Super Sweet 16: The Movie

My friends forced me to watch Super Sweet 16: The Movie with them yesterday. It's the usual teen chick flick, but it isn't one of the good ones. The acting was nearing miserable, mostly due to Brendan Miller, who looked so "All-American-Football-Jock" it was way hard to believe he was supposed to be a documentary-crazed nerd type. But he does serve well as eye-candy. Aly is fine as Taylor Tiara, the super-rich popular girl who tries to break up the friendship of Jacquie and Sarah, the environment-conscious vegan AJ plays.

The production qualities are great and the story is fun, though.

My Advice: Skip this movie and watch some chick flicks that are actually good. (Mean Girls, Heathers, She's the Man...)

I caught this on TV tonight, regrettably. I can't name a single good thing about it. So let's point out the negatives: poor direction, rubbish acting and really (i mean REALLY!) 2D characters. I wasn't impressed by that Lindsay Lohan flick Mean Girls, but that was fantastic in comparison. The story centres around the most awesome hero ev-err(!), Miss Philanthropist Blonde who's a vegan environmentalist, and who doesn't care about fashion, etc. Basically a typical delusion of the less socially successful. And everyone sees she's better than her fashion-mad rival, Miss Dumb Blonde. But when her best friend joins her school, Miss Philanthropist is appalled to see her friend (from a racial minority, of course!) is impressed by Miss Dumb. What's more she can see Miss Dumb is using her friend! O M G (as Miss Dumb would somewhat annoyingly say). The film is ridiculously lazy: everything is 100% PC, as well as regurgitated, bizarrely, from similar terrible films. But none so bad as this, and the only excuse for watching it is if you want to delude yourself. I hate these films myself but if you're considering watching this, go watch Mean Girls instead. If you have taste, avoid all films aimed at WASP teenage girls. Thank you and goodnight.

When two lifelong best friends are reunited after one spends a year at boarding school, their friendship is tested by a popular senior that wants to take over control of their sweet sixteen party.

The plot is very simple and has been done many times before. For an MTV movie, the actors were pretty good, except for Sarah's love interest Shannon (Brendan Miller), and an over-the-top and ultimately just irritating party coordinator played by Debra Wilson of Mad TV fame.

To go off on a tangent about poor writing, Sarah (Amanda Michalka) is a student activist that makes a big deal about taking cheese off of her pizza because she's a vegan, but has no problem eating ice-cream. And poor writing for her character also leads to her cheese-free comment of "I don't eat anything with a face"... Sorry, but cheese doesn't have a face, nor does the milk that it is made from.

Much of the dialogue is corny, and the character personas are overdone. The time between what they begin as and what they "become" happens too quickly without any transitional period. It's probably the best effort they could have made to turn an MTV reality show into a feature-length scripted movie. Overall, if you keep your expectations low, you might enjoy it. Maybe.

Let me just start off by saying 3 of the 8 stars I am giving go to the movie. The movie was funny and like every TV movie, predictable. Sarah and Jacquie are best friends until their Sweet 16's and....oh you get the idea.The other 5 stars go to the Michalka sisters a.k.a Aly&AJ. They do a great job in this film. AJ is great as Sarah and Aly is really good at capturing Taylor. I mean, if you watch any of their interviews, Aly is not mean at all. For me, the highlight of the film is the cafeteria scene. Where you see how hard these girls are trying to get their parties populated with people. Especially, when Sarah says "Remember, the devil did wear Prada". Basically, what I'm saying is the Michalka sisters made the movie what it was.

This movie has a great storyline, but they play way too much in between a PG and PG-13 rating, they honestly tried a little too hard. Cassie Steele and Paula De'Anda carried the film, and their parts should have been more fulfilled. Ally and AJ seriously should have demanded rewrites in the script to better their rivalry chemistry, but the music of the movie was the highlight of it all, along with wardrobe and location sets.