The Jonas Brothers — in all their pop-twink, Disney-cultivated, allegedly virginal, new-millennial Cowsills glory — take their onslaught upon pop culture to the big screen with “Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.” And as the saying goes, people who like this sort of thing will like this sort of thing.
This is a movie aimed squarely at the demographic who doodles “Mrs. Kimberly Jonas” on her Social Studies spiral notebook, and that audience will no doubt eat it up.
Filmed at the JoBros’ sold-out Madison Square Garden show, “The 3D Concert Experience” provides a real you-are-there feeling, with Disney’s very effective Real 3D process making it seem like Joe, Kevin and Nick are right there in front of you.
Points to Nick for doing the least amount of mugging and throwing stuff at the camera; the other two siblings overdo it like they were in that old “SCTV” sketch for “Dr. Tongue’s 3D House of Stewardesses.”
The movie is just 76 minutes long, but it feels like almost a fourth of it is padded with backstage stuff (try not to hyperventilate, Kimberly, but you totally get to see Joe and Kevin take off their shirts), a music video, OMG-our-crazy-fans footage, an appearance by three guys who call themselves the Fake Jonas Brothers (“They say they’re living the dream,” observes Fake Joe, “and we’re dreaming the life”) and guest star turns by fellow Disney creations Demi Lovato and Taylor Swift.
(Didn’t one of the brothers dump Swift via voicemail? Maybe that happened after principal photography was completed.)
I’m a fan of power-pop, and I was even an unapologetic Hanson listener when it was uncool to be one, so I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the actual music here. The Jonases, alas, make Hanson sound like critically-acclaimed cult band Jellyfish. And while we’re on the subject, Lovato makes Vanessa Carlton sound like Kate Bush, and Swift makes Carrie Underwood sound like Kitty Wells.
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Jonas Brothers invasion
I wish that the Jonas sound was a gateway pop drug that would lead their fans to grow up and buy Owsley and Bill Lloyd CDs, but the music here is your basic bland, slick and shrewdly marketed product. If the charts are any indication, the girls screaming for the Jonas Brothers today will flip for the next pre-fab commodity tomorrow.
The only attempt at giving the fellas any kind of personality comes in a contrived, faux–“Hard Day’s Night” intro that tries to establish Joe as The Girl-Crazy One, Kevin as The Organized One and Nick as … well, The Other One.
Onstage, however, it’s clear that Nick is the real musical prodigy of the bunch, as he plays guitar, piano and drums at various times in the film.
Enjoy being the flat-ironed-hair pinup now, Joe; history tells us that the average-looking guys who can play instruments are the ones who have career longevity in the music biz, while the Tiger Beat pretty boys wind up on VH1’s “Confessions of a Teen Idol.”
For the outside observer, perhaps the most interesting aspects of “The 3D Concert Experience” are the odd moments of sexual sublimation — the brothers all famously sport “purity rings” promising abstinence until marriage, but that doesn’t stop Joe from attempting a fat-free-cheesy riff on Mick Jagger’s famous stage strut. Nor does it keep the brothers from — and I’m not making this up — pulling out hoses and spraying foam on the audience in the middle of the show.
No matter what Freud might say about that moment, at least it’s rock and roll.