Elementary
school-aged children love High School
Musical because they live in a world where, one day,
when they're all grown up like the big kids, high
school is going to be amazing: one
dancing-on-the-cafeteria-tables production number after
another. No swirlies. No beatings. Only complete
acceptance of everyone's unique selves and
special talents, whether those skills be baking, singing,
chemistry, cello, or propensity for wearing very gay hats.
If things go wrong, they'll be righted by a musical
number, hopefully one where the chorus goes,
"We're all in this together...something
something...we're all stars, etc. Hey!"
There, I just recapped the first movie for you in case
you missed it. It's a world where a movie like
Heathers simply has no reason to exist.
Adult gays love
High School Musical because they live in a
world where, one day, when they invent a time machine,
they will have the secondary-education experience they
deserved to have, full of music so facile and dorky
that it makes ordinary bubblegum pop sound like black
metal, set in an environment so clean and sparkling and
blazingly color-saturated it could cause cancer of the eyes.
When people talk
about HSM, they talk about children--and
sometimes the humming-along parents held hostage by those
children. They don't talk about adults longing for something
that never was. But that's the secret weapon of
this maddeningly addictive one-two punch of gleefully
uncool TV movies: They know what you always wanted and
never got, especially if you were a show
tunes-starved homosexual.
I watched the
first movie as homework. I wanted to know what this thing
was that had turned my 10-year-old niece into a drooling
karaoke-loving zombie. So one Saturday night, my
partner and I sat down with dinner and TiVo and became
unwitting victims. Somewhere around the part where the
entire lunchroom exploded into a hundred teenagers spinning
round tables and doing backflips while holding trays
of food, I thought, This ain't so bad, really. And
during the final number, where all wrongs were
righted, all relationships healed, and all the cutest
cast members paired up with members of the opposite sex
(even that blond guy, who was the most gay-acting of
all of them, especially since the official word
is that all male cast members are 1000% heterosexual
and possibly even--OMG!--dating female cast
members), my partner said, "You know, I kind of
love this."
But just as you
can't lose your virginity twice, you can't be surprised
by a silly TV movie's unexpected adorability more
than once either. This time around the cast is a
little older, a little less gee-whiz, quite a bit more
self-conscious of their chaste sex appeal, and a lot
more tan. There's no song in this one called
"My Orange-y Spray-On Adolescence," but there
should be. Zac Efron, in particular, emerges fully
formed in this installment as the perfect teen idol
robot: his painstakingly tousled emo-for-popular-kids
hairstyle, his snapping head movements, and his
digitally enhanced blue eyes that border on
unsettling and seem like they might, without much
effort at all, shoot deadly laser beams at anyone who even
thinks about getting in the way of The
Wholesome.
If you didn't see
HSM, the plot of HSM2 will be fresh.
There's a talent show happening at a
fancy-schmancy Albuquerque country club, see, and the
innocuously mean Sharpay (Ashley Tisdale) and her pink
beret-wearing nancy-boy of a jazz
square-doing brother are out to rule the proceedings.
Enter basketball jock Efron and his entourage of laboratory
built-cute, somewhat scruffy, slightly less
insanely wealthy friends who are all, to a man, also
into singing and dancing for the talent show. And
there's your conflict, one that will be
resolved with some very acrobatic dancing, huggy
lyrics, and bleached teeth by the time it's over.
Tisdale, merely controlling in the first movie, has
developed into a full-on hybrid of Paris Hilton and
Miss Piggy for this spin.
But what the kids
(and by this point in the review, when I say "the
kids," I mean "you gays") care about
are the production numbers. And that's where
the bigger budget for HSM2 gets spent. This
time around, everything in the camera's view is so
radioactively colorful it seems more like the film is set in
Alamogordo than Albuquerque. All objects, including
the human beings doing the singing and dancing, are
set to explode into a fourth dimension. There are more
dancing extras, bigger sets, more elaborate choreography,
more of everything--like if someone said to you,
"You want this cupcake?" and you said,
"Hell no, I want six cupcakes and I want them to be
dunked in hot pink frosting so that they're covered on
all sides. I want frosting to be all over my face and
hands and in my hair, too. I want to smear that
frosting all over my entire life. FROSTING!"
The songs are
about how awesome it is that it's finally summertime,
how great it is to be young and adorable, how playing
baseball is almost exactly just like being in a
Broadway show, how wild it is to be young and
adorable and in love except that they don't
think about having sex or even kiss, how great it is to
be rich and at a country club, how much super-fun it is to
have a menial summer job busing tables at a country
club, and how sad it is to have a fight with your
boyfriend. Later, at a crucial moment of conflict, Zac
Efron--serving hilariously petulant bitch
face--has a solo about how everyone who doesn't
understand how sincere he truly is can go to hell
because he's Zac and he's for-real and
he's going to show them all.
The theme here,
just like in the first movie, is that if you're nice and
cute and you can sing and dance, then life is going to be
really wonderful. This is, of course, a complete lie.
But it's a nice lie, and it's served
with the biggest spoonful of sugar ever invented. And it all
gets wrapped up with the final song, where everyone hugs
again and remembers that they're all in this together.
They just don't use those exact words, because to do
that would be copying HSM. And this is HSM2.
After that, the
fireworks burst in midair and the golf course sprinklers
erupt in a frenzy of sublimation. You'll kind of love
it.