Joyful Noise Movie Review
Here is a movie to make you wish human beings had never developed vocal cords.
And I’m not talking about the singing. In fact, the music was one of the few redeeming qualities of this film. I am not a real fan of Gospel, but can appreciate the sound and understand what a powerful tool it can be for the advancement of the Christian pantheon (I consider myself more agnostic than anything else, although if I were forced to choose a specific religion I think I would roll with the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster). No, it’s not the singing that made me want to stuff chewing gum in my ears. It’s the freaking dialog. If I have to hear Dolly Parton or Queen Latifah spout out another hillbilly, earthy country platitude (“If the jury is full of foxes then the chicken is always guilty”) I will be forced to go on a berserk chainsaw rampage.
The story is the unnatural offspring of Sister Act and Footloose, with lingering eye contact made with the Bad News Bears during conception. The proud parents had their child and, because someone else had already used the name Glee, ran with Joyful Noise. The weird thing is when you make a movie out of two mediocre movies you normally only take some elements from each and combine them into a crappier movie. What director/writer Todd Graff (The Electric Company, the Abyss, Five Corners, Stranger Days) did was, with the exception of the gangsters trying to kill Whoopie Goldberg, take ALL the elements from those two movies and pile drive them into one script until the screen is bursting with badness like rancid corpse stuffed into a corset. I mentioned Glee because that appears to be Mr. Graff’s favorite show, and honestly this movie reads like an entire season of bad TV compressed into 117 minutes with each episode creating yet another 5-10 minute subplot.
Fragmented doesn’t begin to describe this story. It is even more fragmented that the horrible New Years Eve I reviewed last year, although at least all the characters in this film know each other. The sub plots are legion. There’s the “main” plot of the losing church choir winning the national Joyful Noise competition. There’s the competition between Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah to be the choir director. There’s Queen Latifah’s hot 16 year old daughter rebelling against her mother’s restrictive nature, as well as her romance with Dolly’s grandson. There’s her Asperger brother trying to deal with being different from everyone else, learning to play the piano, and taking his sunglasses off. There’s the small Georgia town suffering from economic collapse. There’s the choir singer who’s father’s hardware store is closing. There’s Dolly Parton dealing with the death of her husband by ignoring it completely. There’s Queen Latifah’s husband joining the army to get away from her and the two kids. There’s Latifah’s struggle to provide for her family. There’s the grandson’s checkered juvenile past. There’s another girl hooking up with a guy and killing him after the first night (that subplot resurfaces later and somehow hijacks the whole story at the end). There’s the preacher who doesn’t want to spend money on the choir. There’s the struggle that the grandson and Dolly have to update the choir with more than just traditional music in order to win the big contest (oh yeah, somehow winning the contest is integral to the survival of the town. Still not sure what that was about). There’s the preacher hating the new music and pulling out his support. There’s the other kid who gets into a fight with the grandson over the daughter’s affection but later joins the choir as the worlds greatest guitar player or something. The list goes on and on.
In the credits (I read online. I didn’t really stay for the credits. I couldn’t get out of the theater fast enough) it is revealed that Todd Graff’s mother was in a choir, which makes a lot of sense. This movie looks a lot like a self indulgent labor of love, and Graff wanted to stick every small town or choir story schtick he could find into it. Next time I would suggest he make a list of his 20 best ideas and get a third party to whittle them down to like three. Just because you have an idea doesn’t mean you need to execute it.
Before I go on I’d like to say a few words about Dolly Parton. It seems pretty obvious that she is single handedly supporting the plastic surgery and hair care industries. That being said, I can’t argue with the results. She is 66 and looks at most 42-45ish. She also seems to have a sense of humor about it too, and plastic surgery jokes come about in a scene with Queen Latifah that was one of two that I actually enjoyed. Also, while she definitely is a lady throughout the film, her outfits seem designed to emphasis the assets she is known best for, if you know what I mean (her singing voice, obviously. What were you perverts thinking of?)
The story reads like it was written by the second place winner of a 5th grade creative writing contest. I don’t know if I need to get into it too much, as I seem to have covered it in the sub plot rehash. The church choir director (Kris Kristofferson-Blade trilogy, Planet of the Apes(2001)) drops dead during a choir competition, leaving Queen Latifah (Bringing Down the House, Living Single, Taxi) and Dolly Parton (Sweet Home Alabama, Moulin Rouge, Transamerica) up for the gig. Latifah gets it with the goal of winning the big Joyful Noise competition. Dolly’s grandson Randy (Jeremy Jordan-not much of a filmography. Looks like he was in Newsies on Broadway) shows up, falls in love with Latifah’s daughter (Keke Palmer-True Jackson, Cleaner, Akeelah and the Bee), who is a good church girl. At that point the story more or less explodes into the aforementioned subplots like a watermelon with an M-80 stuck in it. Church choir hijinks ensues. No real conflict arises. The story chugs along like a V8 with only three cylinders firing to the inevitable predictable conclusion.
The stars. The music and singing were actually pretty good. One star. The actors, working within the limitations of a bad script and horrible dialog, managed to deliver a decent performance. Kind of like winning a three legged race. One star. Queen Latifah is at her best when she is bitching someone out, and there were two scenes (one with Dolly in particular) that were entertaining that way. One star. Keke Palmer is super cute. One star. Total: four stars.
The black holes. Dialog that made me want to never see another film again. Two black holes. 1 kazillian subplots that went nowhere. One black hole. 1 subplot in particular was especially cringe-worthy. One black hole. Pretty much all the rest of the subplots gave me an attitude that rhymed with “Eye Mont Bare”. One black hole. 
The pacing dragged like trying to pull a corpse to a shallow grave by yourself (not that I would know anything about that. Where did I put that body image courtesy of the Funny T Shirt category). One black hole. Glee ripoff. One black hole. Overall story seemed both pointless and dumb. One black hole. A movie that is supposed to be uplifting and heartwarming laced with death and sociopaths apparently not caring about it. One black hole. Two more black holes for generally wasting my time. Total: eleven black holes.
So a grand total of seven black holes. This is another one that was weird in that the audience around me seemed to be enjoying it and laughing. However, I suspect a lot of them came to see it from some kind of church obligation and had to pretend to like it otherwise their friends might think they were not the good Christians they like to think they are. A lot of the laughter sounded forced, like laughing at your bosses bad jokes. Speaking as a creepy loner who couldn’t care less about what the people around me think (if you don’t believe me just look at how I dress every day) the only prayer I was making was for the credits to start rolling. I don’t know. Was it better than tripping and falling into a tree shredder? In most ways yes. Was it better than spending those two hours working on my Doom Fortress in Minecraft? Absolutely not. However, if you are dating a girl who is Christian this could be a good one to see, especially if you are willing to wait until your wedding night for sex.
I’m back to scraping the bottom of the barrel on movies. Nothing to see tonight, but maybe I’ll see My Week With Marilyn. No way there is anything in that film to annoy me. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Thanks for reading. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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