Yesterday, I took my daughter to the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus concert movie. For those of you that don't follow the Hannah Montana news, this tour is the biggest ticket of the year. Some sites are claiming it is bigger than The Police reunion tour. Tickets are selling out within seconds and scalpers are taking in a cool $500+ from parents who weren't able to buy them from legitimate sources. So Disney decided that they would film a couple of the live concerts and release it for one week in February as a 3D theatrical movie. Tickets for the movie? $15 a piece. Overall, the movie was not bad. None of the songs offend my ears and, actually, some of the songs are really quite good. People just write them off because they come from a Disney channel show.
The movie started off with some backstage scenes. It was basically a "how the tour got started" type of mini-documentary. Then the concert started with Hannah Montana (which would be Miley Cyrus in a blonde wig) singing a couple of songs. There was a lot of dancing and running around. It was obvious she was having fun on stage. In between the songs, there was more of the behind-the-scenes stuff with Miley talking about some of the mistakes on tour (in one song, she's carried by four male dancers...in one show, they dropped her) or working on dance moves. It was nice to see what goes on backstage but I felt it really detracted from the concert. People go to see Hannah/Miley sing, not to see how long it takes her (and her assistants) to do a costume change. It takes away the magical feel of a concert.
After Hannah sang, she brought out the Jonas Brothers to sing "Party With Us" before she left to change into Miley. While she was changing, the Jonas Brothers sang two songs. Unfortunately, they picked the two worst Jonas Brothers songs to put in the movie. It was also a little difficult to understand what they were singing because the instrumentals were turned up too high. Luckily, the boys told us the name of each song before they sang it. I don't know that the audience would have been able to identify it otherwise.
Finally, Miley came out to sing. In my opinion, the Miley songs are much better than the Hannah songs. Even the dancing was livelier. Again, there were problems with the vocals being too low to be understood. You would have thought that the sound guy would have picked up on this by now. More backstage documentary pieces told us why she wrote some songs and how her mother helps her out on tour. The concert ended with Miley and a pre-recorded Hannah singing "Best of Both Worlds" together.
Luckily, my daughter really enjoyed the concert movie. It was her opinion I wanted. The concert isn't really geared for us parents. It's for the kids. However, I still think it would have been better if they left out the documentary parts. The Hannah/Miley fanbase is mostly made up of younger kids - ages 4-10 or so. I'm not sure that they are particularly interested in watching Miley rehearse or see her hiding under the stage before an entrance. I also think it might have been better if they had just filmed one concert instead of filming multiple performances then splicing them together to make it look like it was one performance. If you pay attention, you can see props moving around the stage without being touched or the number of guitar picks in a microphone stand changing mid-song. Again, it's nothing big. It's just one of many little things that takes you out of the concert experience.
So, if you or your kids are a Hannah/Miley fan, you would enjoy the movie. But if you are looking to see the movie in place of going to the concert, it just won't work. Maybe, one day, those of us who aren't willing to shell out a couple hundred dollars for a children's concert will be able to have our kids experience an actual concert.
