Standing Ovation (2010)

 

Director: Stewart Raffill

Screenplay: Stewart Raffill

Cast: Kayla Jackson Cruz as Brittany O'Brien; Alanna Polombo as Alanna Wannabe; Pilar Martin as Blaze; Kayla Raparelli as Cameron; Najee Wilson as Maya; Alexis Biesiada as Tatiana; Joei DeCarlo as Joei Battaluci; Bobby Harper as Mr. Wannabe; Austin Powell as Mark O'Brien; P. Brendan Mulvey as Gramps; William McKenna as Eric Bateman

An Abstract List Candidate

I feel like a sick muppet.

Children's films are an area where so many films are made, excluding animation and focusing on live action, I would not be surprises some strange productions were created and product was churned out like exploitation movies were. Naturally, the reason I am here with Standing Ovation is because of the reputation of its director Stewart Raffill, who helmed The Ice Pirates (1984) but also Mac and Me (1988), an infamous film following the success of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) sponsored by McDonalds and Coca-Cola, and Tammy and the T-Rex (1994), already curious as a film where a young Denise Richard's boyfriend Paul Walker dies but has his brain transplanted into a full sized robotic tyrannosaurus rex, which came back into resurgence in the late 2010s when the original R rated version with gore was relocated.

Standing Ovation from the start did make me worry, about tween female singing groups competing in a competition where they have to create a music video, that his would send the wrong messages by accident seeing young girls in full makeup and dresses onscreen. Thankfully, baring a young belly dancer, this is just a peculiar children's music film. One, oddly, I did not get the reaction to I was hoping for, as this is a film which was a complete failure in its small theatrical release in the USA, getting a small cult of morbid adult cineastes who view this film as bonkers and became obsessed with this over the passing years online. I think because, from the get-go, I hold children's films as being more likely to be strange, cheesy and capable of scraping the bottom of a barrel, so the film alongside its pop aesthetic and music softened the construction of the production.

Boiled to its basis, the two teams are the 5 Ovations, including the lead Brittany O'Brien (Kayla Jackson Cruz), who have to face the Wiggies, a very sinister name for a legitimately mean group, daughters of a wig maker who, with his wealth, can fund them for an unfair disadvantage as well as their own tendency to cheat, such as bribing a stagehand to put pepper in the headset microphones. It is a simple tale of young teen girls aspiring to musical success, but this has some eyebrow raising content, likely to have a greater effect on some viewers not immune to this film's tone like I clearly was. Living with an older brother who is, to her horror, dating one of the Wiggies and writing their lyrics, the only adult in Brittany's is her grandfather, who also has the broadest Irish accent I have heard in a while. He also has a gambling addiction problem, spending the rent continually, which leads to a dramatic scene early on in a bookies watching horse racing on a screen, which you normally do not see in children's media.

Mostly Standing Ovation is very conventional in the narrative, even in terms of a character like Alanna Wannabe (Alanna Polombo), a younger girl who keeps invading everyone's groups and performances trying to crowbar her way to success, eventually with her father just creating her own music video with firemen as improvised back-up dancers. Far more idiosyncratic is Joei (Joei DeCarlo), the new child manager for the 5 Ovations and the daughter of a mob boss. She becomes the best character for me and part of the one legitimately strange aspect of this film, her entire subplot of regaining lost money stolen from her father which sticks out like a sore thumb in a film about singing competitions tonally. I like the character, a tough hearted asthmatic girl, including the bizarre detail she carried around with her exotic and dangerous animals with her, played by real ones (barring stand-ins) whilst still being as safe with them as possible on a production. They are even used to interrogate adults in his journey for the money, threatening one arcade owner and former criminal by trapping him in one of his own claw machines with a cobra. In close up with the actor, it is fake, but they got a real cobra for the job which is surreal to witness in a film from the 2010s, not an old seventies exploitation film for adults.

Aside from this however, Standing Ovation is sickly sweet and merely average. A lot of the reputation is that, whilst Stewart Raffill and the producers still had a bit of budget to work with, this is a low budget film in the then-new 2010s, and the infamous nature of the film comes from its production value and curious touches, like the amount of hats the young male cast wear, that feel unlikely to sell to the tweenager audience of this new era. None of this really added anything as the production values I have witnessed in other work were lower than this, alongside the knowledge so many children's films are made, which means I am not surprised there are very low budget ones in existence. Even the abrupt appearance of adult punks antagonising the child cast had no effect as I have a bias of children's films, or films for families, inexplicably putting material like this in their films which is antiquated in the modern day.

The tone is also the issue, where one film can perplex me and another like Standing Ovation does not. This is a very conventionally pace narrative, one whose style is the more eccentric even in mind of its genre allowing liberties like this but is not fully committing to this even by accident to win me over. In a more eccentric film, Mr. Wiggs (Sal Dupree), the father of the Wiggies and their funder, would be such a stranger figure in a different context, an exaggerated larger figured man who wears a variety of wigs and has a stand in his own home, with a jukebox onstage, to allow his charges to sing classic American bubblegum pop to guests. Neither will I bat an eyelid at something like Joei sneaking frogs into the Wiggies' soup in a restaurant, as that sort of prank is commonplace in this cinema to get payback.

As much of the review is influenced by being the person who does not want to cruelly dismiss the child casts' acting and singing ability, but at the same time nothing in the film was incredibly bad in my own tastes nor spectacular at all to point out.  Only an ending with finding Brittany's dad, skirting the idea money can heal old wounds, can count as a questionable production choice but it also feels rushed. If I have to call Standing Ovation anything, it does slowly reach a 21st century form of kitsch, still sincere but self reflecting of the past and the new technology of when it was made. It does play straight, with humour to a small child trying to get firemen to be sufficient dancers, marching in front of the line as a tiny girl as if she was Bob Fosse, and all the humour playful than thankfully anything remotely mean or cruel. An attempt at trying to sabotage the 5 Ovations's music video by the Wiggies turns into the kind of onscreen crude effects from the time whilst also evoking Nickelodeon I watched as a child. And there is a scene, where the 5 Ovations have to perform in a retirement home for extra cash, which includes old time jitterbugging, again something I highly doubt the target audience would be interested in. Again, this was a film which was not a success, critically panned and a curiosity for people who were not the target audience to latch onto by the end of the 2010s. It is an ironic ending for the film, to have an audience but not the one it was expecting, and the really mean critique if I have any is that this film, from the get-go, would have been a failure regardless of quality due to being a production entirely out-of-time and current culture in terms of the audience it wanted.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None