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Reviews
Lemonade Mouth (2011)
Acceptable for the demographic...
Having watched and discussed this movie with my nine-year-old niece, I found it both entertaining and disappointing.
I hadn't intended to post here, but after reading reviews on a number of different sites, I decided what the heck – 'be heard'! :-) *steps up on soapbox* It was definitely entertaining, even with the necessity to 'suspend belief' in a lot of instances – as was pointed out in a number of postings I read, by 'youthful' reviewers. I'm also was quite comfortable with the 'message' I believe the story was meant to convey – with some effort, we can ALL overcome and achieve.
Decent cast, although I have issues with how the 'adults' were portrayed. But then, it's a Disney movie and is of course, meant to reach a demographic other than my old self. *laughs* While all the 'kids' did seem to mesh and work well together, I thought I noticed some kind of 'connection' between Miss Mendler and Mr Hicks – or their characters at least. Miss Scott did, in my opinion, exceptionally well with the whole 'American' accent thing. Kudos to her.
Now... the 'disappointed' part. As is usually the case when going from print to screen, I feel the original story (I did actually read the book before I gave it to my niece) was indeed, lost in the conversion. And, as we all know, movie-making is a business, and for the most part, projects are evaluated on the premise of profits. And yes, as I have seen posted by a number of youthful revolutionaries, *smirk* it shouldn't always be about profit. Unfortunately however, without profits, we'd have FAR FEWER movies worth watching. I will say that in this case, the changes from book to movie seem to have worked – quite nicely.
I am VERY disappointed with the production of this movie. There are a BUNCH (a double-digit number) of filming/editing errors in it, making it blatantly apparent that Disney shot this solely on the premise of showing it on TV – and not in theaters. While I'm not going to delve too far into this, I will give you what I considered the most obvious. It involves a label-less bottle of water. In one scene, to characters are sitting at a table talking, the camera changes angles from one to the other as each of them has dialogue. During one of the cuts, a bottle of water appears between them, and then on the very next cut, disappears. There are a number of others, but my point is; the actors involved deserved better than to have all their efforts tossed into a blender, with the final result being a 5 (barely) on a scale of 10 for editing.
Shame on you Disney. Good thing your demographic turned out to be YOUNG.
Ultimately, I will say this: Any movie that can get a nine year old to continuously repeat 'be heard, be strong, be proud', is in this writer's opinion, a GOOD MOVIE.
*steps down off his soapbox*