Thursday, September 1, 2011

Prom (2011)

The universe that Disney’s Prom takes place in is not one that exists in the real world, and you can thank your messiah for it. It’s one of those fantasy-land high-school utopias where all the kids use Crest Whitestrips and McNuggets never go to their thighs. It’s multi-racial, but everyone is vanilla, and they all speak in the language of teenager platitudes. If such a world existed, Mitt Romney would send all of his children to high school there, and they’d never have to worry about drugs, or crime, or peer pressure, or bullying, or acne. It’s a world where Santa Claus exists, and where a poop fairy comes every night while you’re asleep and evacuates your bowels so you never have to bother yourselves with unpleasantries like dropping a deuce. Everyone in that world comes from Disney’s central casting, under the roles: “People who look like they’d be friends with that Bieber kid.”

It’s a fucked up place, and if Doctor Who were to land on such a planet, he’d probably discover the sinister machinations that might keep such a utopia running: Alien unicorns being probed and ground up into an energy source underneath the planet. If I had a 16-year-old daughter who wanted to see Prom, I’d wonder where I went wrong as a father, and then I’d send her to some hippie socialist gay camp to get her head on straight. Nobody should grow up in a JCPenney’s catalog. The world of Prom makes the world of “Saved by the Bell” look like a goddamn crack den with methed-out prosties rubbing up against each other for contact highs. There, there, Jesse. A.C. Slater will make everything OK for a dimebag and a handjob.


Aimee Teegarden (“Friday Night Lights”) is at the center of Prom, one of those whitebread class president types with glimmering teeth, a perfect SAT score, and a scholarship to Georgetown. She’s also organizing the prom, and it’s very important to her that she afford her classmates that one last “special night” (don’t fret, though; sex is not on anyone’s mind here; sex is messy, and these kids don’t get dirty). The problem is, her expected suitor, Mr. Practical Polo Shirt, has no sense of romance, and instead of asking Nova (that’s her name) to Prom, he suggests that they carpool together (*swoon*). Things fall apart, however, when Nice Black Guy uses the storage shed to light candles and ask Nice Black Girl to Prom, inadvertently setting all the prom decorations ablaze only three weeks before the glittery hoe-down.

Enter Mr. Dark and Brooding, but only in the Disney sense of the word. He rides a motorcycle. He has long hair. His mom works at a 50’s diner that serves milkshakes, but because his Dad left his family, he’s “troubled.” He has to skip class every Monday to pick his little brother up because his Mom has to take an extra shift to ensure that the kids can continue eating Frosted Mini Wheats for breakfast. Scowling Principal punishes Mr. Dark and Brooding by making him help Nova re-organize the prom. Naturally, Nova dislikes Mr. Dark and Brooding. But once she gets to know him, and once her Dad calls him a “loser” (the meanest word uttered in the entire film), she gravitates toward him. Because somewhere deep, deep down beneath the gated-community, Disney mind control, her panties are ablaze. Her inner Eva Mendes wants out, and it wants to fuck Mr. Dark and Brooding against a wall.


There are an array of minor characters, too, all white teeth and perfect hair and meticulously crafted stammers. There’s Sophomore Kid who is in love with Sophomore Girl, but she’s kind of hung up on Nice Black Guy, who isn’t all that nice, because he’s stringing along Nice Black Girl, until Nice Black Girl finds out Nice Black Guy has been holding hands with Sophomore Girl and dumps him. Nice Black Girl is without a date to Prom, but fortunately, there’s a mawfucking Cusack-looking idgit who wonders around the high school making grand romantic gestures (all various forms of cheesy signage) in order to land a date. Clearly, they’re the only two seniors left in high school without a date, so they are meant to be. Meanwhile, Ginger Best Friend is jealous that Sophomore Kid is more concerned with dating Sophomore Girl than their shared interests in the greatest band in all the land, Stick Hippo. There’s also Bland Brunette, who is smitten with Computer Geek, and Asian Girl who hasn’t told Glasses that she’s going to New York City for college, where she’ll last exactly two weeks before she realizes that living in NYC is nothing like the movie Enchanted after she runs into strung out Zach Morris, who her offers her a taste for a taste.

There must be an audience for Prom, though I am at a loss to describe it. Even the lifeless and maudlin Twilight series is miles better, what with the vampires and the werewolves and the promise of Edward tearing open Bella’s uterus with his teeth. Prom is a movie that evangelical soccer moms might send their daughters to because The Princess Diaries is too subversive, what with that harlot who stars in it later showing her tits in that gay movie. I suppose it’s also the sort of movie that Goth Girls could dress down for to take their Grandmothers in order to afford their Nanas the impression that Goth Girl is all freckles and smiles and no premarital sex. But I’m guessing that even most Nanas would scoff, wondering how their daugthers managed to raise such lame kids. Nana wanted shirtless boys and prom-night orgies, and all she got was this lame fucking film.

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