High School Musical

To introduce my new system of film criticism, I thought the best way to showcase its parameters is to watch High School Musical for the very first time. I did not grow up with Disney Channel when I was a kid, I watched Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network instead, and finally putting a face to the songs and references in this film I had seen for so many years was both hilariously alien and strangely nostalgic.

Not only does the story world take place in 2006, but it lives under Disney's domain, creating a glittery, bizarre lens into high school, yet the recreation manages to keep its dated reality somehow familiar to this day. It was weird how I already knew the characters before they even came on screen. The writing doubles down on several clichés, but it works. There is always that piano girl with her own music, or the varsity athlete trying theater, or the popular girl feels threatened by a new girl trying to fit in. It builds up the high school drama as real high school drama, even though it is oversimplified to fit the runtime. Now, the main problem of this film is how they treat these characters; there is a lot of melodrama to keep the excitement going, resulting with the scenes involved to stumble in quality. Luckily, though, this brief moment of forced tension leads to one of the best songs in the film, Vanessa Hudgens’ solo.

The best scenes are the music numbers. Not only are the songs catchy, but the dancing and energy committed to each one is fantastic and so overdramatic. Vanessa Hudgens really shines in these scenes, and it is a lot of fun to see Zac Efron lip sync the whole time. The two songs that did not really land for me were “Get Your Head in the Game” and "Stick to the Status Quo." They were not bad, but I knew the words and setting to those songs before I watched the film, and seeing what they actually sounded like did not meet my expectations. But to be fair, this is a tv-movie. they were not trying to compete with The Sound of Music or White Christmas. For me, it is because this film was made for Disney Channel that makes it so unique. The humor is so forced, and the sets are so aggressively vibrant that in such a strange way. I love it.

Overall, High School Musical is a blast to watch in more ways than one. Most of the songs are absolute ear worms, the camerawork is pretty good with amazing sets for a TV movie, and the over-acting reaches just the right amount of camp. The only reason I did not watch the sequels were because I want to watch it with people to maximize the enjoyment.

How the new system works is based on scoring every scene in the film on its own. Therefore, a third act cannot save a film, nor can a rough beginning drown out its peaks. Each scene will be scored from a scale of 1-5:

1 = ("yikes") glaringly bad, would be mentioned after walking out of theater

2 = ("rough") awkward/ broken/ boring

3 = ("meh") passable, does what it needs to do

4 = ("textbook") set up and pay off within scene, individual story within the story

5 = ("excellence") culmination of momentum + character + themes

What counts as a scene?

Location changes

Transition shots in the process of (i.e. talking on street in between office and apartment)

Montages/ back-and-forth sequences count as 1 scene

Shift in camera/ character set up with shift in tone and/ or conversation

At the end of the film, I will graph the data into 2 graphs:

The Rolling Average of the individual scenes to show the flow of how the film built on its story.

The Cumulative Score of the scenes shift from 1—5 to -2—2. This approach shows when the film falls in its entertainment, elevates to the next level, or simply attempts to keep the audience awake (in that specific case the scene is now scored 0 instead of 3).

The grand average score for the 77 scenes is 3.1038961/5, or:

~6.2/10