Movie Review - TEEN BEACH MOVIE

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I have to admit--I was excited when I heard about Disney's Teen Beach Movie. Though corny by today's standards (or any standards, for that matter), I used to watch the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies as a kid. Born in the sixties, I loved the costumes, dance and music of my parents' teenaged years. I also watched Annette on the old Mickey Mouse Club black and white re-runs, so it was cool to see what she did afterward. The last beach movie released was 1987's Back to the Beach, which I loved, because in addition to being a blast from the past, Lori Laughlin played Frankie and Annette's daughter. Back to the Beach was campy and silly and featured Pee Wee Herman singing "Bird is the Word"; what more could you ask?

When my eight year old daughters started extreme fangirling on High School Musical, I thought I should see what it was all about. I was pleasantly surprised. I even went to the theatre to see the third one with them and really enjoyed it. While the storylines left something to be desired, the music and dance scenes were impressive. My daughters didn't have to twist my arm to get me to watch Camp Rock, or Lemonade Mouth either. So when I read about Teen Beach Movie I was interested. My daughter insisted it was like Grease and she was all "been there, done that". Even though I insisted it was more like Beach Blanket Bingo than Grease, she remains steadfast in her claim, refusing to take even a peek at Beach Blanket Bingo, headstrong almost-fourteen-year-old that she is, which is frustrating as this means I am unable to educate her on the finer points of popular culture on which I thrive.

Teen Beach Movie is surprisingly entertaining to watch. In the movie, Brady and Mac (short for Mackenzie) are in love. Mac lives with her grandfather on the beach, but she must go back to the city with her stuck-up aunt to attend private school for the rest of her education. Because Mac's deceased mother wanted her to be the best she could be, Mac feels a duty to go with her aunt, even if it means breaking up with Brady to do so. Mac is a surfer, better than most of the boy-surfers out there, and she has been looking forward to surfing the forty-foot waves brought on by the coming storm, but surfing them would mean missing her plane. She awakes on the day she is to leave to see that her grandfather's surfboard, the one always hanging from the rafters, is propped against the wall instead, and she decides to go for one last surf. Worried she may drown, Brady takes a Jet Ski out to save her. They both get pulled down by the waves and come up for air in the sixties, and soon realize they are actually in the beach movie, West Side Story, that Brady idolizes and knows by heart. The movie is about the love story between a surfer boy and biker girl who fall in love and unite the two gangs against stereotypical bad guys to save the day, but when the surfer boy falls for Mac and the biker girl falls for Brady instead of each other, they have a problem.

The music in Teen Beach Movie is pop-based with a retro flavour, and I'm not embarrassed to admit that there are a few I wouldn't be above adding to my playlist. The acting is okay, but it's what you would expect from an old time beach movie, that is to say, over the top. Ross Lynch as Brady is perfect as the lovelorn puppy dog who would be lost without his girl. Maia Mitchell is cute as Mac, but her character suffers from a case of she-doth-protest-too-much until she gets acquainted with Grace Phipps' character, the girl biker, Lela and they become besties. Garrett Clayton plays the role of Tanner with vapid charm, though he looks a little too much like Zac Efron for comfort. The final surprise in this movie was seeing Kent Boyd of So You Think You Can Dance fame as Rascal, and while his acting is overblown (again, as you would expect from a beach movie), he was one of my favourites from the show and it was great to see him post SYTYCD, though I would have liked for his part to be a little bigger. He might have been good in either male lead. For sure he has the legs for it.

While Teen Beach Movie is not one of those movies I could watch again and again (like I do Men in Black, Legally Blonde, or Kate and Leopold, for example), it is quite enjoyable as a parody of the original movies. The song and dance numbers--though they may occur randomly as Mac points out--are entertaining, and the jokes--like how everyone goes surfing and emerges with dry hair--are kind of funny. There are some laugh-out-loud moments, and some borrowing from similar movies (Brady's lifejacket fades from existence like Marty McFly's siblings from the photograph in Back to the Future, and there's a baby-doll sleepover scene like the "Sandra Dee" number in Grease, that comes off as a sort of mashup between "Sandra Dee" and "Summer Loving"), though I did miss watching my daughters try to dance along with the cast when they teach the moves during commercial breaks. Nevertheless, Teen Beach Movie is great entertainment for the kids as an introduction to a long-extinct genre, and memorable nostalgia for their parents. The hour and forty-five minutes I invested in watching the movie was time well spent.

About the Author

Elise Abram, English teacher and former archaeologist, has been writing for as long as she can remember, but it wasn't until she was asked to teach Writer's Craft in 2001 that she began to seriously write. Her first novel, THE GUARDIAN, was partially published as a Twitter novel a few summers back (and may be accessed at @RKLOGYprof). Nearly ten years after its inception Abram decided it was time to stop shopping around with traditional publication houses and publish PHASE SHIFT on her own.

Download PHASE SHIFT for the price of a tweet. Visit http://www.eliseabram.com, click on the button, tweet or Facebook about my novel and download it for FREE!

Archetypes

An archetype in literature is like a prototype, a version after which other versions are patterned. This is, I think, what makes me a fan of Once Upon a Time. In television’s Storybrooke, archetypal characters are brought to life, both as archetypes and as modern versions of themselves. In season one, it was the dichotomy of their personalities that drew me in, the difference between Storybrooke’s David and Fairytaleland’s Charming. The self-assured Snow versus the meek and unconfident Mary-Margaret. What made it especially fun were the peeks into the archetype that I imagine to be bubbling just beneath the surface in Regina and Gold, the only two characters with intact memories, and the repartee between them. I named my blog “My Own Little Storybrooke”, because I understand that all imagined characters and storylines are based on archetypal ones, new spins on old ideas. As I’ve already mentioned, it’s the deviation between the traditional and the new that makes these stories so exciting.


Take Smallville for example, the last spin on the Superman archetype. The Superman legend enamours me for its romanticism, in which the archetypal story is the boy next door who turns out to be the strongest, most virtuous and handsome person on the planet. Or maybe it’s about the nerdy guy that has a crush on you who is just as worthy as the captain of the football team, but you’ll never know because you can’t get past his nerdy exterior. Revenge of the Nerds just popped into my head, a group of nerds who are shunned until their superpower (great sex) is discovered. They get the girl, but continue to battle the jocks in the sequel. Read: Superman/Clark Kent hooks up with Lois Lane but continues to battle Lex Luthor and other villains in the sequels.

It is The Beauty and the Beast archetype that spurred this blog entry. When read as even the lowest creature is worthy of love, the archetype has merit. But this archetype could be seen to have a darker meaning, one with undertones of Battered Wife Syndrome and/or Stockholm Syndrome, in which the victim begins to identify with her attacker/captor, using love as an excuse to stay. In The Beauty and the Beast legend (and I’m going with popular culture’s version and not the original archetype which I haven’t read), a brave girl (Belle in the Disney and ABC versions) breaks the damsel in distress mould and decides to save her family rather than having them protect her. She volunteers to go with the Beast who mistreats her and locks her in the dungeon. Eventually, he releases her so she can take care of his castle. Because he shows her sporadic kindness, she falls in love with him. Once he wins her love the spell is broken and he is no longer a beast.

While I love the OUaT version, Rumple is really rough with Belle, to the point where one might ask how she could possibly fall in love with him. Perhaps Gold’s confession that he is a difficult man to love tugs at her heart strings. Belle, ever the martyr, sacrifices her own happiness to save the man she loves. I have to admit I was looking forward to the new Beauty and the Beast television show, premiering on Showcase last night. This version closer parallels the eighties show starring Linda Hamilton than the Disney one. In it, Kristen Kruek plays Catherine, a police officer (Linda Hamilton’s Catherine was a reporter) who meets up with Vincent, a genetically engineered super soldier turned vigilante who once saved her life. If this series is anything like the eighties one, the two team up to fight crime. While I love Linda Hamilton from The Terminator (and more recently Chuck) days, I remember watching BatB sporadically. I never quite understood why Vincent looked the way he did or why she was so attracted to him. This iteration of BatB takes place in a New York which looks a lot like a dressed up downtown Toronto (the only information I could find online was that it was filmed in Canada). Catherine meets Vincent in the first minutes of the show in 2004 when he saves her life and then we flash forward to 2012 where they meet again. Once more, he saves her from certain death and she is intrigued by him, especially when she learns he’s supposed to be dead. Long story short, they meet up, he spills the beans about his history and she agrees to keep the fact that he’s still alive a secret. So much for the slow build. Truth be told, I won’t be watching again. If I want a police procedural with a built-in love story, I’ll watch Castle instead. Speaking of Beauty and the Beast and police procedurals, Rookie Blue’s Sam and Andy kind of fit the bill—loner Sam is reluctant to succumb to Andy’s charms but eventually does. After a fellow cop is killed on his watch, Sam blames Andy and is horrible to her, playing beast to her beauty. True to archetype, even when Sam emotionally abuses Andy, the residual, reciprocal attraction remains.

Rumbelle still intrigues me, though I don’t understand Belle’s interest in staying, other than that she can’t leave Storybrooke or she’ll lose all memory of who she was. Being Beauty is much better than being a basket case locked up in the mental ward in the equivalent of Storybrooke’s dungeon. I love the new Rumplegold, a little bit Gold, a little bit Rumplestiltskin, and Robert Carlyle plays the part with slimy precision. Emilie De Ravin’s Belle is a young woman with a maturity beyond her years. She treats Gold as an impetuous child who, once he realizes he is indeed loved unconditionally, will stop playing manipulative games, grow up and be a man. Sounds a little like the relationship between Wendy and Peter Pan, doesn’t it?

Darn those archetypes.