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HSM3

This is an article from New York Post by infamous Kyle Smith, movie review. I went to see HSM3 last night with a bunch of friends and it was a BLAST! THe movie... well lets say most everything Mr. Smith says in teh following is true, the movie was good for the company and a few of the songs were note worthy. I had a really good time with my roomie Rachel and some others from our ward/ Apt complex. Go see the movie if you have afun group to go with, otherwise, bag the idea and order in pizza and watch something constructive...like TMMT


'HSM3' IS TEENAGE WASTELAND
YOU'LL BE BETTER OFF PLAYING HOOKY

October 24, 2008
Posted: 1:53 am
October 24, 2008

I plan to be the father of a 9-year-old girl in about 8 1/2, so I went to see "High School Musical 3" for a glimpse into my future. Chilling, chilling.

The weapons-grade Albuquerque wholesomeness of Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale and whoever plays the boy with all the hats is still brutally efficient. The girl-powered crowd I saw the movie with Wednesday night on 42nd Street squealed at the beginning and (less loudly) at the end, though maintaining an almost complete silence in the middle.



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"It wasn't bad," ruled Victoria Testa, 12, a full-time kid. "Parts of it were a little overwhelming." Would she see it again? "I don't think so." Her sister Olivia, 8, thought the movie could have used a few commercial breaks.

I'll put it another way: The jokes are awful, the intrigue minimal (good girl Gabriella, played by Hudgens, doesn't disappear at a climactic moment because of her enemy Sharpay's witchy schemes - she simply walks away), the romance, except for 2.2 kisses near the end, implied. All of this is why it seems like there's a long, long time between the musical numbers, which themselves are at the level of a Mentos commercial.

This time, the kids are mulling options for college. Gabriella got into Stanford but Troy (Efron) wants to play hoops at the U of A - or is that what his dad wants for him? Mull, mull. Dark moment: Troy in the gym, by himself, on a gloomy night, agonizing over his future as basketballs pour from the rafters and lightning flashes.

"It just started raining randomly," notes Olivia Testa, although she could have been talking about a different random rainstorm, on a rooftop where Troy and Gabriella sing, "Let it rain/Let it pour/What we have is worth fighting for."

As the kids plan a meta-musical called "Senior Year," in which everyone will play himself or herself, their teacher springs a surprise: She has invited scouts from Juilliard. "HSM 4: The Moppets Take Manhattan"? Could happen. Chilling, chilling.

There's a distinct energy shortage here compared to the first two films.

Every staging idea seems stale and the songwriters are running out of hooks, though the rock(-ish) song of (near-)anger Troy delivers is one of the few that rises above the mush.

None of the numbers approaches the bust-out inventiveness of the lunch scene in the first movie or the whimsy of the baseball bit in the second one. A brief taste of Bob Fosse's moves doesn't accomplish much. As Billy Wilder once put it, even for Albuquerque, this is pretty Albuquerque.

Sharpay's haberdashery-

obsessed brother Ryan again burns up the fedora catalog, coordinating the hats with his pink pants and his sur prisingly broad range of eye ball- scalding argyle sweaters. If his headgear budget had been halved, the movie could have afforded to hire a couple of joke writers to come up with better stuff than "I wouldn't sing with you if I were starving and you were the last pickle at the picnic." Or maybe a new lyricist: "Where's my shaver/I look like a waiter"? Really?

Reassuring though it may be to parents that the kids inhabit a zit-free, hormonally unroiled state (despite being the same age as the characters in "Superbad" and "Grease"), there is also something surgically sterile. The movie sounds as though it was recorded in a padded chamber instead of a bustling school, and it looks like it came from some alternate world, one that basks in the eternal sunshine of the spotless skin.

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