Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
Four stars (out of four: for Gleeks)
Two and a half stars (out of four: for the rest)
Rated: G
Who’d ever think a packed stadium of modern-day teens could lose their minds over nerds in Harry Potter-like school uniforms crooning forgettable ’70s sappy popper Silly Love Songs?
Behold the power of Glee, the TV show poised to begin its third season, having spawned near-manic love among its fans for choral music and the gang of misfits and outsiders who make it on the show each week.
Glee has outgrown its small-screen start to become a pop-culture phenomenon, with 34 million songs downloaded to date, enough merchandise sold to bail out the Greek economy and a 40-date concert tour earlier this year featuring the actors reprising their roles and hit songs from the show live for screaming hordes of fans, those who loyally call themselves Gleeks.
Filmed in 3-D over two nights in East Rutherford, N.J., it’s hardly a groundbreaking concert film. The Stones and U2 can sleep easy. In fact, the concert seems slightly amateurish, which gives it a simple, often awkward charm of the “my dad’s got a barn, let’s put on a show” variety. The players aren’t sure how to work together onstage as musicians, so they tend toward hopping up and down in unison, broad mugging, or skipping around with determined ferocity.
All, that is, except Kevin McHale (Artie), who plays a student in a wheelchair, so he does his pops and locks in a seated position. He is wheeled around so often by the other performers it looks like he was auditioning for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? The thing is, McHale is not in a wheelchair in real life, which is why he launches to his feet to do a madcap song-and-dance rendition of Safety Dance. Don’t be puzzled; just go with it — that’s the Glee spirit.
Luckily for fans, Fox Broadcasting, which airs the show, also has a movie studio. It seemed a natural to film the Glee concert, especially when the actual tour was so brief, given the actors’ availability. It’s also for all those parents who replied to their entreating kids: “The tickets cost how much?!”
Some of those parents bought tickets themselves, however, as sweeping shots of the blissed-out audience show. Grey-haired guys, gay couples of all ages, moms and daughters and, of course, masses of teens, jammed the stadium, most of them dressed in Glee-inspired garb.
To pad out the movie, between the songs there are almost evangelical testimonials of three young Gleeks: a “little person” teen girl who is also a cheerleader and prom queen, a young woman with Asperger syndrome and a 19-year-old who faced a painful time when his homosexuality was revealed in high school. All of them have compelling arguments about how Glee changed their lives, making them accepting of others as well as themselves.
It’s a theme that’s repeated often during quick parking-lot interviews with fans, and why knock that kind of positivity?
The concert rarely strays from the squeaky-clean middle-America path, although Mark Salling (Puck), who turns 29 on Wednesday, too long in the tooth for a high school show, makes some G-rated sexual references before rocking out on Queen’s Fat Bottomed Girls.
Heather Morris (Brittany) strips down and tries for smouldering in her cover of Britney Spears’ I’m a Slave 4 U, along with a chorus of sexed-up dancers but while her footwork is precise, she stumbles on the sultry part.
As for Glee’s sweetheart, the leather-lunged Lea Michele (Rachel), her version of Barbra Streisand’s show-stopping Rain on My Parade sounds rushed and doesn’t make the grade. Maybe she really was nervous, as she alludes to in a backstage moment when the cast participate in interviews in character.
Opening with the show’s anthem, Don’t Stop Believin’, the film moves along at a good clip, coming in at a tidy 90 minutes. The 3-D is little more than a novelty; some streamers add an air of festivity, but mostly the effect gets in the way, as singers who cross main performers upstage suddenly dominate the screen. As they do on the show, belters Michele and sassy pants gal Naya Rivera (Santana) and Canuck cutie Cory Monteith (Finn) get plenty of stage time, but the singer who steals the show is Amber Riley (Mercedes). She stands on a small stage and delivers Aretha Franklin’s Ain’t No Way like a sassy, self-assured concert veteran.
Missing from the show are stalwarts Jane Lynch (evil Cheerios cheerleading squad coach Sue Sylvester) and beloved teacher Will Schuester played by Matthew Morrison. But they likely had better things to do on their break from the show. Perhaps Gwyneth Paltrow, who now fancies herself a singer, didn’t. She shows up to do her cover of Cee Lo Green’s Forget You, which she did in a guest spot as McKinley High’s substitute sex-education teacher.
Murphy has said that the cast of Glee will graduate this season, proof that nothing lasts forever. And Glee: The 3D Concert Movie will only have a two-week run in theatres. But the songs will live on through DVD. Don’t stop believin’ that, Gleeks.
Linda Barnard is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.