Just when you thought the series couldn't get any worse, along comes Glee: The Concert...

I would apologize for the delay, but that would be disingenuous; I just couldn’t bring myself to watch this piece of shit.  I’m not even joking, I seriously procrastinated writing this review because I knew what I had to watch would be awful.  I’ve stopped writing reviews for individual Glee episodes because the program reaches new lows every week and I can’t just keep saying the same criticisms with different words twenty-two times a season.

This is a special occasion, though:  a “concert film” of the cast’s Summer 2011 tour, for which they rehearsed four days and charged over seventy dollars a ticket.  The tour itself may have made bank, but the release of this “concert film” (don’t forget to pronounce the air quotes), even in 3D, failed to make any money.  Thank Jeebus, too:  there is very little to recommend about this charade.  You know what?  In the interest of doing it a little different, I’ll talk about what was actually good first.

Pros

- Heather Morris appears (if not dances) in fifteen of the twenty-three performances presented here.  She is a featured dancer in several and her implants (may they rest in peace) are prominently on display during her solo.

- There are also many upskirts during Naya Rivera’s solo, which is helpful.

- Chris Colfer’s solo of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” is the only performance that has any sort of authenticity to it.  Everything else seems rather rote while Colfer’s interaction with the audience, to say nothing of his actual singing, feels genuinely like he wants to be there.

- “The Safety Dance” is included and though it’s not a terribly good rendition, at least it’s there, affording Kevin McHale the opportunity to get out of his chair for a couple minutes.

- Not too much Rachel.  Keep in mind, I so much hate Lea Michele as I hate Rachel and the simultaneous degeneration of the character while increasing her screentime.  She still has more leads than anybody else, but they’re spread around and we’re at least seeing Michele in her natural element.

Cons

- The many insert shots.  This is one of the reasons I’ve been tossing quotes around “concert film”: to me, if you’re going to show me live footage of a musical performance, there are two things I don’t want to see.  The first is obvious footage that was shot at another time edited into the real footage and passed off as being part of the original proceedings. That shit infuriates me... it’s also everywhere in this damn thing.  Even with the cranes and the sky-cam I could make out filming the show, there are many shots here that could only be achieved by having a camera on the stage.  That doesn’t bother me, but covering it up and acting like this is in any way an authentic experience boils my blood.

- The other thing: any footage that is not of the performers. I’m ok with wide shots of the crowd; keeping it a large, faceless entity which exists to provide applause and call-and-response singing without humanizing it in any way. I don’t. Like. Shots. Of individual. Audience!  Members!  Fuck em!  I’m not here for them!

- Keeping with Glee’s habit of taking everything that sucks and running with it, Glee: the Concert interrupts the show no less than seven times to allow random plebes to yammer into the camera as well as tell the stories of three in specific: a dwarf cheerleader, a gay guy and a Aspie girl. In case I didn't make it clear...I DON’T CARE!

I’m here for the show!  If I were one of the few suckers who plunked down $20 to see this in 3D in a theatre, I would have been livid to be forced into watching these “different” young people blather on about how Glee changed their lives and gave them courage and blah-diddy-blah-blah-blah.

I don't give a f**k! Just show me Heather Morris' ass...

...sweet.

- Last but not least, the concert just isn’t that good. It’s the same songs I saw on the show, plus occasional lip synching, minus plot context, divided by the same arrangements as on tv, times lackluster singing and dancing, all to the boring power. The camerawork is pedestrian, the stage(s) are ok but not really interesting; it’s all just... there. I honestly got more out of this concert by watching cameraphone bootlegs on YouTube.

Extras

- Extended and Additional Performances - I didn’t watch them.  Why would I?  Is there actually a chance that something in the four extra songs that would change my opinion of the movie or do you think it would be more of the same?

- On Stage with the Cast - Missing from the film proper were these interstitial sketches by the characters which were actually cute and deserved to be part of the feature instead of those goofy, malformed proles.

- Backstage with the Cast - About forty-five seconds of material that didn’t make it into the movie of the characters talking to the camera.  Pass.

- Digital Copy - There’s a second disc which includes a dvd copy and a digital copy of the movie.  I ignored it.

Seriously, even if you still like Glee, don’t bother watching this disc - it’s pretty pointless.

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