Man, this is really, really weird. Check out this trailer for what looks to be a God-awful High School Musical/Step Up style movie called Standing Ovation. I think this is probably the first movie ever to feature a video-contest based plot. I’ve read a bit about the film and long story short, a bunch of teenagers want to shoot a music video to win a one million dollar video contest prize.

Yeah, like I said, it looks horrible. Apparently this movie actually played in hundreds of theaters in the US but I’ve never heard of it. I’m guessing all the advertising was done online and aimed at sites that tweens frequent. The movie opened on July 16th and was dropped by most of its theaters by the next weekend. Here’s a bit of a pretty rough review of the film from the Chicago-area’s Daily Herald:

“Standing Ovation” is a spiritually bankrupt, morally reckless, ethically unhinged and emotionally vacant musical comedy about a group of tweenies who can’t act, sing or convincingly lip-sync.

This film deals in gay stereotypes. It traffics in token black characters. It advocates cheating. It condones revenge. It pushes the idea that money not only can buy happiness, money is happiness.

How this movie ever got into production will go down as one of the great mysteries of the world, along with where Jimmy Hoffa went.

You can read the full review here: http://www.dailyherald.com/story/?id=394376

So anyway, the movie sucked I guess. But in a weird way I think it’s kind of cool that online video contests have become so mainstream that the dude who wrote Mannequin 2 would write a script about them (seriously, it was written by the guy who wrote Mannequin 2.) I’m tempted to netflix it just to see far off from reality it is. The Daily Herald review mentions that the film seems to encourage cheating. Wonder if the video contest in the movie picked its winners via a public vote. It’d be really bizarre to see a movie that includes scenes about vote-fraud in video contests.