Movie: “Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience”

Director: Bruce Hendricks

Rating: ** (out of five)

Let’s just get it out of the way – both you and I know what the Jonas Brothers really are. Like Miley Cyrus, they are Disney mechanisms constructed out of the spare parts of old Disney stars. Their mission is to assimilate and program young tween girls to be good consumers and buy into the corporate machine. Their music is bubblegum pop containing nothing of real substance, while their lyrics deal with concepts far beyond their maturity levels. These boys sing about love and loss, but are they old enough to know anything about true romantic love? I seriously doubt that Nick, Kevin and Joe Jonas have lived 50 lifetimes and are secretly the reincarnations of Jane Austin, Shakespeare and Freddy Mercury, respectively. Agreed?

But tween girls probably do not know that, and will not care. The “Jonas Brothers: 3-D Concert Experience” will please the girls within a certain age demographic just fine, for the movie is intended for them. For anyone else to see it and expect some highly cerebral experience is simply pure folly. It will be a test of endurance for parents to see how much they love their Jonas-crazed daughters when dragged into the theater.

Knowing how mediocre the Jonas Brothers’ music is, the wiser of the parents will cringe when they see how the filmmakers link the popularity of this band to The Beatles. In the beginning of the film, the boys reenact the opening of “A Hard Day’s Night” and are chased from their cars and down the street by rabid fans. Wide angle and crane shots are meticulously planted to capture the size of the crowd. It’s as if the filmmakers were anticipating a large crowd to follow the brothers to a helicopter, like it was scripted! At least in The Beatles’ movie, the hand-held camera work made the crowds feel spontaneous. But an even bigger difference between the opening of the Jonas Brothers movie and “A Hard Day’s Night” is that The Beatles were actually worth chasing down the street.

To be fair to the tween fans, I know how excited they must be for this movie. Just recently I watched a video of a contemporary rock artist from Korea, Seotaiji, joining with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to put on a show complete with fireworks and pyrotechnics. The intensity of my jubilation rivaled the screams of the fanatical girls in the crowd of the Jonas Brothers concert. It’s an amazing experience to see your favorite musician in a high-quality concert. In the Jonas film, the production value is high, the accompanying orchestra sounds good, and the 3-D looks great. It’s about as good a concert movie you could expect out of the Jonas Brothers.

But their music will not stand the test of time, and popularity is fleeting. Once their time runs out, the Jonas Brothers will go extinct the same sad way as Britney Spears or the Backstreet Boys – with ridicule and contempt from the same media that once built them up.