Word: mia
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...here on China Beach, soon as the green light came from Washington. ''We want to put in hospitals as part of the development,'' Irl said. ''You don't want your tourists getting sick and dying.'' Irl said -- as does just about everybody one runs across in Vietnam -- that the MIA issue is a stumbling block, yes, but an issue, no. ''Hanoi is bending over backward looking for old bones.'' The trouble is, according to the herd of entrepreneurs moving cross the country like a solid wind, Bill Clinton has played out his string with the Pentagon, what with...
...When it came to breaking box-office records, Batman wasn't flying solo. Universal's Mamma Mia! earned $27.6 million to snare the best opening for a musical, narrowly beating out last summer's Hairspray and helping propel the record weekend sales across the industry...
...older ones, anyway. For them, this is prime nostalgia. For those too young to remember the Abba years, it's just faux-stalgia. But even that has its allure. It can turn a hapless movie into a fun one. And if you don't like the Mamma Mia! film, you can still hum those tunes all the way home...
...film in a strenuous simulacrum of pleasure. She has the laughs the way a consumptive has the coughs. You worry that when Streep dies and goes to Actor Heaven, the recording angel will say, "On this scale we have decades of transcendent performances, and on this scale, that Mamma Mia! thing. Begone...
Eventually, as Donna and her gal pals don trashy frocks to do Abba's greatest hits and a Greek chorus of villagers materializes as a backup group for practically every number, Mamma Mia!'s flouting of narrative and visual logic starts to suggest a cunning subversion. The film is not failed kitsch but triumphant Dada. It exists in an alternative universe, an Abbaworld, where 40 years telescopes to 20, the Seine is the Aegean, and Streep's outsize cheerfulness is the expression of a soul in mortal panic...