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.
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