The Wily Filipino

Two Movies with Nothing to Do with Each Other, #8.

Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (2007) and Kenny Ortega's High School Musical (2006).

Eloise: I never thought I'd have Angelina Jolie's butt that close to my face.
Me: I never thought I'd have Anthony Hopkins' butt that close to my face.

Which just about sums up Beowulf, really: a relentlessly puerile cartoon aimed directly at 12-year old boys and savvily hitting the ceiling of a PG-13. (I can't believe Neil Gaiman (and Roger Avary) were partly responsible for this crud, which, acting- and writing-wise, is only a few degrees removed from a videogame's cutscene. Actually, that's what it is: a videogame on the big screen, complete with different quests and big bosses at the end of every level.)

Still, it's worth seeing the film on the big screen for one reason alone. My friend Eloise and I saw it in 3-D and on an Imax screen, and ten minutes into the film -- and that includes the Paramount logo -- my 12-year old mind was screaming HOLY BEJEEZUS EVERY MOVIE EVER MADE FROM NOW ON HAS TO BE IN 3-D!!! To have spears, bodies, rocks, arrows, and boobs all flying at you within inches of your face is absolutely thrilling, and there aren't very many real-life situations that would let you have that experience. (I mean all at the same time.)

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Don't knock it till you've actually seen it, they said. It's really not that bad. Well, I've finally gone and seen High School Musical, and they're right: it's really not that bad, but that's saying very little. The melodies are fairly catchy, but the lyrics are irredeemably awful, as if the writers put words like "free", "brave", "believe", "fly", "you", "me", and "together" into a blender and figured out how many variations they could come up with. Despite its "Up with People" blandness and plot schematics right out of "Clifford the Big Red Dog", High School Musical is charming, and there's something to be said about young people who can act, dance, and sing. And there's a sweet chemistry here, particularly in the first scene when the two young leads tentatively discover themselves (and each other) during an impromptu karaoke session.

Every decade needs its Grease or Dirty Dancing, and this is the 2K version. (I must confess a general dislike for musicals, and the fact that I'm not the target audience for HSM probably renders my complaints pointless. But Richard Wong's Colma: The Musical was one of my favorite films this year, and Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is probably in my top 50 of all time. So there.)

Interestingly, there's a way for the movie to be read as a Coming Out narrative, but I won't bother. I guess it's also pointless for me to say that it's a happily sanitized vision of high school, with no drugs or concealed weapons or teenage pregnancies or No Child Left Behind to menace the students. It's perfectly harmless and inoffensive, which, I suppose, is better than a lot of girl-oriented merch (the impossibly thin Barbie, the slutty liplinered Bratz, the disempowered Disney Princesses). If anything, what's most disturbing is Disney's aggressive marketing to pre-tweeners. If there's any real upside here, it has to do with introducing different standards of beauty for little kids out there, especially for my Chinese Pinay daughter: perhaps my favorite part of the movie was Vanessa Anne Hudgens' beautiful, beautiful, Chinese Pinay nose.

Posted by the wily filipino at December 26, 2007 09:21 PM