Lemonade Mouth Encourages Friendship and Self-Expression

My familiarity with tween Disney phenomena is fairly limited, so before this week I had never heard of the made-for-TV movie Lemonade Mouth, but when Netflix directed me to it, I decided to take a chance on this movie that’s a bit like a mash-up of High School Musical and The Breakfast Club.

Adapted from the Mark Peter Hughes book by April Blair, this movie, directed by Patricia Riggen, could probably be instantly pegged as a tween Disney musical. It just has that look and feel to it. It’s contemporary and earnest, walking the line between hip and corny without fully landing in either territory. For the most part, it’s not as cheesy as I thought it might be, though it definitely has its moments.

Lemonade Mouth takes its name from the band that five Mesa High School students form after an impromptu musical moment in detention, which they serve in the dilapidated music room. Only one of the five is a rabble-rouser; one is there for attempting to cut class under coercion from her boyfriend, and the others are there almost by accident. The beginning of the movie introduces each of them, swiftly establishing their personalities and family issues.

Blond pianist Wen (Adam Hicks) is bitter because his dad (Bob Jesser) is head over heels in love with a 28-year-old bombshell named Sydney (Ariana Smythe) and doesn’t seem to give two hoots about how Wen feels about their quickly-progressing relationship. Half-Japanese anarchic guitarist Stella (Hayley Kiyoko) hates the world because she is living in the shadow of her super-genius parents (Aimee Dale and Scott Takeda), who just moved her across the country a month into the school year.

Floppy-haired drummer Charlie (Blake Michael) is living under his mother’s (Lora Cunningham) expectation that he will be just like his soccer star brother, and Indian-American bassist Mo (Naomi Scott) gets exceptional grades but still feels she can’t live up to her father’s (Shishir Kurup) ideal of a perfect Indian woman. Our narrator, introverted blond singer-songwriter Olivia (Bridgit Mendler), is the only one whose family dynamics come out more gradually; in the beginning, all we know is that she lives with her grandmother (Judith Rane) and sickly cat.

The movie really does an excellent job of distinguishing these characters from one another and making us care about their situations. I found myself invested in every one of them, particularly Wen, whose dad is astonishingly insensitive but whose sweet soon-to-be-stepmom is truly making an effort to reach out to him. My favorite, though, is Olivia, whose quiet disposition and writerly impulses remind me of myself. While aggressive Stella is the driving force behind the band’s formation, gentle Olivia is the most essential as the lead singer and primary songwriter.

Lemonade Mouth starts at the end, with Olivia relating the band’s story at a point at which they have become enormously successful. We see the almost instantaneous rise to fame, and while the hearing-their-song-on-the-radio-for-the-first-time moment pales in intensity to That Thing You Do! or LOST’s Greatest Hits, their joy is still infectious. More striking, however, are communal displays of favor – the Lemonade Mouth signs that start popping up around school, the moment late in the film when fans touchingly demonstrate their absorption of the band’s lyrics.

Those lyrics are generally messages of affirmation, individuality and friendship. A couple of the songs have a rebellious streak, as the band is largely a reactionary effort against Principal Brenigan (Christopher McDonald), who rules over the school with Shatneresque authoritarian cheese. His office wall is covered in surveillance feeds from around the school; his face greets students multiple times a day via video announcements; he makes the rounds of the hallway on his Segway, gleefully distributing detentions.

Brenigan’s the Big Bad, but not really; he’s too silly to be truly intimidating, and every once in a while it’s evident that he truly does care about all his students. However, his chief concern at the moment is the athletics program, which is under the thumb of a sports drink company. The lemonade from the soon-to-be-ousted machine outside the music room becomes a symbol for freedom of expression and the idea that all extracurricular activities should be given adequate attention. The only other adult in the school who we get to know is music teacher Miss Reznick (Tisha Campbell-Martin), an enthusiastic educator frustrated by the principal’s policies and eager to help the kids make their voices of dissent heard.

McDonald and Campbell-Martin give the campiest performances in the movie, but they rarely made me wince and often caused me to chuckle. The songs fall firmly into the teen pop category, so I’m not all that into the style of most of them, but I like the message of most of Lemonade Mouth’s, and their chief rivals, punk rockers Mudslide Crush, offer an amusing juxtaposition with their hostile, self-aggrandizing lyrics. I would never buy the soundtrack to the movie, but the music is enjoyable enough in context.

I expected to find Lemonade Mouth pretty silly, and at times I did, but I was surprised at how invested I got in the main quintet. By the time each of them finds some resolution to the problems pressing on them at the beginning, I actually caught myself misting up a little. I certainly recommend this to the tween crowd, but if you’re older than that, you might consider giving it a shot anyway. It sure didn’t leave a sour taste in my mouth.

Seven-Year-Old Emma Kragen's Vision Hits DVD in The 12 Dogs of Christmas

A couple of years ago, I happened upon The 12 Dogs of Christmas, a cute and simple book that parodies The 12 Days of Christmas by having each day bring dogs of a different breed. Seven-year-old Emma Kragen came up with the concept, while three adults helped with photographing dogs and providing background illustrations. When I found that this book had inspired a movie, I found it hard to imagine what kind of film could come out of a mere listing of dogs of various breeds. I put it in my queue, expecting something pretty silly. After two years on the list, it finally made its way to my mailbox this month, and I must say that while it was silly at times, it was better than I anticipated.

The 12 Dogs of Christmas is a live-action family film set in the 1930s, with a running time of nearly two hours. It stars Jordan-Claire Green as Emma O’Conner, a plucky 12-year-old from Pittsburgh whose out-of-work father sticks her on a train to a town from his past, giving her the address of “Aunt Delores” and a promise to collect her by Christmas. Emma soon finds out that Delores (Bonita Friedericy) is not her aunt but her father’s former flame. She’s still got some pretty bitter feelings toward him and can’t believe his audacity in dropping his daughter on her doorstep.

Naturally, she eventually agrees, albeit reluctantly, to allow Emma to stay with her, though she insists upon her finding a job so she can pay for her food. She even thinks she has the perfect job for Emma - as lackey for the scuzzy local dogcatcher (John Billingsley), who has amorous intentions toward her. But Emma, despite initially professing a dislike for dogs, soon finds herself in league with Mike Stevens (Adam Hicks), a boy who, along with his mom Cathy (Susan Wood), is working diligently to undermine the dogcatcher at every opportunity. His position is especially nefarious because his brother, the mayor (Richard Riehle), in the movie’s most absurd plot point, has outlawed the owning of dogs within city limits, considering them a nuisance. So any dog he finds inside the city is fair game.

This is a direct-to-video movie that is sometimes a little over-the-top and slapsticky and relies on a couple of dubious premises. On the whole, however, it’s polished - infinitely more so than Dear Santa, the low-budget disaster of a movie Netflix last sent me - and the actors, though mostly unfamiliar to me, did their jobs well. I especially enjoyed Riehle, who I’ve seen in several projects, most notably Office Space. He provides a charming mix of pomposity and decency for the mayor. I also loved Eric Lutes, who guest starred in a memorable episode of Frasier, as the football coach who takes over direction of the children’s Christmas program at the last minute, leading him to team up with piano-playing Cathy. His sweet, bumbling manner is most endearing, making him my favorite character in the movie. It was also fun to see Austin Powers‘ Mindy Sterling as a harsh but not altogether unreasonable administrator.

The two young leads are unremarkable but effective. They don’t come across as cheesy, except perhaps Hicks in one scene, though Green is a bit wooden at times. In general, though, they do a good job. Friedericy and Billingsley are both over-the-top, but the former is mostly entertaining, while the latter is mostly grating. The movie, directed by Kieth Merrill and written by Merrill and Steven Paul Leiva, seems mostly historically accurate and reminds me of Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, which is set during the same time period.

Of course, one might argue that the entire purpose of this movie is to find an excuse to assemble a film version of Emma Kragen’s vision, and that does happen, in the form of the kids’ Christmas pageant. It’s a little too convenient that Cathy’s makeshift shelter just happens to contain exactly the right numbers of each type of dog to pull that off. That is the movie’s second-most-unbelievable plot point, but I’ll let it slide since it’s the scene around which the film was written.

The DVD includes a behind-the-scenes peek at the movie that mainly consists of poorly edited interviews with the actors. Lute’s segments are the best, as he infuses his responses with considerable wit. The kids - who include Hicks, Green and Alisha Mullally, who plays their classmate Miranda - seem giggly and nervous, and there’s something a bit eye-rolling about Green’s explanation that, in essence, the true meaning of Christmas is that dogs are lovable.

But dogs are lovable, at least to many of us. If that includes you, The 12 Dogs of Christmas might just bring a smile to your face.