Getting Hip

As the years tick by and we watch our friends becoming increasingly wrapped up with their offspring, I find myself fearing the time when I will have to admit that I am an old fogey. Some of you will think, and rightly so, that in some ways I have always been an old fogey, but the old fogeyness to which I am referring is not my natural inclination to yell at the neighbor kids to “keep it down,” but the kind which other people manage to avoid simply by having children who will grow up and one day tell their parent, in all seriousness, that “you are totally uncool.”

Since I will have no children to provide these kinds of helpful hints, I only have myself to keep an eagle eye on my fading coolness. So in an effort to stave off impending decrepitude, I did the only thing possible. Yes, dear readers, today I watched High School Musical.

For months now, the faces (and, er, naked bodies, in some cases) of the High School Musical stars, Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens, have been gracing the covers of magazines everywhere. Having seen them so often in pictures at red-carpet events, I felt it was high time I got to know them — in their natural environment, so to speak.

High School Musical begins at some kind of Dirty Dancing-ish resort at which Troy, popular football star, is vacationing with his parents. At a New Year’s Eve party, Troy gets forced onstage to perform a karaoke duet with Gabby, a shy, bookish genius. How do we know she’s a shy, bookish genuis? Why, she carries a thick book around with her all the time and hunches up her shoulders when anyone talks to her. Now that I think of it, perhaps the reason people thought I was stuck-up in college and not shy was because I didn’t hunch my shoulders appropriately.

The karaoke song is pleasant enough although sadly, also the high point of the otherwise forgettable music. Troy and Gabby turn out to have amazing singing voices, which is fortunate because otherwise this would be a really short movie. But once back at high school, they find themselves falling into different cliques, where apparently you have to pretend you don’t want to audition for the musical, unless you’re Sharpay, the popular (aka mean) girl who refuses to believe anyone else deserves the lead in any musical.

Then again, perhaps Troy’s better off pretending he’s not interested in auditioning, as his next song is a terrible, hip-hoppy basketball song that starts out promisingly enough by ripping off the beginning of Duran Duran’s Wild Boys, but then sadly veers off into something so awful that I had to rewind and watch it again.

My old age began to catch up to me then, and I had to fight to stay awake during the middle section of the movie. The plot being fairly simple, I had to amuse myself by rating the actors on their acting abilities and deciding who had the best odds to hit it big in “real” movies.

Where a real movie has a climax, this one had an apex. A particularly bad scene involving brainiacs and jocks running interventions on our heroes had me wondering if the writers had ever heard teenagers speak, and would this movie ever get around to showing any part of the actual high school musical?

It was around this point that I realized this movie was not, as I had assumed, about an actual high school musical, but merely about having the guts to try out for a musical. Heck, three quarters of the movie was over, and we hadn’t even hit the CALLBACKS for the musical tryouts. So far, the plot appeared to be:

Jock and Brain want to try out for the musical. They are afraid. This is the equivalent of a volcano eruption in their high school.

I hadn’t finished the movie yet but I was pretty sure the ending would be along the lines of:

Jock and Brain and assorted friends realize that being true to yourself is more important than fitting in.

Evidently, the writers had never been in high school, either.

Even the notion of a sing along version of this movie wasn’t enough to make me want to watch more of this, but maybe High School Musical 2 would actually show…you know, the musical. And maybe more real high school-ness.

Hey, I have a suggestion. Winona Ryder may be interested in doing a sequel to Heathers. How’s your singing voice, Winona?

A musical version of Heathers. Now THAT’S what I call a high school musical.

Posted by: Supersonic Jane | October 17, 2007 | 4:01 pm
Posted in: Entertainment/News | This Life