Raise Your Voice Review
by Frankie Paiva (swpstke AT aol DOT com)October 1st, 2004
RAISE YOUR VOICE (No Stars)
2004 – USA
Director: Sean McNamara
Starring: Hilary Duff, Rita Wilson, Rebecca De Mornay, John Corbett, Oliver James, and Jason Ritter
Reviewed by Frank Paiva
Raise Your Voice accomplishes an amazing feat. The new supposedly inspirational movie about following your dreams from the Hilary Duff Machine and Company goes from terrible, and then to so bad it's good, and then back to awful again. It really is that dreadful. I was laughing at nearly every supposedly "serious" or "love" scene, and so was the entire rest of the audience. Even some pre-teen girls sitting in front of me who were hardcore Hilary fans admitted they thought things had gone too far. Raise Your Voice is easily the comedy of the year. I can't remember laughing so hard at a movie theatre in a long, long time.
The predictable plot follows Terri Fletcher (Duff) who suffers a traumatic car accident where her older brother is killed. The incident haunts Terri as she sneaks away from her overbearing father and powerless mother to summer music conservatory camp in Los Angeles. At camp she meets the usual characters, including a bland but tremendously good-looking Brit named Jay (Oliver James), and must struggle to find herself and accept her brother's death.
It's easy to pick out where things go wrong. I knew we were in trouble in the film's first minute, where Terri sings Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World". But wait, she's not actually singing. Terri's voice sounds strange, as if it was being run through a pop wizardry machine in a recording studio. Indeed the audience found that whenever Terri opened her mouth, even in the most intimate of scenes, it didn't appear as if she was ever actually singing. It was as if someone on a track was singing somewhere, and she was mouthing along with it. Sometimes she even forgot to mouth. Surely there can't be a connection between this strange occurrence and the fact that Hilary Duff is in the lead role.
What's even more sickening are the other people at Terri's music camp. Every other character is quirky. Each has a combination of mohawks, piercings, brightly dyed hair, and wild fashion sense. Terri stands out like a sore thumb. It is quite obvious that the producers wanted to recreate Hilary Duff's image by surrounding her with an ethnically diverse and generally edgy social group, but keep her boyfriend as daringly clean-cut as possible. The only character more bland than Terri is her love interest Jay. Both James and Duff lack any sort of charisma or ability as actors. Duff, however, makes the most unaffected and beautiful looking recovery from a coma that I've ever seen, and James goes from hung over one moment to magically perfect the next. The sad thing is that two good actresses had to be dragged into this mess. Rita Wilson plays Duff's mother, and poor Rebecca De Mornay plays her hip artist aunt.
Among my favorite points of laughter was an extended scene in which Terri's t-shirt, covered by her partially zipped jacket, spelled out the phrase, "Candy Hoe" across her chest instead of a more innocuous message about candy and shoes. Then there's the laughably evil rival that screams about Terri's lack of talent to their teacher after she loses a solo because of her. She's the only character that says anything truthful in the film.
One has to wonder how much longer Hilary Duff can keep up this parade of lackluster films and albums. Her new album's release was timed to coincide with this film, and to be fair to Swedish songwriters of the world, the song Terri sings at the end about following your dreams and never giving up is quite nice, but she has yet to show any promise other than a child star who played her cards right. There really just isn't any foreseeable hope for her in terms of a long-range career. Oh well. At least she's already made her Glitter.
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