No sooner did the Universal logo appear onscreen than straight men around the world shrugged at the sight of the new Mamma Mia! trailer, a glittering, sensory-overloading hint at this summer's forthcoming tribute to the revolving institutions of ABBA, Meryl Streep, and general gayness.


While we respect the near-seismic impact of the film's Broadway source material and its iconic star, we're especially interested in the backloaded allusions to Streep's character's licentious past. By "allusions," we mean her half-hearted denial of "sleeping with hundreds of men," or her friends' cheeky amusement at her charming history of looseness, or her spread legs in the foreground of a shot featuring the panty-melting trifecta of Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard. Additionally, the accompanying melodic drone isn't even ABBA, but rather something akin to American Idol ABBA, one degree and two volume notches removed from tuneless cruise-ship ignominy. Are we the only ones missing the discriminating taste (or at least the genetic coding) required to think this was a good idea?