Trolls Band Together (2023) - Movie Review

This feels like a step backwards for this franchise. After expanding beyond pop music into all sorts of different genres in Trolls World Tour, going back to just pop music feels like it's making the film's world smaller, which isn't ideal if they're going to even bother making another one to begin with. That they likely did it just so that they could cash in on boy band nostalgia, with star Justin Timberlake’s history with NSYNC being both figuratively and literally invoked in this film, doesn’t help.

But hey, my first interaction with this franchise involved plenty of scepticism, and not only did I like the first film, I liked the second one even more so. Well, while I still had fun with this latest entry, I am definitely starting to wonder if this was all that necessary.

Turning Red (2022) - Movie Review

There are quite a few things that are considered good sport to make fun of. Boy bands like One Direction, twee romance novels like Twilight, any number of chick flicks. And not only has it been openly acceptable to mock such things, their audiences are regularly caught in the cross-hairs. Not many people tend to take a step back and considering why it’s okay to mock the things that young girls and woman are interested in; it’s just… part of ‘the culture’.

And before this sounds like I’m getting all holier-than-thou, I did my fair share of this shit too. ‘Boy bands are gay’, ‘chick flicks are stupid’, ‘what kind of damaged freak could possibly enjoy Twilight?’; teenaged me was way more judgemental than the me that decided to make a career out of judging media. I can’t say that I don’t hold onto at least some of those opinions today, but the notion that it’s perfectly cool to mock people just because they find joy in something? Yeah, that’s unbelievably not okay.

Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of (2015) - Movie Review

Given the rather ill-fated step that this entire blog started on, boy bands now have an added bizarre undercurrent on top of my already rather vocal disdain for them: I may hate them in general, but they are at least partially responsible for me taking my obsessive cinematic habits and turning them into something mildly useful. So, when news reached me that a documentary was coming out based on one of the biggest boy bands of all time, the Backstreet Boys, I felt some weird form of obligation to check it out beyond my compulsions. But, with my mother in tow to provide cultural context when needed as she grew up around the phenomenon, was it worth seeing? Like, at all?

One Direction: Where We Are - The Concert Film (2014) - Movie Review

I don’t hate all boy bands; I myself have a certain affinity for 5ive (Everybody Get Up is a little too catchy for me to ignore) and even some songs by N*SYNC. That said, though, I have ears and a brain that would even scrutinize my baby brothers’ crayon drawings: I know emotional manipulation when I hear it and that is the crux of what every boy band does. They are tools of record companies to exploit feelings of Lisztomania in teenage girls (and some women… and some teenage boys, come to think of it) through songs with lyrics that are vague enough that they could apply to just about any girl listening, and yet specific enough to latch on to some minor part of said girl’s psyche due to basic probability (You drop a brick out of a plane, and it will hit something eventually). It’s almost clinically fascinating to see the effect boy bands can have on people.