack, and having the feel of animated woodblock cuttings. The celebrity voices aren't distracting, as they sometimes can be; you might not even recognize most of them until you see their names in the closing credits.

You won't miss much, I suppose, if you wait to see this on cable or DVD, but it's worth a trip to the theater, especially if you've got kids; they'll love it.

BOOKS: Cheer, Kate Torgovnick (2008)

Like Stefan Fatsis' Word Freak and Mark Obmascik's The Big Year, Cheer gives us a look inside a subculture that outsiders may have never really been aware of. This time, it's college cheerleading.

Cheerleading has become a full-fledged sport, one that makes just as many physical demands on its participants as football or basketball. It's one of the most dangerous sports, too, with an injury rate so high that many lifts and throws have been banned unless the performing surface is either gym mats or natural grass. That means that many cheerleading squads can't perform their most elaborate routines at sporting events; basketball courts and Astroturf are too dangerous for those tricks.

So for most cheerleaders, the year is divided into two pieces. During the fall and winter, when they are obliged to cheer on their sports teams -- what's known as "spirit cheering" -- the routines are often simpler, and the cheerleaders are using the time to get into top physical shape for the more difficult spring, when they will be preparing their competitive routines.

Torgovnick follows three top teams through a single year. The Lumberjacks of Stephen F. Austin State University are a national powerhouse, hoping to win their fifth consecutive national title. The Southern University Jaguars believe they can compete with the best, if only they can convince the school to foot the $17,000 bill it will take for them to travel to Nationals. The University of Memphis All-Girl squad does lifts, throws, and pyramids that are the envy of male cheerleaders, but still don't get the respect they feel they deserve.

Torgovnick does a fine job of building suspense and drama throughout her year, as the teams prepare for their championship meets. Unlike most sports, there are very few preliminary competitions between schools during the year. There are so few, in fact, that schools have to submit videotapes for preliminary judging to qualify for Nationals, and most schools will have never seen any of their rivals perform before Nationals.

The biggest missed opportunity here, I think, comes from the fact that none of the three teams compete against one another at the end. There are two different organizations that sponsor a national championship, and the Lumberjacks and Jaguars don't attend the same one; the Memphis All-Girl squad competes only against other female teams.

Still, each team's story is filled with drama, and each team has its own set of challenges to overcome. At Stephen F. Austin, there's a last-minute coaching change just as the season begins; the Jaguars, located in Baton Rouge, are still struggling -- individually and institutionally -- with the aftermath of Katrina; the Memphis women are plagued all year by injuries.

There are a lot of people to keep track of here, and Torgovnick does a good job of keeping everyone straight for us, providing just enough reminders as to which Chelsea or James we're talking about this time. Chapters rotate among the three teams, with one out-of-place extra chapter in which Torgovnick interviews a former cheerleader who talks about the abuse of drugs in the sport; apparently, one is not allowed to write any sort of sports book these days without the obligatory "drugs bad" chapter.

That misstep aside, though, this is a solid piece of journalism. Torgovnick is lucky enough to have chosen three teams with particularly dramatic stories to tell, and she tells them in an entertaining way.

MOVIES: Smackdown 1939: Hattie McDaniel, Gone With the Wind

Hattie McDaniel's Mammy is the moral center of Gone With the Wind; she is the wisest and most mature character in the movie. Even Rhett Butler understands how important it is for him to win Mammy's respect if he is to have any chance of winning Scarlett's heart.

Even before the death of Ellen O'Hara, it's clear that in a very real sense, Mammy is far more of a mother to Scarlett. It is Mammy who scolds Scarlett when she misbehaves, who worries that Scarlett will damage the family's reputation, who warns Scarlett against "acting like poor white trash children." Mrs. O'Hara may have taught Scarlett religion, but it is Mammy who has taught her -- or has tried to teach her -- morality.

It's not an easy task, and Scarlett never does quite get the hang of it; Mammy has to keep reminding Scarlett of what is right ("He's her husband, ain't he?" she says when Scarlett wants to butt in on Melanie's reunion with Ashley), and she insists on going with Scarlett to Atlanta, knowing that adult supervision and guidance are still required.

But for all of her wisdom and moral virtue, Mammy (unlike Melanie) is a human being. She's very sly and capable of great humor; she can be a little bit vain (her scene with Rhett and the red petticoat is a delight). Watch Mammy and Melanie as they climb the staircase after Bonnie's accident -- Mammy is grieving, Melanie is performing grief because it is expected of her.

It is much to McDaniel's credit that Mammy feels so real; while she is the best written of the movie's slave characters, she's still not drawn in a fully three-dimensional way. McDaniel brings to Mammy more than is in the script, giving her a sharp comic edge and a warmth that do wonders to make Mammy more than just an uncomfortably nostalgic portrayal of the happy slave. It's an intelligent performance, and in a movie which is painfully bloated, McDaniel's every appearance helps to make the time go by a little faster.