I can easily say that the day I had today was well worth the hassle of being stuck in town for a few extra days.  I spent the afternoon/evening with some of my favourite people from my undergrad years.  We were able to relax with each other and have some of the fun that kind of got a little lost as we progressed through the years.

The last portion of a the day would have been terrible with anyone else, but the company made it bearable... therefore, here is a movie review:

High School Musical 3:

Ugghh.  Generally this movie was pretty terrible.

Do you ever wonder what life would be like if you just broke out into song at the drop of a hat?  It would be trite, fickle, and badly overdubbed - just like this movie.

The storyline was weak at best - a group of high-school students write a high-school musical to commemorate the end of their high-school careers.. how high school!  The movie starts off with the basketball team only having 16 minutes left on their last game of the season, and even though they're already talking about prom being around the corner, they have time to write, rehearse, and do a performance run of this elaborately tacky musical.  Of course, the musical has no real story, and it's pretty much just rehashings of songs that were sung earlier in the movie.

As a musical, this triple threat fell flat on its ass: Acting was horrific and unbelievable, much like most musicals, but really... this is a big budget one - at least try!!  Dancing was somewhat redeemable.  The leads were quite good, and there was some strong corps dancing by the guys, but the females didn't make the cut.  At one point there was a kicking chorus line, if you could even dare to call it that - feet were variable pointed... if pointed at all, there was a good 30 degrees variation on kick height, and they were pathetically low!  The singing... well, it was dubbed and way over-processed.  The female vocal lead was pretty bad and the use of pitch correction technology was horribly obvious and shouldn't even have been necessary.  If you're recording something... the professionals should be good enough that they can record something decent on their own, they have lots of opportunity to try, try, and try again... it's not like they are performing it live!  Goddamn, give me a recording studio and a Hollywood budget... I would sound like fucking Horowitz!  Most annoyingly was the slash job of dubbing.  Golly, they can match up voices to cartoon characters, so why can't they do the same for these so-called actors!

Besides all the the numerous flaws with this musical, there were a few good things:

The lead guy was a nice hunk of eye-candy, at first I felt a little guilty cause he was playing a high-school student, but I checked and he's 21, so it's all good.

It's a feel good experience.  As much as I mock, you can't not smile/laugh/pass gas during the overly cheesy romantic moments, or the overdramatized moments where every ounce of their soul is riding on how well they spontaneously dance in the middle of a basketball game.

In conclusion, this movie blows, but it was great fun to watch and make fun of!