WaPo Film Critic Bashes 'Disney's Prom' Because It Requires No TV Censorship

Washington Post film critic Sandie Angulo Chen slammed the movie "Disney's Prom" because it's so clean it's a "whitewash" of teenage lives. What exactly is wrong  with a little purity? Is this woman saying "Carrie" was authentic to real life?

For movie lovers, prom evokes cinematic memories of pig’s blood in buckets, virginity-losing contests and “Pygmalion”-style makeovers. You’ll find none of those things in “Prom,” Disney’s chaste take on the annual high school spectacular. Nor will you find much excitement, tension or resemblance to actual teen culture in this whitewash of the quintessential rite of passage.

Movie critics always want to assume there are no teens anywhere who live normal, morally straight lives. To remind people of the fantastical "Carrie" plot, the new Time article on worst pop-culture mothers by Lev Grossman:

Granted, Carrie White probably shouldn't have telekinetically murdered her high school classmates at the prom. But her home life almost justifies it. Mrs. White — played in the movie by Piper Laurie — is a religious maniac who believes that Carrie is getting her period because she is sinful, and that the proper remedy, rather than a tampon and an awkward conversation, is to lock her in a closet and make her pray. Also, she refers to her daughter's budding breasts as "dirty pillows," which is just bizarre.

 Now back to the complaining Sandie Angulo Chen. who's upset it has nothing to censor for TV:

When this teen drama hits Disney’s cable network, as it inevitably will, the studio’s basic-cable censors will have absolutely nothing to cut, and that’s the problem. A pure-and-clean prom movie is perfectly fine for a television special, like the original “High School Musical,” but in a feature film, it plays as shockingly inauthentic. In “Prom,” none of the kisses are swoon-worthy (on the big screen, a foot of space between kissing teens is laughably noticeable) and all the infidelities are insignificant.

What makes this a little more interesting is that the reviewer, Sandie Angulo Chen, is also a reviewer for the parental watchdog group Common Sense Media. She said parents would love it, and it stinks:

Parents looking for a completely tame high school movie for their younger kids to watch will be thrilled with this PG version of adolescence. Director Joe Nussbaum has so rigorously Disney-fied the high school experience that the characters act more like Disney Channel or Nickelodeon TV tweens than real teenagers. In the Prom universe, no one is belligerent or rebellious or even hormonal. Jesse skips class to help his single mom, and when it's revealed that the school 's big jock, Tyler (DeVaughn Nixon), is cheating on his prom queen-wannabe girlfriend, Jordan (Kylie Bunbury), she breaks up with him without betraying any bitter recriminations. It's like these teens are from another planet where high school is devoid of any wild and crazy -- or even merely emotional -- students.