Went to see High School Musical 3 last night, and let me tell you: it was quite the experience. The evening was greatly enhanced by the fact that my friend Christine and I pounded back a few beers first, and that the 10:45pm showing was mostly older high school students and college kids - all people who knew they were too damn old to be there, but had a great time anyway.
During the film, we laughed every time the HSM kids broke out into song or delivered a trademark cheesy line, and cheered each time there was horribly awkward sexual tension. For a "G"-rated movie, there were a lot of moments of hot, sleeveless Zac Efron flexing, and one shown-from-behind, angry shirt removal in the locker room that led to thunderous, knowingly-ironic applause from the audience. Zeke was shown shirtless - and let me tell you, he's been hiding a lot beneath those basketball jerseys - and Sharpay showed off her super hot legs once again in an outfit so sexy the crowd gasped when they saw it. And there was kissing, moments when you know they WOULD have been kissing if it were PG-13, and just so very, very many examples of awkward sexual repression you have to see it to believe it.
It was the ultimate guilty pleasure: guilty enough to laugh at yourselves, but not so guilty that you feel kind of gross afterward. The transitions were better this time around, with most of the musical numbers appearing to be staged acts themselves, fitting in with the movie's theme of putting on a musical about their senior year (which was actually a lot less cheesy than it sounded). The dancing was incredible - a vast improvement from the very amateur quality of the first, and even over the fairly intricate second film. There was no "Bet On It" moment, in which you wondered if they have $2,000 and one day to film the scene and just told the actor to fake it. And the music was memorable, lively, and more harmoniously and melodically complex than the previous films. Without losing the pop quality of the music that has defined the film, it managed to gain a slightly more musical feel, which - as a fan of musicals, had been one of my perceived shortcomings of the previous films.
It was a little shameless how they tried to set up new characters to fill the same architects (down to race and hairstyle) for follow-up movies with a younger cast - Zac has already said, of course, that this will be his last "High School Musical," and no one breaks the Geneva Convention torture rules on franchises quite like Disney. But at the same time, I felt myself hoping that they did continue to pump out musicals, even if the quality goes down (which it inevitably will).
Does that make me a bad person? Probably. But it's hard to hear my conscience over the blaring HSM3 soundtrack.
