..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience
Directed by Bruce Hendricks

Many years ago, my oldest daughter was enamored of the New Kids on the Block, and watched her NKOTB concert tape so much the tape eventually got worn out; the walls above her bed were adorned with posters of the New Kids, and every night for a couple years, her bedtime ritual included kissing each of the boy band members good night in turn. Nearly 20 years later, I found myself at the 12:01AM screening of Jonas Brothers: The 3-D Concert Experience with my 12-year-old daughter, and in spite of the nifty 3-D technology employed to allow Kevin, Joe and Nick Jonas to get up close and personal with their squealing tween and teen fanbase, it felt, in many ways, like deja vu all over again -- though not entirely in a bad way.

The Jonas Brothers, if you're not in the know (i.e., don't have a tween or teen girl in your life) are another musical act brought to the world via the good folks at Disney, who previously brought the world a concert movie of another huge Disney sensation, Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana. The Jonas boys had a brief appearance with Cyrus at her concert, and it was only a matter of time before Disney capitalized on the appeal of the squeaky-clean brothers to give them their own concert tour.

Having been to quite a few midnight early screenings with my daughter for all the Harry Potter films and, more recently, Twilight, I anticipated there would be a huge line of Jonas Brothers fans snaking around the building when we arrived. Apparently the boys don't have quite the pull of handsome boy wizards or dazzling teenage vampires when it comes to persuading parents to let their young daughters stay up until 2AM on a school night, though, because last night's screening was surprisingly sparsely attended -- counting me and my daughter, there were 16 of us on hand (14 squealing girlies and one other mom who kept looking at me with a somewhat martyred air every time she passed by. "See what we go through for our kids?" she seemed to be saying in an air of silent solidarity). But really, it wasn't completely intolerable.

Here's the thing about the Jonas Brothers: for all that their music is derided as Disney-esque, bubble-gum, idol-du-jour pop music, and for all that the lyrics can be simplistic, sing-along friendly, and targeted around themes likely to appeal to their girly fanbase (mostly falling somewhere along the spectrum of idealized visions of youthful romantic relationships), the music underneath is relatively technically complex, with interesting use of rhythm and key changes. And like their boy band predecessors, these boys can sing and perform like nobody's business -- I was exhausted just watching their onstage antics, and not just because of the late hour.

The Jonas Brothers -- Joe (the "hot" one), Kevin (the "fun" one) and Nick (the "serious" one) -- are about as parent-friendly as an outfit like the Mouse House could hope for: the boys are cute, talented and clean-cut to the extreme. Evangelical Christians, they wear "purity rings" as a symbol of their commitment to God to remain pure until marriage, a pledge one imagines would have to be challenging to uphold, given their star status and throngs of screaming female fans that follow them everywhere they go; I kind of wondered at one point if their enormous bodyguard, Big Rob, is there to protect the chaste brothers from those wanton female fanatics in more ways than one.

The opening of the film, in the brothers' luxurious hotel room as Big Rob rouses them at 4:30AM for a long day of fan-dodging, promotional appearances and a concert at Madison Square Garden, reveals a remarkably clean and tidy room -- no evidence of late-night partying for these boys, no lingering groupies being shuttled out surreptiously (although Big Rob does give the stinkeye to a lingering room-service waitress who sticks around too long eavesdrop on the boys).

The concert itself is full of energy, with a stage design built for recording a 3-D film, and the camera, for the most part, does a good job of bringing the audience close to the action, even if the boys do occasionally mug it up a bit. And as the Jonas Brothers guested on the Miley/Hannah tour, the boys return the favor to Disney (well, to be fair, they probably weren't actually given a choice) by performing one song each with teen songstresses Demi Lovato and Taylor Swift (Lovato's performance was a bit shaky and revealing of nerves, Swift's was more confident and quite good, as she powered her way through a tune about a cheating boyfriend with some vocal help from Joe and her very enthusastic fiddle player/backup singer).

The fans in Madison Square Garden and Anaheim, where the concert footage was shot, scream and squeal and cry hysterically en masse and on cue throughout the performance as the boys strut the stage, working the crowd -- if you give them nothing else, you have to give them props for sheer energy and their ability to charm their audience. And or the most part, things remain squeaky clean -- with the exception of one questionable moment when the boys grab giant foam guns and spray their mostly-female audience with, er ... globs of white foam. Thankfully, my daughter didn't ask why I laughed out loud in disbelief over that bit.

There are moments in the film that are an obvious homage to The Beatles' film A Hard Day's Night -- interludes of scenes of the boys playing in a sunny meadow in Central Park (I would have hated to be in charge of the security detail for that one), driving a horse-drawn carriage, Joe clowning around as a cop in charge of crowd control, wearing a bushy fake moustache -- but to a certain extent, those scenes are less effective than were the interlude scenes in the Miley/Hannah concert movie, which revealed more about young Cyrus' nervousness about her tour, endless practicing and preparation, and a moment of near-breakdown that humanized the pop idol in a way that her fan base could relate to.

Maybe it's the artsy movie geek in me, but I would have rather seen more of an artistic approach to the filmmaking aspect of making this concert film: show us a bit of the five-year track it's taken to get these young brothers to this point in their career, talk to them about their purity rings and the challenges of remaining true to their faith as mega pop stars, bring us into how they've evolved (or seek to evolve) musically, or reveal to us their honest vulnerability as teenage boys being overwhelmed by their frenetic fanbase and stardom.

The film does show us those moments, but more in a hamming-for-the-camera way that attempts to mimic The Beatles' films which ends up feeling less genuinely authentic than it could have -- which is more the fault of the direction from Bruce Hendricks, who also directed and produced the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana concert film, than the subjects themselves.

The brothers seem, by all appearances, to be nice, charming, intelligent boys, and one has to think that, given a little more rein to just be themselves, they might have made the non-concert parts of the film considerably more engaging. It would have been nice to see more of who they really are when they're not running, jumping, and flipping around the stage for their fans.

And to be honest, I'm really more interested in seeing how the Jonas Brothers -- especially quiet, serious, and musically gifted Nick -- will evolve as musicians over time, as their fan base ages past being interested in them and as they themselves grow older and want to stretch beyond the Disney-pop leash. But that, perhaps, is a more interesting documentary for ten or fifteen years hence, not now.

The truth is, I am not the Jonas Brothers fanbase, and neither, most likely, are you. Their fans are girls like my daughter and the other 13 girls who were in the theater last night, who spent the entire show on their feet, screaming every time one of the brothers pointed or smiled at the camera, dancing to the music, and singing along enthusiastically. The folks at Disney know their target audience, and for the most part, they've made a concert film that will appeal broadly to the Jonas Brothers fanbase -- even if it's not likely the film will broaden that fanbase beyond the bubblegum teen set that's made them stars.

-Kim Voynar

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