Brits Are Dangerously Obsessed With Mamma Mia!
We're not really sure why this is happening (other than these people being weird), but Mamma Mia! is huuuge in the UK. Like, top-grossing film of all time. Beats Titanic, even.
That's what we read today and we, while not being judgy, are a bit WTF about it. £69 million and counting! The film, despite its great cast and sort of pleasingly numbing schmaltz, is really not good. And these songs have been around forever! I guess the Brits just have a deeper love for cloying candy pop than we do.
The soundtrack to the movie (based on a Broadway show that centers around a raft of ABBA songs) is selling loads (we hear, anecdotally, that every woman-of-a-certain-age in Britain simply must own the record in some form other, lest she be thought of as strange) and there's a book about the backstage experience of the stage show that has been on bestseller lists. These charmingly-accented, crumpet-scarfing, dental-hygiene-ignoring folks just can't seem to get enough of throwback Swedish synth pop. A recession back into seemingly-better, Ulvaeus-tinged times.
Remember when comedian Steve Coogan did that Alan Partridge show called Knowing Me, Knowing You and he had that little "Aha!" catchphrase thing and you thought "oh hee hee, that British man likes ABBA." Turns out it's not just him. It's the whole damn island.
Well, whatever. Good for Amanda Seyfried. And, you know, Meryl.