Strict Barriers Come Down in the Tween Rom-Com Geek Charming

My friend Libbie invited me over to her house recently, in part because she had noticed that the Keisha Knight Pulliam / Phylicia Rashad movie Polly, a made-for-TV musical adaptation of Pollyanna, was among the Video On Demand choices for the week. I’d gushed about the movie before, and she remembered. Unfortunately, when we went to watch it, the movie wasn’t there anymore. Instead, though, we went with a different made-for-TV Disney movie, the much more recent Geek Charming, starring Sarah Hyland from Modern Family as a stereotypical mean girl who gets thrown into a close association with a nerdy classmate.

This is pretty much your average uber-predictable tween movie about an outcast getting in with a popular crowd and briefly abandoning his friends before repenting in a very public manner (usually, as is the case here, at a school dance). There’s a slight twist here as it’s not just about the geek getting in with the popular crowd but also about the popular girl unleashing her inner geek. In other words, it’s about breaking down barriers. While it’s still pretty cheesy and over-the-top, it has many moments of genuine sweetness.

Matt Prokop is Josh Rosen, an aspiring filmmaker in desperate need of a subject for a documentary contest that could help him get into film school. Hyland is Dylan Schoenfield, who just has to be pronounced Blossom Queen at the upcoming dance. She’s a queen bee with a loyal posse, but she has tough competition, and a film like the one Josh wants to make could just be what she needs to win over enough fans to take the crown.

Josh is generally very likable, aside from his sour attitude about popular kids in general. He definitely comes across as a bit elitist himself in the beginning. As a gal who considers “geeky” to be practically a prerequisite for my own idea of Prince Charming, I didn’t have much trouble sympathizing with him, though he’s far from the most endearing geek I’ve encountered on TV. Meanwhile, Dylan, who lives in a mansion and is waited on by a housekeeper, is never quite as blanketly obnoxious as the mean girls in these types of movies usually are. Even when she’s at her worst, she has a nice streak, so the gulf between these two isn’t as wide as it might be in some movies.

The gradual friendship and sparks between these two is the heart of the movie, and the development is done pretty well. There are a couple of cute scenes with Dylan’s surprisingly down-to-earth dad (Andrew Airlie) and Josh’s wise, supportive mom (Lilli Birdsell), and Josh’s gang of misfits is fun. There’s also an interesting subplot with Amy (Sasha Pieterse), the artsy girl Josh admires from afar who has a past connection with Dylan. My favorite side character, though, is Josh’s film advisor, Mr. Farley (David Milchard), mostly for the incredibly compelling reason that he has a Scottish accent and I love listening to him talk.

Generally, I found neither the writing nor the acting to be particularly noteworthy, but aside from some of the silly jargon Dylan uses – particularly the oft-used “’what’ and ‘ever’” – the dialogue usually feels reasonably realistic. Some of the plot elements are a bit cheesy, but that’s to be expected. One thing I loved and didn’t see coming at all was a scene in which several of the characters see Flight of the Navigator at the theater and discuss it afterward. I mean, what Cineplex is re-running Flight of the Navigator - and where can I sign up? I was so tickled by their discussion I had to watch that Disney classic again for myself.

While the big confessional scenes – there are two in this movie instead of the traditional one – are just as overblown as I would have expected, the quieter moments that get us to that point are enjoyable, and I appreciated that this was not just about a nice kid mingling with the in crowd and returning to his old friends but about a diva remembering she wasn’t always that way and learning how to be herself again. I still much prefer Polly, but Geek Charming is certainly not without its charms.