Boycott "Tropic Thunder?" Some say, yes

Usually, it's critics who try to warn people off movies, but in the case of the upcoming comedy, "Tropic Thunder," a coalition of disability groups is expected to call for a boycott.

Here's the scoop: The New York Times Monday reported that a coalition of groups representing the disabled was expected to ask audiences to avoid "Tropic Thunder," the Ben Stiller-directed comedy that's being released Wednesday and which received an early rave from David Ansen in Newsweek. "The funniest movie of summer," wrote Ansen.

The movie's main story line focuses on a group of actors who are making a kick-ass Vietnam War movie. Stiller appears as Speedman, an action star whose career may be foundering. In an effort, to branch out, Speedman previously appeared in a sappy and badly received drama called Simple Jack. He played a mentally challenged young man, who looks a bit like Mad Mgazine's Alfred E. Newman.

According to the Times, several groups objected to use the word "retard" in reference to Simple Jack. The movie's defenders say that "Tropic Thunder" is making fun of the ludicrous ambitions of actors, not of the disabled.

According to Defamer , the releasing studio -- DreamWorks-- pulled its mock Web site for Simple Jack, although it hasn't altered the movie. The joke site had been part of the studio's "complex interweaving of 'Tropic Thunder' tie-ins," wrote Defamer. The movie evidently was making an in-joke, lambasting actors who have played mentally challenged people in attempts to ingratiate themselves with audiences and with organizations that dispense year-end awards.

I guess it's fair to say that filmmakers who make comedies always run the risk of crossing a line that will offend someone, but when people who are offended voice their opinions, why not take a second look? The Times, for example, quoted David C. Tolleson, executive director of the National Down Syndrome Congress, as saying that he felt as if he'd been assaulted. (I felt a bit assaulted by Stiller's comedy, too, though probably not for the same reasons as Tolleson. More on that when I review the movie.)

Is this a non-issue? Some would say, yes. "Tropic Thunder" is satire and lots of folks are skewered by Stiller, who includes a fair measure of rude, crude humor. But if you've got a child who's mentally challenged or have spent the better part of your professional life trying to change attitudes toward the mentally disabled. I can understand why you weren't laughing when you saw the movie.

I tend to put such issues in the hands of the audience. Those who see "Tropic Thunder" and who know about the controversy now must decide whether the disabled community is over-reacting or whether viewers should take a closer look at what's making them laugh.

As for impact? I"m guessing a boycott will have little effect on a movie that's set to challenge "Dark Knight" for the nation's number one box-office spot.

Getting high on a wire -- really high

I've always been skittish about heights, so "Man on Wire" -- a documentary about Philippe Petit, the man who walked across a cable strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center -- was a genuine white-knuckle experience for me. I watched the movie with my eyes, and felt it in my stomach.

You may remember this bit of 1974 insanity, which unfolded long before the World Trade Center became a symbol of something far more disturbing than a violation of common sense and city ordinances. Oddly, 9/11 never is mentioned in this generally fascinating documentary, which includes some recreated footage that's well done, but still may offend purists (I'm one) who think documentaries shouldn't contain wholesale recreations. On the other hand, this may be a time when an exception really does prove the rule. No one would have been able to photograph the real events that took place inside the World Trade Center in 1974, and seeing just how Petit's crew turned two buildings into a high-wire stage has an obvious value.

As for mentioning 9/11 ... The argument here presumes that director James Marsh wanted to take us back to the time when Petit was able to leave New Yorkers (and the rest of the country) gawking with wonder. Petit, a mime and daredevil by temperament and training, long had had his eye on the towers, which he learned about while perusing a magazine in a doctor's office. He read about the towers, and knew that he'd found his destiny.

After a variety of warm-up stunts (the Cathedral of Notre Dame among them), Petit enlisted a crew to help him sneak into the towers and string his cable. These sequences have compared to a good heist movie. Maybe so, but the reason to see "Man on a Wire" has more to do with the walk than with preparation. Footage of Petit on the wire is breathtaking, and it had me clutching the arms of my chair.

As an artist who's able to find poetry in his efforts, Petit -- who now resides in rural New York -- makes an able storyteller, and it's difficult not to appreciate the crazy courage it took for this Frenchmen to step off one of those towers onto a wire. Petit actually went back and forth eight times, as if to emphasize the sheer magnitude of what seems like the height of folly to those of us who prefer keeping two feet firmly planted on the ground. Petit, I suppose, would find such an idea dull, prosaic and perhaps even unthinkable.

THE PAIN OF HIGH SCHOOL REVISITED
Local publicists offered a variety of pre-release screenings of Nanette Burstein's "American Teen," but I wasn't able to get to one until the night before the picture opened. So here's my quick take: Burstein ("The Kid Stays in the Picture") has made an over-produced, disturbingly slick documentary about a year in the lives of four high school seniors in Warsaw, Ind. As if sent from central casting, the main characters fill out a roster of standard-issue teen types: the jock, the nerd, the super-popular princess and the rebellious girl. Some critics have suggested that some of the movie's scenes look as if they might have been staged. Maybe, but here's the good news: The stereotypes eventually give way to flesh-and-blood human beings who endure romantic heartbreak, anxiety about getting into college and rampant insecurity. I stayed with these characters as the year unfolded, but ultimately found the movie less moving than the best of director John Hughes' work (say, "The Breakfast Club") and less profound than Frederick Wiseman's 1968 documentary, "High School," which felt more like a bona fide cultural investigation than a documentary that fits a little too neatly into a teen-pic mold.

The stoner comedy makes a comeback

"Pineapple Express" almost makes one nostalgic for a time when many lived their lives through a thick haze of marijuana smoke. Of course, I don't know about this from personal experience, but I've read widely and have seen "Up In Smoke," the granddaddy of all stoner movies. I guess it's appropriate that "Pineapple Express," which marks a major departure for indie darling David Gordon Green ("George Washington," "All the Real Girls" and "Snow Angels"), arrives in theaters shortly after the announcement that Cheech & Chong again will be working together. Are we talking a pot resurgence here? Could this be the final the legacy of the Bush years?

Even though 'Pineapple Express" ultimately blames pot-smoking for the life-threatening predicaments in which its characters find themselves, it spends enough time in a rag-tag, pot-addled daze to earn a place in a growing pantheon of movies that take pride in their dishevelment. The movie draws its title from a rare form of marijuana that sets the plot in motion.

This time, Green -- whose hallmarks have been slow and sensitive movies with a feeling for place -- works with producer Judd Apatow, the comic hotshot whose movies ("Superbad" and "Knocked Up") have been known for gross-outs and bawdy humor. The movie also stars Apatow regular Seth Rogen, who plays a process server who spends most of his day stoned. Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who wrote the "Superbad" screenplay, turn out a script that teams Rogen with James Franco, as a pot dealer whose personality seems to have been molded by repeated viewings of "Dumb and Dumber."

Don't expect a tidy package. "Pineapple Express'' is part doper comedy and part action-film spoof. Thanks to a convoluted plot, Rogen and Franco spend most of the movie running for their lives. It seems they've gotten crosswise with a major dope dealer (Gary Cole) who's in cahoots with dirty cops.

Rogen's character has a girlfriend named Angie (Amber Heard), and jokes are made about the fact that she's still in high school. It should come as no surprise that Angie's parents (Ed Begley Jr. and Nora Dunn) are appalled by Rogen's character, who shows up at their home during his flight.

Rogen is Albert Brooks without the self-doubt, an actor whose comedy involves a tacit acknowledgement to the audience that they're watching a guy who's not afraid to let his sweat-stained personality show. Franco, who hasn't done much comedy, steals the show as a dopey dope dealer whose pants look like a psychedelic experience and whose intellect is...well....less than keen.

You'll find some graphic images here, and not every comic bit is fall-down funny, but the movie whips up enough laughs to keep it percolating, and Green holds it together even as its loosey-goosey tendencies threaten to blow it apart.

The strange message in a fortune cookie

I've been eating Chinese food ever since I was a kid and too young to get much beyond the mushy pleasures of chicken chow mein, usually accompanied by egg rolls and fried rice. Although I'm by no means an expert, I've since learned something about Chinese cuisine and am delighted that my home city, Denver, now has a few exceptional Chinese restaurants, one of them being the China Jade, which specializes in Szechuan-style dishes such as twice-cooked pork and eggplant with basil. I'm a fairly adventurous eater, but remain leery of any dish involving pig's intestines. I mention this only because many "authentic'' Chinese restaurants -- and the China Jade in one -- feature dishes that can offer a steep challenge to sensibilities that are squeamish about offal-related dishes. I've never tasted a chitterling, and probably never will.

But most of China Jade's fare need not be accompanied by offal alerts: As one of the restaurant's patrons told us during our last visit, the restaurant's food has punch, all of it delivered in a no-frills store front that appears to be a converted fast-food franchise. Actually, China Jade is located in a strip mall in Aurora, Colorado. Odd ethnic retail combinations lately have been popping up in such smaller malls. The same strip of stores that's home to China Jade also features a Ukrainian grocery and a French bakery.

Take all this as a lengthy preamble to the real subject of this post: fortune cookies.

Even authentic restaurants such as China Jade offer these more-or-less tasteless treats, usually dumping them on the tray that arrives with the bill. After the spicy enticements of a China Jade meal, a fortune cookie seems the ultimate anti-climax, and the messages most cookies deliver usually are as disposable as paper napkins. Fortune cookies generally proffer harmless aphorisms, optimistic predictions and flattering personality assessments. But every now and again, one is dazzled by the sheer lunacy one finds inscribed on a thin pice of paper that has been implanted in a cookie.

Years ago, a friend and I were dining in a Denver Chinese restaurant of no particular distinction: He received this fortune, which up until last week, was my favorite: "A close relative will travel in outer space." As far as I know, the cookie's prediction never came true. Still, it was instructive: A mixture of specificity and outlandishness make for the most amusing fortune cookies.

So here's one that I received at the China Jade last week: "Don't kiss an elephant on the lips today." If this admonition has special meaning in Chinese culture, it eluded me. But I particularly loved the fact that it was only a one-day warning. Presumably, I safely could have kissed an elephant on the lips the following day. I didn't put the theory to the test, but receipt of this warning reminded me that no cookie should be left uncracked. You just never know.

And while we're on the subject of Chinese food, a book recommendation: Must reading for enthusiasts, Fuchsia Dunlop's "Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper, A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China" (W.W. Norton & Company, 320 pp., $24.95). Dunlop, a Brit, trained at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. Her book is a good-humored ramble through a great cuisine and though Chinese culture as experienced by an eager and engaging Westerner. A quote: "Texture is the last frontier for Westerners learning to appreciate Chinese food. Cross it, and you're really inside." Among delicacies that Dulop sampled: tripe, chicken's feet and a clawed turtle's foot.

A slow march toward a final test

Consider the following: For most of your adult life you have rejected religion. You've worked hard to shed what you view as the stifling strictures of a church that seems to have been designed to drain life of its pleasures. But now, you've reached old age, and you're on your deathbed. Will your convictions hold? Will you remain faithful to your lack of faith or will you make a last-minute reach for salvation?

That question looms throughout "Brideshead Revisited," the latest adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel. In this much-abridged big-screen version, the characters can be divided into believers, non-believers and those who are uncertain. If this kind of rarefied subject matter -- very much alive to Waugh -- holds no interest for you, you may find yourself on the outside looking in as director Julian Jarrold's semi-successful movie unfolds.

Still, there's always decor: Replete with period trappings (the story unfolds in the years prior to World War I), "Brideshead" displays a doting fondness for days gone by, bathing itself in the customary aura of high culture. Jarrold has directed a work worthy of Merchant/Ivory, an assessment that can be taken as a compliment or a warning, depending on your tastes.

"Brideshead Revisited" became one of Waugh's best known novels, thanks mostly to the 11-part miniseries that played on PBS in the 1981, and which featured a stellar cast: Jeremy Irons, Claire Bloom, Anthony Andrews, John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. Working with a talented but less renowned group of actors, Jarrold whittles Waugh's story into a slightly irregular love triangle between Charles (Matthew Goode) and a brother and sister of the Flyte family (Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell).

In the early going, Charles -- a non-believer -- pops off to Oxford where he meets Whishaw's Sebastian, a gay sophisticate who draws Charles into his lively circle of friends.

Perhaps craving more intimacy, Sebastian invites Charles to visit his country estate, Brideshead Castle. There, Charles is smitten by Sebastian's sister, Julia (Atwell). Charles' attraction to Julia can't help but bruise Sebastian deeply. Thus begins the downward spiral of the brilliant young Sebastian, who slips ever deeper into alcoholism. Sebastian ultimately travels to Morocco where he lives in physical and moral squalor until he finds shelter in a monastery.


Both Sebastian and Julia are part of a family that has split. Presiding over the English half of the clan is the severely Catholic Lady Marchmain (a fine Emma Thompson). Having rejected what he regards as the stultifying Catholicism of Brideshead, Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon) has fled to Venice where he has taken up with another woman (Greta Scacchi) and become an advocate for sybaritic pleasures. The always remarkable Gambon presents Lord Marchmain as the very picture of easy-going indulgence.

Jarrold and writers Jeremy Brock and Andrew Davies build the story around Charles, who aspires to be a painter. Charles' ambiguity becomes a source of both interest and frustration. What precisely attracts Charles to Sebastian? The young man's charm? His aristocratic wealth? The plush surroundings of a family that's significantly more established than Charles' own? Charles' father, a man who seems cheerfully oblivious to just about everything, hardly looks up from his work when his son leaves for Oxford.

The homosexual currents in Waugh's novel are more pronounced here than they were in the PBS series, but still appear as somewhat vague. However, the Flyte siblings -- each of whom alternately captures Charles' attention -- are well played: Whishaw makes a convincing transition from buoyancy to despair, and Atwell proves a suitably elusive object of desire.

Condensation -- as opposed to artistic ambiguity -- leads to some of the movie's problems, and the whole production never rises to the level of a classic.

The story ends with the outbreak of World War I and the apparent collapse of the Flyte way of life. Curious isn't it? The suffocating elitism of the upper classes, the upwardly mobile yearnings of those who crave privilege and the rigidity of believers who perch on barricades of religious certainty should have produced a work of urgency and passion instead of one that seems a little too covered by literary dust.

AN IRRESPONSIBLE DRUNK DECIDES WHO'll BE PRESIDENT

"Swing Vote," a new comedy starring Kevin Costner, tells the story of Bud Johnson, an alcoholic father who finds himself in an extraordinary situation. Turns out a voting-machine glitch has created a situation in which Bud's lone vote will decide a presidential election that quite improbably has ended in a dead heat.

Putting such an irresponsible character in the middle of a Capraesque comedy may seem like a bold move, but little about "Swing Vote" struck me as daring, particularly its refusal to adopt anything resembling a real position. Maybe that's because the movie can't make up its mind whether to criticize "dumb-ass" American voters or turn one of them into a hero. I guess it's no surprise that the movie ultimately argues that even a wastrel can take citizenship seriously. By the end, Bud has become a spokesman for ordinary folks everywhere.

Throughout the movie, Bud's goaded toward responsibility by his down-to-earth, 12 year-old daughter Molly (Madeline Carroll). She basically has taken on the role of the adult in the family. Mom, we learn, has flown the coop. In a late picture scene, we learn why Molly lives with her father. Turns out Mom (Mare Winningham) is even worse.

Though its deployed in obvious ways, satire may be the movie's strong suit. "Swing Vote" has fun with the notion that candidates will do anything to win. Kelsey Grammer portrays the Republican president, and Dennis Hopper plays the Democratic challenger. Each candidate has an unscrupulous adviser: Stanley Tucci strategizes for the Republican; Nathan Lane handles dirty work for the Democrat.

In their efforts to appeal to Bud, the candidates visit the small New Mexican town where he lives, and, in the bargain, flip flop all over the place. Their changing positions result in one sharply funny pro-life campaign ad. But the movie does its own brand of shape-shifting, moving from intentionally dumb comedy to equal-opportunity satire to serious drama.

Oh well, Bud's slovenly look may have penetrated the movie's core: Like Bud, "Swing Vote" provides a few laughs, but overall, it's a pretty shabby effort.

Stepping in it with Will Ferrell

Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly play 40-year-olds who refuse to grow up in "Step Brothers," a foul-mouthed comedy in which a couple of laughs may offer compensation for the movie's inability to get much beyond a single joke. No "Talledga Nights: the Ballad of Ricky Bobby," "Step Brothers" revolves around two slothful men whose lives are sent into turmoil. Ferrell's Brennan and Reilly's Dale are forced to share a room when Brennan's mom (Mary Steenburgen) marries Reilly's dad (Richard Jenkins). The new stepbrothers fight, become friends and then battle some more in a movie that has one truly inspired moment, Ferrell singing Andrea Bocelli's "Por Ti Volaré." It's almost worth the price of admission, providing you have a high tolerance for the constant stream of dumb-and-dumber jokes, forced off-color humor and a distasteful display that results from watching two grown men acting like perpetual teen-agers. Oh well, "Step Brothers" could be the only summer movie to build a joke around an exposed testicle. And you thought movie culture was crumbling.

"X-FILES I WANT TO BELIEVE," I TRIED BUT COULDN'T...
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson revisit the characters of Dana Scully and Fox Moulder in a sometimes involving but generally unnecessary big-screen reprise, which arrives six years after the popular and widely acclaimed TV series went bye-bye. There are many holes in a story about a psychic pedophile priest (Billy Connolly) who's trying to get right with God and the world. When he's not praying, Father Joe devotes his time to helping the FBI locate a kidnap victim. Scully, now working as a full-time physician at Our Lady of Sorrows hospital, tires to save a kid with a rare and supposedly incurable disease; she also helps persuade Moulder to heed an FBI request to abandon his isolation and help with the investigation. The movie eventually unveils a bizarre plot involving organ transplants and whacko biological experiments. "I Want to Believe" seems interested in exploring intelligent themes (the relationship between science and faith, for example) but tin-eared dialogue and too many abrupt leaps in the plot stand in the way. I'd say you probably need to be an "X Files" fan to get much out of this; if you're not, "I Want to Believe" may look like one more hopelessly muddled thriller.

"The Wackness" tries hard to be original

If you're into adolescence in a big way, "The Wackness" might be just what the shrink ordered. In fact, the movie features a massively irresponsible shrink who buys pot from one of his high-school age patients. With Ben Kingsley diving headlong into the role of an aging hippie and Josh Peck playing the young man who deals him marijuana, the movie manages to climb out of the ordinary. Whether its portrayals tell us anything instructive is another matter, but maybe that's asking too much.

The best thing about "The Wackness" might be the oddball friendship between Kingsley's Dr. Squires and his mostly reluctant patient, a kid who trades marijuana for Squires' half-baked brand of therapy. Luke feels like a misfit; his psychiatrist tells him it's nothing that a little sex wouldn't cure. Despite Dr. Squires' apparent lack of insight, he and Peck's Luke get along reasonably well. But when Luke falls for Squire's stepdaughter (Oliva Thirlby), the good doctor objects. He tries to warn Luke off. Is he attempting to help Luke or is he unwilling to make his stepdaughter the answer to Luke's sexual prayers?

Whatever the case, the young lovers get along famously for a summer, but Thirby's Stephanie eventually decides to teach Luke -- who claims to be Manhattan's biggest teen-age outcast -- a lesson in the perils of young love.

Director Jonathan Levine ("All the Boys Love Mandy Lane'') attempts to find fresh ways to stir overly familiar coming-of-age ingredients, Thanks to Kingsley and Peck, he occasionally succeeds. That doesn't mean that the movie -- a Sundance darling -- isn't eager to leaf through a catalog of indie-pic dysfunction. Squires' life is falling apart. His wife (Famke Jansen) has had enough of him, and he's ogling every bit of young flesh he can find. Luke's parents (Talia Balsam and David Wohl) constantly fight over money. At one point, Squires accompanies Luke on his drug deliveries. Just a couple of fun-loving kids in the city.

There are laughs en route to the movie's off-kilter resolution, but I can't see "The Wackness" becoming an indelible part of adolescent lore, perhaps because it tries a little too hard. I did, however, like the idea of watching two men (separated by nearly 40 years) prove that they weren't all that far apart. As we know, maturity is not exactly the hallmark of American movie culture. (Don't believe me; try "Step Brothers." )


While Levine heads back to 1994, singer Neil Young attempts to catapult himself into the present with "CSNY: Deja Vu," a documentary about a concert tour devoted to opposition to the Iraq War. In order to achieve something approaching balance, Young -- who reunited with Crosby, Stills, Nash for the tour -- asked journalist Mike Cerre to provide a patina of objectivity. Cerre's supposed to be covering the tour, which generates a lot of enthusiasm, but also some contempt. Not all of CSNY's followers welcome the political message that the band dispensed during the summer of '06. Some fussy Atlanta residents, for example, objected to a song calling for president Bush's impeachment. CSNY was active during the Vietnam years and the band's at it again. The music's good, the political slant is just what you'd expect and the whole thing comes off as a mixture of heartfelt protest, solid music and occasional digression. The average age of the band's members: 62, to which the only appropriate response is: Rock 'til you drop, boys!

Batman in a world gone batty

Had director Christopher Nolan wanted to be totally accurate, he would have renamed his Batman movie, "The Really Dark Knight."

For me, "The Dark Knight" title just doesn't do justice to how grim Nolan's movie can be. Yes, it's based on characters from DC Comics, but "The Dark Knight" has the kind of tension and bloodshed we expect to find in realistic thrillers. That seems to be what Nolan is striving for, and he certainly achieves it. The opening scene -- a bank robbery staged by The Joker and many accomplices in Joker masks -- rivets attention like few recent heist movies. And the movie seldom lightens up. Its pedal to the metal gloom is so prevalent that the few attempts at humorous one-liners seem misplaced. This is Batman with a severe case of depression -- and you know what -- Nolan may be onto something. It's as if he's decided to deny us the pleasures associated with comic-book movies and once-and-for-all propel Batman into graphic novel turf.

Ethical questions -- unusual for a mass entertainment -- echo through "Dark Knight." What does morality mean in an age of terrorism? Should anyone be expected to behave rationally when confronting an irrational foe? Can anarchy be fought by non-anarchic men who accept moral limits? You'll find no reference to places as such as Quantanamo, but today's headlines resonate through "Dark Knight" just the same, lending a topical edge that Nolan surely intended.


You've probably read that the centerpiece of this Batman isn't Batman; it's The Joker, played by the late Heath Ledger with a level of intensity that shakes the movie to its core. Batman -- a.k.a. Bruce Wayne -- is not especially appealing or intriguing. Maybe that was unavoidable. I'm not sure how Christian Bale could have competed with Ledger, who pushes himself toward some unseen edge. He disappears behind the Joker's psycho-clown make-up.

The rest of the cast is in fine form -- notably Aaron Eckhart as a crusading district attorney, Maggie Gyllenhaal as his girlfriend and fellow prosecutor; and Gary Oldman as a plodding detective. Any one of those actors could have -- and has -- carried his or her own movies, and I haven't even mentioned old pros Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman.

If you see "Batman'' in an IMAX venue (which I did) you'll have a difficult time not being wowed by the overhead shots of skyscrapers, by Batman's vertiginous leaps through night air and by the sheer scale of the destruction wrought by the Joker, a fiend who kills without compunction. He's not afraid to put children at risk. He's the devil's own master of ceremonies at a party devoted to chaos. He even blows up a hospital.

If there's fault to find here, it's with the script. An overloaded plot sometimes tramples minute-to-minute logic. Still, it wouldn't hurt if audiences actually listen to what Nolan, who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan, has to say: It's as if he's rubbing our noses in our taste for superhero blockbusters. You want violence? OK, I'll give you violence, only I'm going to take it further than you expect. You want evil? I'll give you evil, but I'm going to turn it into a message from hell. You want some meaning in your mass entertainment? I'll give you that, as well.

You get the idea; Nolan refuses to wink at the audience. If he wanted to his dark beauty of a movie to leave us feeling chastened, he has succeeded, which means "Dark Knight" may not be the summer movie audiences expect. "The Dark Knight" is a superhero who engenders both admiration and scorn. He's Batman for a time in which the world's moral compass has spun as wildly out of control as the movie's frantic chases. Simply put: This Batman plays for keeps.

Meryl sings and dances. Wow!

There's nothing wrong with "Mamma Mia!," the big-screen adaptation of the ABBA-inspired musical, that a healthy dose of cynicism wouldn't fix. I leave that to someone else. Meanwhile, Universal Pictures deserves credit for pitting "Mamma Mia!'' against the foreboding presence of "The Dark Knight." If Batman has gone pitch-black thematically (and it has), "Mamma Mia!" races headlong in the opposite direction, bathing itself in the spectacular light of a Greek island and in the unrelentingly upbeat rhythms of ABBA tunes. Devotes can compare the screen version to the stage show; I'll just say that I've now had my "giddy" quotient for the year. Maybe the next two.

A couple of things did occur to me as I listened to the teen-agers in the audience giggle at the way director Phillidia Lloyd framed the movie's jokes. For one, I couldn't shake the illusion-shattering knowledge that I was watching Meryl Streep sing and dance. I kept thinking something along the lines of, "Yes, it's Meryl playing air guitar, doing girl-group riffs and falling into the spirit of the whole frivolous enterprise." Pierce Brosnan, on the other, can't really sing, and I had a kind of reverse realization watching him. "Yes, there's Pierce not singing particularly well," I thought.

For those who don't know, a recap: The story involves a wedding. Streep's Donna prepares for her daughter Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) to head for the altar. Donna raised Sophie as a single mom. Eager to learn the identity of her biological father, Sophie invites three men (Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard (yes, he of angst-riddled Dogma cinema) to the nuptials. They all were involved with Donna around the time Sophie was conceived.

Also in attendance are two of Donna's gal pals (Julie Walters and Christine Baranski). Call Baranski the clear winner as far as performance is concerned. She's the group's seen-it-all, done-it-all woman.

The whole production is so pumped up that it virtually screams, "Isn't this fun?" Some of it is, but after a while, it's tiresome watching a movie that seems to be telling us how much fun we're supposed to be having. I suppose I eventually was beaten into submission. Meryl, you convinced me. You had a great time making the movie. You are the dancing queen. You go, girl.

Now, onto more important business and more appropriate exclamation points: Let's fire up the Batmobile!