I should really hold this second installment of my Continual Review Process ‘cos I’ll be watching the movie with the DVD commentary in the next week but I’ve blogged so little this past week that anything is worth an update :p This movie is seriously cool. I still want to know if they had any problems with the trademarks involved, there’s even more than I thought the first time round, I hope the commentary goes into this. One thing I need to amend from the below review is that it looks like the girls did perform their own stuff to a certain extent – I watched the “Backstage Pass” featurette on the DVD and you get to see them recording backing vocals and Rachel Leigh Cook strums a bunch of chords – they apparently still mimed to a pre-recorded track, but they at least knew what they were “playing,” having attended band camp (no American Pie jokes, please, they make ‘em on the disc :-p) for a few weeks. So that’s fairly awesome.

More when I watch the commentary I guess. God I love this movie.

3rd July 2005:

Oh man. I was so in need of this movie I couldn’t begin to explain (I’ve tried, I swear, several written-but-not-posted blog posts today :-P).

This movie is a kind of mix of Mean Girls, Spice World, and Slap Her … She’s French. I expected to love it whatever, ‘cos I love the kind of music that’s all through it, that Ashlee Simpson / Lindsay Lohan / Hilary Duff – type girl-pop-rock-whatever stuff. But I didn’t expect one of the most surprising and effective messages, made even more surprising by the sheer number of corporate logos you’ll spy while watching this movie. How on earth they got this thing together without hellish legal problems, I don’t know (maybe the commentary will explain – I imagine it’s actually something to do with the vast number of seeming product placement, maybe once you use so many logos it becomes clear that you’re not targeting any individual one … for example, there are boxes of Bounce behind the actors in a scene towards the beginning, attached to the wall of a private jet for no apparent reason).

“When the going gets tough –”
“The – tough make lemonade!”

I’ve seen snippets of the cartoon and it never really grabbed me, at all. The animation was terrible, overall it’s dated, it just never grabbed me. But I loved the idea of it. Rachel Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson (yeh it’s a pre-Rent musical role for her, but don’t get excited ‘cos I don’t think any of the girls here do their own singing – I think she’ll make a great Mimi, though) make a great team as the band, there’s amazing support from Alan Cumming (doing such a Richard E. Grant that I couldn’t help think how good he would’ve been in the role) and Parker Posey (who is just incredible here, especially towards the end. There are semi-injokes for fans of the comic book, maybe I missed some since I didn’t ever even know it was a comic book, only a TV show, but there are some of those kind of injokes that are funny even if you don’t know the info behind them. For example, at one point, the “sidekick” character is suddenly onboard the private jet taking the band to their new life of wealth and fame, and is asked why exactly she’s there too, she answers,

“I’m here because I was in the comic book.”

I’ve been really down lately. And it mostly related to the kind of stupid behaviour that this movie lampoons. When I saw it in the TV listings I decided immediately that I’d watch it, and prayed it would be as good as I expected to lift me out of my doldrums. It turned out even better than I imagined. This is one of my favourite comedies of all time, it was practically on its way in DVD form before it’d even finished. Can’t wait to look at the extras.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 10th, 2005 at 12:10 am in 4 hearts, Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.