To know me is to know how I love Pierce Brosnan. Remington Steele is one of my favorite shows of all time, and I have always felt he was terribly underrated and generally given the wrong vehicles for his talents. He’s a tremendous comic actor; not only gifted with brilliant timing, but a genius at physical comedy as well. It’s this combination – well, that and his incredible good looks – which make him the only one I would accept being compared with the miracle that was Cary Grant. (If anyone lays that mantle on George Clooney just one more time… Sigh. Clooney is lovely, but absolutely nothing like him. If they’d like to call him the next Clark Gable, that would actually be appropriate.)

But I digress. Today’s meme is: “Least Favorite Movie by a Favorite Actor.” Of course, taking into account the above argument, there are a number of films with Brosnan that are not my favorites, as he gets so little comedy. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s a fine dramatic actor, and I liked him as James Bond. But Remington Steele was set up like a Screwball Comedy – my favorite genre – and they just don’t make ’em like that anymore. Occasionally, Brosnan does something fabulous like The Matador, which is a very notable and worthy exception from his usual fare, but they are really few and far between. I should thus applaud his every attempt to step out of the mold into which he’s been most often cast by doing something new and different.

Alas, though it is… different, I just can’t on this one: Mamma Mia! was just a bad, bad idea for him. Frankly, I can’t see it as a very good idea for over half of the people in it, as it really is just a hot mess of big damn stars who are towering actors, but who just… cannot sing. As much as it saddens me to criticize Pierce Brosnan in any way, I must say that singing is not his strong-suit. He’s not terrible; his voice doesn’t grate or anything really, it’s just that he’s so clearly uncomfortable with it, that the discomfort comes through to the viewer. Perhaps that’s just me though; I was terribly uneasy throughout. I just couldn’t figure why people like Colin Firth and Stellan Skarsgard were putting themselves through such a thing, other than what was probably a very large paycheck and a month or two (or three) in Greece. To be fair, that’s a perfectly acceptable reason, and I’m not one to judge. I’m just not going to be able to sit through it ever again.

My dear sister Lara shares my great love for Remington Steele, and is spending this month blogging about television, so… perhaps we’ll hear something about it there? I think not, actually, but that’s where a lot of my interest in TV begins and ends, so I’ll have to be forgiven my single-mindedness.