By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Family Films
Reviewing a film targeted at younger audiences begs the question: how does an adult critic evaluate a film that’s targeted in every way at a demographic to which the reviewer finds it difficult to relate? And can film journalists who are unable to let go of their grown-up mindset and get into the headspace of what it was like to be a teenager possibly understand what’s so appealing about a film like High School Musical 3 to the kids for whom it was made — or should we just accept that our ability to review such a film objectively might have some limits, and avoid even bothering to review something that’s so far out of our interest range that we can’t possibly give it a fair shake?
I rarely review certain types of horror films, because I just don’t grok the appeal of films of the Hostel-and-Saw variety — though I have enjoyed more cerebral horror fare such as The Descent, The Orphanage and Alien. Certain family films, though — perhaps even more than the horror genre — tend to be targeted with laser precision at a specific demographic. High School Musical 3, which just opened this past weekend, is the most recent example of this type of film. Where family films like Kung Fu Panda or Wall-E have a lot to recommend them to adults as well as the kiddie set, the High School Musical franchise (much like the Disney Channel television programming that spawned it) is strictly aimed at tweens and teens, and therefore its appeal to that market can be lost on reviewers looking in vain for what in it might appeal to them as adults.
It’s pretty much inevitable that dissenting voices in the critical community, when evaluating something like the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus concert or High School Musical 3, take offense at what they perceive as the film’s inanity. And then commences yet another tired tirade bemoaning the “dumbing down” of entertainment aimed at our youth, as if the existence of films that pander to the particular interest of the youth target market is, in and of itself, big news that in some way speaks to the decline of our societal intellectual development. To which I say, bullshit.
The thing is, sometimes kids just want to have fun, and for what it is and who it’s aimed at, the High School Musical movies are, quite simply, fun. As a boring grown-up, I don’t always understand what’s appealing about a particular movie to kids, but when I don’t “get it,” my tween daughter is happy to provide me her very vocal assessment of what aspects of the film I might be overlooking from the lofty perch of adulthood; her insight has helped, more than once, to shape my perception of a family film. Sometimes we have dissimilar points of view on a film: I loathed The Adventures of Shark-Boy and Lava-Girl, a film she still periodically advocates for as having an “interesting story” and “cool special effects.” We were united, however, in our mutual disdain for Happily N’Ever After, and it was my daughter who pointed out to me with an exclamation of horror last week that a sequel to that wretched film is being made.
When it comes to the High School Musical series, though, I get very much why she and her friends are nuts about these films. The young stars are talented and appealing to her in the same way that the early Mouseketeers were appealing to my own mother and her friends when they were kids. When Annette Funicello moved on from the mouse ears to cheesy beach movies with Frankie Avalon, my mom and her friends went along for the ride, and enjoyed every minute. A generation later, when I was a little kid, I’d wake up early on Saturday mornings to catch Grape Ape, Josie and the Pussycats, Speed Buggy, and all the other cheesy Saturday morning cartoons. While all those weekend mornings watching cartoons probably did not contribute greatly to my intellectual development, I don’t think they killed too many of my brain cells for the long term.
Back in the day, my friends and I watched Grease at least 89,000 times. We all begged for the soundtrack (on vinyl!) and spent endless, pleasurable hours re-enacting scenes from the movie with our Barbie dolls (we even colored one unfortunate Ken doll’s perfect plastic hair black with marker so he could be Danny Zuko) and argued over who got to play Sandy or Rizzo and who got stuck playing the guy roles. When Purple Rain and then Desperately Seeking Susan came out in 1984 and 1985, respectively, I was at the theater with many of the same girls watching those film over and over; we would sing along to the soundtracks with all our hearts and mimic the hairdos and fashions from the films with great passion. (And no, you do not want to see pictures of me from those days.) My parents would just shake their heads and wait for the latest craze to pass; these days, much as I swore I’d never turn into my mother or grandmother, I sometimes have to guard against the tendency to morph into the proverbial grumpy old lady shaking my fist at those darn kids and their annoying taste in movies.
The question is, when writing a review, do I hold a film like High School Musical 3 to a different standard that I’d hold, say, an arthouse drama at a festival, or a documentary about a refugee camp in Uganda? Of course I do, for the same reason that I don’t expect many of the books my kids gravitate toward to meet the criteria of the adult literary intelligentsia. My almost-12-year-old, for example, loves reading the Twilight books, Babysitters Club, and Animorphs. She’s also enjoyed reading many books that are considered classics of children’s literature — books like the Anne of Green Gables series, Lois Lowry‘s The Giver, A Bridge to Terabithia, and many books by Judy Blume. But she also likes grabbing an easy-to-whip through Babysitters Club book when she just wants a book to relax with, much as I, when I travel to film fests, pack lighter reading in my bag along with the brainier fare, or the way many adults enjoy following their favorite television program or catching the latest romantic comedy or horror flick at the theater, purely for the enjoyment and escapism.
Is the writing in most of the kiddie-lit books on par with the Brontes or Mark Twain or Lousia May Alcott? Of course not, and it’s not intended to be. But I can say, having read most of those books myself, that neither do they herald the end of intelligent civilization as we know it. I like to read what my kids are reading, both so I can discuss their passions with them as if I actually know what I’m talking about, and because I want them to know that I respect that their interests are important to them. When my seven-year-old proudly brings me her latest elaborate drawing, I don’t critique her for not being Picasso or Van Gogh; when my five-year-old excitedly shows me (over and over again) how he can count to to 100 and he’s thrilled with having unraveled some pattern of numbers, I don’t critique him for not yet grokking the Theory of Relativity. I celebrate their developmental milestones as they cross them for what they are, and respect where each of them are at that particular point in time, without expecting them (or their literary or cinematic taste) to be that of an adult. So yes, I can look at a film like High School Musical 3 and respect the aspects of it that appeal very much to my tween, even if it’s not a film that I’d go out of my way to catch at the cineplex if I were a single, twenty-something hipster.
When my tween daughter reads a review of a film like High School Musical 3 that was clearly written by someone who’s not followed the series, clearly doesn’t grasp the appeal of the storyline and actors to kids her age, and writes the review from an oh-so-brainier-than-thou, condescending viewpoint, she gets mad. She reads reviews like that and bemoans the sad-but-true fact that there aren’t a lot of film critic jobs out there for an almost-12-year-old to offer the perspective of the intended target market for those films, and she wonders why someone who doesn’t have the foggiest idea why Miley Cyrus or Zac Efron or the Twilight series are so appealing to kids like her would even bother to write about them to begin with.
A movie like High School Musical 3 should be evaluated from the standards one would apply to teen lit, not the standards one applies when reading, say, the latest Michael Chabon novel. They’re not just different genres, they require an entirely different way of thinking about what qualifies a film as good or bad. There are family films that are truly wretched, that do dumb down the content and condescend to kids — and trust me, the kids know what those films are. High School Musical 3, though, isn’t one of them. If you can let go of your arthouse mentality, channel that inner teenager still lurking somewhere inside your grown-up body, and look at it as the fun, singing-and-dancing romp for tweens and teens that it is, it’s a pretty good time. And if you can’t do that, well … maybe you should just skip it, and move on to the next film on the list of Oscar contenders.
