Raved With Good Intentions

Year: 2016

Director: Christopher Louie

Cast: Sarah Hyland, Graham Phillips, Brett DelBuono

Run Time: 1 our 32 minutes

Rating: TV-MA

I have no idea why XOXO exists. Combining the central conflict and half the cast of Jem and the Holograms with the EDM subject matter of We Are Your Friends, the Netflix original film is cobbled together from the two biggest flops of 2015. Nevermind that I kinda like both those movies, it just doesn’t seem like a solid investment. And the first-time writer-director, former animator Christopher Louie, is no Duffer Brothers, to say the least. Oh well. Maybe I’m just getting old.

He who is tired of watching other people party is tired of life.

XOXO wants to be the Love, Actually of the rave scene, detailing the myriad adventures of the attendees of the XOXO EDM show and how they cross paths. Our de facto protagonist is Ethan Shaw (Graham Phillips), an aspiring DJ who lands a coveted last-minute slot on the XOXO lineup, but is too shy to play his own demos. He doesn’t seem aware of how raves actually work. Or record deals, as evidenced by his seduction by the skeevy headliner Avilo (Ryan Hansen). Or USB drives. There are literally two separate scenes where the tension hinges on his inability to plug things in. This guy’s our hero.

Anyway, the other characters are Tariq (Brett DelBuono), Ethan’s best friend/manager who attempts to hold a meeting with a record producer and find Ethan among the throng after being accidentally dosed with LSD; Shannie (Hayley Kiyoko) and Ray (Colin Woodell), a couple trying to enjoy their last day together before she moves across the country for a year; Neil (Chris D’Elia), a music shop owner/rave Grinch who used to be a DJ but is bitter about the scene; and Krystal (Sarah Hyland, the film’s biggest “name”), a rave virgin/regular virgin who is there to meet a guy she’s been talking to online for a month. But is she really ready for this?

And, more importantly, are we?

Like any film dedicated to depicting a very now subculture, XOXO is hastily assembled, slapdash, and kind of hilarious. Now I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve never been to a rave, and I’ll die happy if that never changes. But judging from XOXO’s too-trendy teens and depiction of the show as a drug-soaked erotic bacchanal as envisioned by a suburban soccer mom’s G-rated nightmare journal, Christopher Louie has been to even fewer than I. 

I mean, at least I have Instagram friends who go to Electric Daisy Carnival.

When XOXO is an adult’s attempt at translating the world of teens for other teens, it’s a doofy but loveable flop. Then when it really settles down for some deep interpersonal drama, the engine drops out at 40,000 feet. But before it plummets to its saccharine demise, it’s worth at least keeping on in the background while you wash dishes. Let’s focus on that part for the time being.

Full of the hip teenage standbys of giant text bubble chockablock with random emojis, zooms on YouTube pages as the numbers rack up, and ridiculous ABBA reject outfits that adults think people actually wear, the first act of XOXO is a manic slalom through too many characters doing too many things that make too little sense. There’s actually some genuinely good dialogue in this sequence, though the lazy clunkers start here and only pick up momentum as the show goes on. It’s a shoddily tossed-together sugar rush that’s easy to mock but easier to find at least a  little endearing.

However as the stories progress, they either settle into an entirely predictable formula, stop making any semblance of sense, or lose steam and evaporate from the film entirely. There are still some pockets of campy B-movie magic, like the reclusive creator of the rave, who’s one part Great Gatsby and one part Willy Wonka, but the film’s attempts at emotional sincerity are stunted by its Dollar-Tree-wrapping-paper-thin characters.

Seriously, that stuff tears if somebody’s using scissors NEXT DOOR.

It’s kind of impossible to care about these people because, other than Ethan, they’re only given one character trait to beat over and over like a bongo drum. And they don’t have “arcs” so much as linear stretches from point A to point B, and point B is dancing. I find watching other people have fun onscreen to be an intolerably boring experience, and if you’re anything like me, XOXO will grate on you like your brain is a block of parmesan.

There are some alright moments. Chris D’Elia is amusingly misanthropic. You get to see Ryan Hansen’s arms, and man is that dude aging like a fine wine. But for the most part, XOXO is a transient burst of energy, like a Pixie Stick. There’s still a little powder left in the tube after the initial rush, but you have to work way too hard to get to it. Stick to Netflix’s original series and don’t bother with this half-baked feature.

TL;DR: XOXO is a slightly bad-good but mostly messy exploration of an exhausting teen subculture.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 855

Glamour And Glitter, Fashion And Fame

Year: 2015

Director: Jon M. Chu

Cast: Aubrey Peeples, Stefanie Scott, Juliette Lewis

Run Time: 1 hour 58 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

As is so often necessary in this modern Hollywood epoch of renewing and rebooting old properties, I must lead with a disclaimer. I have never seen the popular 80’s cartoon series Jem, from which the film Jem and the Holograms is loosely adapted. From what I’ve heard, hardcore fans of the show would have been better off pretending they’ve never seen it either if they wanted to avoid a deadly clot of frustration. Although, all things considered, the statistical likelihood that anybody reading this has actually watched the film is extremely low.

You see, Jem and the Holograms is now the record holder for worst wide release opening weekend of 2015, the fourth worst of all time (it’s only behind Delgo, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, and the genuinely embarrassing Saw 10th anniversary re-release). It made back approximately half its production budget and was pulled from cinemas after just two mortifying weeks. And even if you’re someone who wanted to see it (a demographic of pretty much just me), you couldn’t. It took me five different Redbox excursions to actually find the disc, and the exuberantly misinformed idea to price the retail DVD at $20+ could be the subject of the next Michael Lewis book. This kind of high profile disaster is music to my bad movie-loving ears, so of course I had to give it a look. Here’s my field report.

After procuring a pink wig and covering my natural scent by rolling in a pile of glitter, the Holograms are finally beginning to accept me as one of their own.

In Jem and the Holograms, Jerrica Benton (Aubrey Peeples) is your average teen girl from the “least likely” place ever: The Valley. After her father passed away, she and her sister Kimber (Stefanie Scott) moved in with their Aunt Bailey (Molly Ringwald for some reason) and became a part of her Polly Pocket Dream house family. Bailey owns a costume shop (because nobody in this universe is, like, a dentist or something), and her foster daughters Shana (Aurora Perrineau) and Aja (Hayley Kiyoko) are a fashionista and a gearhead respectively. Nobody seems to be interested in Netflix or videogames or have homework to do.

Yadda yadda yadda, Molly Ringwald is about to get evicted because the costume shop business ain’t what it used to be. But! After Jerrica puts on a wig and makeup and performs a song as Jem, which gets uploaded to YouTube, she becomes a viral sensation. Because if movies are to be believed, literally anything uploaded to the Internet will spread like wildfire, something this blog provides evidence against. She is being courted by record executive Erica Raymond (Juliette Lewis), and the money she’s offering could pay their bills! Jem insists that her sisters come along to be her band, and thus begins a month-long rocket to superstardom. The buzz from the original acoustic video is so huge that they already have a national fanbase based on that one song. Naturally, nothing they play is ever acoustic ever again.

But! Erica wants Jem to be a solo artist for some ill-defined reason. Will this cause a rift between her and her sisters? Will her secret Jem identity consume her soul? Will she ever get to make out with Erica’s super hot son Rio (Ryan Guzman), with whom she has so little chemistry that their atoms seem to actively repel one another? Also! Her dead dad left behind a robot called Synergy, which is leading her on an epic musical scavenger hunt across LA to learn about herself and her values or some crap.

Yeah, that sci-fi element sure worked its way into the story organically. What a triumph of naturalistic storytelling!

The truly weird thing about Jem and the Holograms is that it’s still manifestly a Blumhouse picture. Along with cherry-picking the rhythm of Whiplash and the teen savvy of Unfriended, with some occasional dips into the scavenged source material of Paranormal Activity, it also features some prominent new cast members from the Blumhouse stable: The Boy Next Door’s Ryan Guzman and Insidious: Chapter 3’s Stefanie Scott and Hayley Kiyoko. Plus, the entire film – a relatively massive budget for them – takes place on about six sets, spending at least an entire half hour in just a single suburban house. It’s an extremely odd effect, like watching a Disney Channel Original Movie being strangled before your eyes.

The whole film exists in this perpetual limbo, trapped between the extravagant glitzy lunacy it strives for and the low key realism it can afford. Normally I would watch a movie with an over-the-top teen angst girlgroup boilerplate plot that gets frequently derailed by an inexplicable subplot and abruptly swerves into a heist movie for a couple scenes in the third act and call it a fever dream masterpiece. However, the camp quality is cut off at the knees by the too-serious production, at least until the robot hums to life and overloads the system, sending the movie into its bizarre plot seizures.

You see, no matter how tempered the actual content frequently finds itself, the way it is presented is patently deranged. A solid years worth of story is compressed into less than a month, so any time a character mentions “that day by the pier” (yesterday) or “all this time” (one week), it’s an inexhaustible well of unintentional comedy. Drama arises offscreen and gets resolved instantly, sometimes within seconds, plot device explode into the frame without even considering being set up, and shots from the perspective of a security camera constantly undermine every last ounce of tension.

Also, dad apparently forgot that Kimber existed when setting up his Jigsaw-esque scavenger hunt.

Do you see the bind I find myself in? Jem is mostly not a good movie. Aubrey Peeples is a kind of non-presence, delivering a voiceover narration as devoid of nuance or emotion as a concrete brick, and the other girls are spunky but only vaguely etched out (and Aurora Perrineau might as well be an extra for all the focus she’s given), so there’s really nothing concrete in the A-plot to grab onto. However, a much livelier piece of bubblegum trash is constantly oozing out around the edges.

This movie is jam-packed (or should I say Jem-packed? No. I shouldn’t.) with microscopic appearances from actors I really adore (including Party Down’s Ryan Hansen, looking like an actual adult – a handsome adult), hilariously vacant and catchy pop music masquerading as True Art with a Message, and messily overstaged musical performances that only perpendicularly intersect with reality. And did I mention there’s a dress-up montage with people nodding or shaking their head to outfits, presented completely unironically? All while they’re supposed to be at a location across LA in 20 minutes? It’s magical. 

All this is ruled over by Juliette Lewis vamping her bones out of their sockets. She acts like she’s actually in the Jem cartoon, sashaying through every set with the hyperbolic malice of an evil queen, even before she is revealed in any way to be an antagonist. Shes utterly captivating any second she’s onscreen, and if every element of the film were keyed up to her level, Jem would be an instant cult classic.

As it stands, Jem and the Holograms is a generic, vaguely manic shell of a pop musical, scraped clean of meaning. Juliette Lewis and a shirtless Ryan Guzman edge it just enough over the line to recommend it, but it’s a movie you catch on TV, not one that you own. However, it must be said that it’s certainly not worse than most of the crap that gets foisted on the viewing audience on a weekly basis. Hell, it’s a whole lot better than Sinister 2. It didn’t deserve its box office whipping, but hopefully its martyrdom will help it find the right home on DVD. As soon as it ends up in dollar bins. That home is not with me, but it so could have been with just one or two adjustments.

TL;DR: Jem and the Holograms isn't the campy thrill ride it could have been, but it's fun enough in its ludicrous messiness.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1386