The High School Musical trilogy

It seemed like the logical next step, after our Cheetah Girls excursion. Guys, get ready: this is a long one, but, as usual, we are attempting to entertain you where we mostly found despair.

Directed By: Kenny Ortega (Newsies, This Is It)
Starring: Zac Efron, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel, Corbin Bleu and Monique Coleman
Plot Summary: "Let your freak flag fly, Troy!"



The massive song-and-dance number above is the core conflict of High School Musical, and also, the synopsis for the first season of Glee. (Let's just acknowledge that right now and move on.) Albuquerque's East High is constricted by hierarchies and an alarmingly high frequency of personality disorders, resulting in a school full of students unable to accept change. When the balance is overthrown, s*** hits the fan. Our crew for this evening:

--Troy & Gabriella = The charismatic jock and the shy, brainiac new girl, who meet by chance and discover their mutual love of singing and shared desire to break out of their cliques
--Sharpay & Ryan = The theatrical queen bee and her gay-but-everyone's-ignoring-it-because-this-is-Disney twin brother, who conspire against Troy & Gabriella to keep Sharpay in power
--Chad & Taylor = Troy & Gabriella's respective BFFs, a fellow jock and brainiac, who don't appreciate their friends trying to do anything different and also conspire against them

In movie 1, the leads for the winter musical ("Twinkle Town," they're calling it) are totally on lock for Sharpay & Ryan. OR SO THEY THINK! If Troy & Gabriella win the roles at callbacks, Troy's top-dog influence as captain of the basketball team will combine with his relationship with Gabriella to create a world where athletes, mathletes and theatre kids can inter-mingle, and that is just UNACCEPTABLE if Sharpay is going to remain a star. Nevermind what her brother cares about, but we'll get to that later, because their strange relationship is going to be important.


(Brother and sister auditioning with a couple's duet to play romantic leads, folks.)

Chad & Taylor, who are the Chris Brown to Troy & Gabriella's Rihanna, are some of the worst friends in the history of the world. They go so far as to work in tandem with Sharpay & Ryan, just to break Troy & Gabriella apart and keep things in line. (This was actually a smart thing to do, script-wise, because the people who fight hardest to keep you down are rarely the obvious villains.) Taylor's hold on Gabriella isn't too difficult, since the girls have just met this year and their clique's more open to progress, but Troy is being held hostage by Chad, and Troy's own father, Coach Bolton. Their collective bullying has created a fragile boy so crippled by internal conflict that he has intense emotional breakdowns on the regular. (The severity of these freak-outs will get worse and worse as the movies go on.)

Of course, once their friends realize what they've done and stand behind them, Troy & Gabriella triumph at their callback.



In part 2, IT'S SUMMER! School's out, and everyone's constantly chattering about finding summer jobs to pay for college (even though all of these kids appear to be loaded to the point that scholarships shouldn't exist for them). Appropriately, Sharpay & Ryan, whose family owns an entire country club and some other stuff, are the only ones not talking about it, because that would just be silly and Sharpay's never worked a day in her life. She decides that what she wants this summer is Troy, so she gets him a job as a favor. Troy agrees, as long as all his friends can have jobs too, so the whole class starts working at the country club.

Sharpay's focused on her schemes and throws Ryan by the wayside, so he joins up with the rest of his classmates and becomes friends with them. Sharpay starts elevating Troy's status in the club and dangling college networking connections in front of him, so he gets blinded by riches. (We don't know why Troy needs help networking, since he's apparently got so much pull in Albuquerque that he got an entire class of highschoolers hired in a country club without applications or interviews.) His friends get pissed about him ignoring them, and Gabriella dumps him because nobody knows who he is anymore. And then Troy breaks down, and his crisis is so much harder than ever before that it results in -- for lack of a better descriptor, as we're struggling to see it any other way -- the gayest scene in the history of the Disney Channel. This is only unfortunate because half of Troy's freak-out is about his now-ex-girlfriend.


(To be honest, if this choreography had been different, the song might've worked. But we just kept laughing. We can't figure out how they managed to shoot it seriously.)

In the end, Sharpay's put in her place and everyone forgives each other. (Yeah, yeah, we know.) The most important thing that happens in the second movie is that Ryan starts to forge his own identity, and here's where we discovered the greatest part of the entire trilogy. Since Gabriella's been who she is the entire time, Troy's still crying about the same things, and Sharpay's still as selfish as ever, Ryan's character gets the only arc from movie #1 to movie #3. He goes from his sister's bitch to a star in his own right. Plus, he's the only one who finally succeeds in uniting the cliques.


(Sarah: "Does Ryan know Chad can dance because HE CAN SEE HIM DANCING LIKE WE CAN?!")

In High School Musical 3: Senior Year, the crew's doing their usual, except Chad & Taylor have faded into the background a little, and Sharpay and Ryan now operate as fully separate entities. Impending Future Freak-Out is the big situation in this one. Troy's still trying to figure out what he wants to do. His dad's got him pegged for University of Albuquerque, for a basketball scholarship, but Troy also wants to go to other schools -- one of which is Juilliard, where he's a scholarship candidate as well. The rest of the plot isn't important, but we can't watch Troy be sad for two hours without other fluff to break it up. The point here is that Troy's inability to make decisions comes back in full force from the first movie. Sports or theatre? SPORTS OR THEATRE?! He loves playing basketball, but HE'S JUST GOTTA SING, DAMMIT!!!


(The theatre director finds him at the end of this number, but if she hadn't, we have a strong suspicion that the East High Wildcats would've come to school the next morning to find their leader hanging from the rafters in the auditorium.)

Troy decides to go to the University of California, Berkeley, because there, he can study theatre AND play basketball. We find it unfortunate that no one has the heart to tell him how intense college theatre is, and how all-encompassing college sports teams are, and that he won't have time to do both like he did in high school, which will surely lead to another breakdown when he has to make this decision again, mere months from now. (He will inevitably choose theatre, because what does he turn to when he's having a crisis and subsequent violent outburst? SINGING ABOUT IT, not playing a few games of H.O.R.S.E.)

(Several) Observations Made As We Watched All Three Movies:
--"This whole thing could be a coming-out speech."
--"SAY 'MUSICAL' CORRECTLY, YOU BATTY OLD C***!"
--"Basketballs must be awfully uncomfortable to masturbate with."
--"Come on now, Sharpay, what if someone had been changing her tampon? You can't kick open bathroom stalls like that."
--"Why is Chad acting like they're in a cult? Drinking the Kool-aid, planning the group suicide?"
--"OK, 'thunderclap' is OBVIOUSLY an STD."
--"This song woke [Sarah's dog] Oskar up." / "That's because Vanessa Hudgens is so goddamn pitchy."
--"This is like a wild Greek orgy. Who brought the vuvuzela?!"
--"That's where serial killers put the bodies."
--"I'm sorry, I just can't get the visual of blow job circles in the basketball locker room out of my head."
--"You a**hole, you are gonna get this girl fired because of your obsession with frolicking."
--"His dad must want him to know how much hookers cost, especially if he's going to have all this pent-up homosexual energy that he can't share with Gabriella."
--"OH, HI ZAC'S BARE TORSO, YOU LOOK NICE TODAY!"
--"Ryan almost teabagged Chad right there." / "Oh, good, you saw that too."
--"TROY, YOU ARE DRUNK ON SORROW!"
--"I can't think of anything that makes this scene more gay." / "Dancing dildos, maybe?"
--"See, my mom would be mad if my high school boyfriend had suddenly shown up in my room, because she would assume I was letting him f*** me senseless."
--"This is worse than a Hamlet soliloquy, because this won't end in murder... just more dancing."
--"I'm not an expert on basketball, but I don't think they're doing it right."
--"Troy is not gay! He just has so many feelings!" / "I disagree."

The Best Part: The journey of Ryan Evans. He's super-likeable and we cared to see him finally get what he wanted. (He ends up being a winner of that Juilliard scholarship, for choreography.)

The Worst Part: The music. It's musical-appropriate in the first movie, clearly written for the purpose of being sold as pop singles on iTunes in the second, and then irritating by the time we get to the third. Especially because the third movie mostly consists of three sentimental bulls*** songs that each get repeated one or two more times throughout, and a few others that don't contribute to anything.

The original movie is legitimately cute, and as such, it is now the first vindicated movie to make it through the blog! CONGRATS, WILDCATS! You made it through on the basis of being better than our formerly best-reviewed bad thing, Twilight!

However, High School Musical 2 and High School Musical 3: Senior Year both get Ds. The first one, which has such a different spirit from the second two, can't save the downhill nature of the rest of the trilogy. So, it's a C for the whole shebang.

Sarah: "Truthfully, I always want to watch Love Actually after every Camp or Crap? excursion, just to remind myself that there is hope in the world."
Me: "I just want to watch The Virgin Suicides."
Sarah: "We appear to have opposite reactions."

(Posters and video clips © Walt Disney Company)