142 - Camp Rock

    A musically-inclined girl goes to Camp Rock, an arts camp, where she encounters a nice girl, an mean girl, and a dreamy rock star boy.
    This is a made-for-TV Disney movie.  It’s silly, but not as groaningly silly as Camp Cucamonga.  And it lacks the heart that makes Poison Ivy my favorite camp movie.
    I should get this out of the way.  I watched this because I had an idea for a movie that would be aimed at kids.  It would take place at a camp.  While I love camp movies, I mostly love 80s camp movies.  I haven’t seen many modern ones.  So I watched this for research.  I also took loads of notes about the structure.
    The movie itself was mostly pretty dumb.  It’s aimed at young girls, especially young fans of the Jonas Brothers, who play a substantial role in the movie.
    There’s a lot of unintentionally funny stuff going on.  In particular, for a music camp, they put a lot of focus on dancing and choreography.  No one - at least no one that I could identify - knows how to play an instrument.  (There might be an exception to this.  I think in one scene, a drummer in the background might have been actually playing)
    The villainous girl gives a fantastic performance, probably around a half hour into the movie.  It’s perfectly written.  It’s an over-the-top cocky song about how she’s so popular and no one else is as cool as she is.  It reminded me of a song that appears in The Simpsons - Privileged Boy.  It’s a hilarious song, because it requires the singer to be completely unaware of what they’re saying.
    Near the end of the movie, there are a string of performances.  There’s a dramatic ballad played by a girl with a guitar.  She doesn’t know how to play, and she doesn’t even know how to fake playing.  It’s hilariously bad.  The other performance, by our heroine, is also ridiculous, but in this case, it’s because her singing involves shaking her body around.  It’s supposed to be dramatic, but for anyone who has sung…
    The movie does have a few interesting points.  I think the villain had an interesting arc, in that the movie redeems her, while the heroine starts off okay, gets bad, and learns a lesson.  I’m still not positive why she’s really likable.
    Regardless, I learned a lot from breaking this movie down.  It’s not anything notable, but it moved quickly and it hit every note it needed to.

    One other thing.  There’s a scene where the heroine sings a little bit by herself in front of a bunch of other people.  Her singing is terrible.  Terrible!  She’s on pitch, but she’s shouting, she seems aimless… it’s terrible.