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October 24, 2008

'High School Musical 3' is wholesome entertainment

Teen, 'tweens flock to big-screen installment

By Brian Ojanpa

MANKATO — “High School Musical 3: Senior Year” features singing, dancing and soap-scrubbed wholesomeness.

And that’s just among patrons in the theater lobby.

“Last night high school and college girls were singing ‘High School Musical’ songs while they waited in line,” Cinemark Movies 8 general manager Chris Menezes said.

The first two installments of Disney’s wildly successful “High School Musical” franchise were aired on the cable Disney Channel. The latest offering in the trilogy opened in theaters nationwide at midnight Friday.

Menezes said lines snaked through the lobby and beyond for that showing, and Friday afternoon hordes began gathering well in advance of the day’s first matinee.

Kris Gleason of Mankato was there with a gaggle of antsy young girls in tow.

Has mom seen the previous HSM musicals? Silly question.

“Oh, about a thousand times,” Gleason said. “I have TiVo.”

“High School Musical” has been called the “Grease” of a new generation. The latter, released in the 1970s, is regarded as the gold standard for teen movie musicals.

“Maybe for teen musicals, but not for ’tween musicals,” Gleason said.

The distinction is valid because while “Grease” carried a libidinous, rougher edge rife with teen hormonal angst, the squeaky-clean “High School Musical” is geared more for the grade-school set.

Ten-year-old Megan Kalina of Mankato said she loves HSM for its “singing and dancing.”

But what about the boys?

To that, Megan pleaded the fifth by way of a bashful smile.

“Oh, you like Zac,” her mother Janene Kalina told her.

Zac being heartthrob and trilogy star Zac Efron, though at 21 his days of playing a high school kid are all but behind him.

“High School Musical,” set in a fantastical high school where sex, drugs and violence are nothing more than dictionary words, is as innocent as a newborn. And to that it owes its success.

“It’s so not real,” Janene Kalina said. “But you know what? It’s sort of nice to get into that mode, with all the sad things happening in the world.”

Nearby was Kris Gleason’s husband, Dave, looking more than slightly out of place among the female-intensive movie crowd.

He said he was there of his own volition.

“I’ve actually looked forward to it,” he said. “The moral stature of it keeps it light and fun. They don’t get into things they shouldn’t get into.”

Well put, and certainly more so than the attempt made by one of the movie’s stars, Monique Coleman, who touted the HSM franchise with tortured syntax, telling mtv.com:

“I think this movie has inspired kids to follow their dreams — these really cliché things — but it’s sort of true.”

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