Quotes of the Day

As a parent, one cannot share all the enthusiasms of one's offspring. For a start, there are too many and they change too often. You master the Wiggles and they're all about Dora. You gain a working knowledge of iCarly and they only want to talk about The Wizards of Waverly Place. Many are simply unwatchable (I'm looking at you, Clone Wars). Many are worth absorbing more for what their appeal says about your child than for themselves. Which brings us to the Jonas Brothers. You get a sense that admiring them will neither pollute nor elevate anyone, so they seem to belong squarely in the harmless-but-not-worth-encouraging column. They aren't going to help you have an interesting conversation with your child, nor do you have to monitor them for inappropriateness. To test this theory, we put their new movie, Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, through its paces, asking for reviews from parent (me), target audience (tweens Spike, 11 and his sister Ginger, 8) and veteran movie critic (Richard Corliss).

The brothers Jonas, in case you've missed them, comprise Joe, the junior Mick Jagger of the group; Kevin, guitarist and second-string show pony; and Nick, the cute, sensitive, cleaned-up Kurt Cobainy one. You discover this slowly, through the songs, since there's little dialogue in the movie, and most of it in the first 10 minutes after they get their 4:30 am wake up call from bouncer Big Rob and discuss the day's punishing schedule over breakfast. After that it's a parade of songs and screaming fans and one or two cool 3D effects. In other words, pretty dreary. Wear a watch, so you'll have something else to look at occasionally and can gauge the length of your nap. The trailers before the movie, for Ice Age and Up and Monsters vs. Aliens were all also in 3D. After they're done, the entertainment factor drops precipitously.

At least it did for me. But what about the movie's real demo? Here, with some parental guidance, is what the young 'uns saw. Not surprisingly, there's a gender divide.

Ginger: What was your favorite bit of the movie?

Spike: I didn't have one. There were too many things happening all the time: fireworks, and them going up on poles in the air. They didn't need all that. They should have more movie bits and less concert bits.

G: Who is your favorite Jonas Brother?

S: None of them. Maybe Nick. I don't think Joe even knows how to play guitar.

G: I like all of them—

S: You're stupid.

G: —but if I had to pick one it would be Joe. He's handsome and he can sing and do tricks.

S: No he can't. What tricks did he do?

G: He stood back to back with his brother and he did some jumps. And he can play tambourine.

S: Anyone can play tambourine. You just shake it. And how would the audience even be able to hear it?

G: I think Joe seems to be a bit obsessed with girls. He met those ladies in the car and his brothers had to get him.

S: It looked like he was trying to peek up Taylor Swift's skirt on stage.

G: On the way to the movie I was looking forward to screaming, but I never screamed. You need more people around you to scream.

S: What I didn't get was why the brothers don't ever have a war against each other. There are two that have curly hair. The same two play guitar. Don't they try to kick each other out of the band?

G: No, because then Joe would only have a curly-haired brother playing guitar on one side of him on stage. Now he's got one on each side. It's more unique.

Mom: Who would enjoy this movie?

S: Only Jonas Bros. fans. I'm not really into the Jonas Brothers. Maybe they have some good songs. And it's pretty cool that a teenager can write songs, I guess.

G: I don't get how they go to school. They must go to a private school. I don't think they'd last a day at school because the girls would all be "Oh my God!"

S: I don't get why the girls are running after them. Just to touch them? That's weird.

Read TIME's feature: "The Jonas Brothers Grow Up"

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Mom: Do you think the Jonas Bros. have a nice life?

S: No. They have everything anybody could want but they never get to use it. And everybody's looking up to them — what if you did something wrong? So many people would get mad at you. Also, it seemed like they hardly ever got to see their parents.

G: I think they have a nice life.

S: Would you like to get up that early?

G: Besides that...

S: Besides that! If you made a mistake in front of all those people wouldn't you be embarrassed and cry?

G: I'd just keep going.

S: What if they booed?

G: The Jonas Brothers would never get booed.

Mom: Which Jonas Brother would you be?

S: Nick.

G: Nick has Jay-oh-one diabetes.

Mom: Juvenile diabetes?

S: No he doesn't. He just pretends to have it for the ad.

G: I'd be Joe.

S: That's just because he's the most famous. I don't want to be famous. You have to do so many hard things.

G: I know you do. You have to get really sweaty on stage. But I still want to be famous.

S: The movie was too long.

G: It was long, but there were good songs.

S: But it was better than Coraline.

G: Oh, it was three times better than Coraline.

Mom: Ginger, you said High School Musical 3 was better than Christmas. Was this better than Christmas too?

G: No but it was better than Easter.

S: No it wasn't. It was better than Lent.

—Belinda Luscombe

A Critic's Take: The Jonas Brothers' Hard Day's Night

Coming in to Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience, I knew nothing about the guitar-popsters except that they wear promise rings and the middle one is cute. But I didn't begrudge what tween America feels for the group, because I do know this: Kids need to love things. And when they find something, they love it to pieces. The world is so fresh, their attention so intense, that any object they fix on — a toy, a TV show, the Harry Potter books, a new friend — becomes an object of the deepest, most transporting obsession, the purest form of first love. Anyone who was ever a child knows this; we all went through it.

Walt Disney knew this, and built his empire on it. His early, primal animated features mined infant emotions of fear, loss and reconciliation, and branded the Disney name on their receptive brains. On '50s TV, The Mickey Mouse Club and Disneyland sold young viewers not just a theme park but a sanitized ideal of childhood. Walt also sold them friends: cartoon characters you could pack your school lunch in, fall asleep with or wear on your wrist. (The marketing genius of the Mickey Mouse watch cannot be overstated.)

More than 40 years after Walt's death, his successors at the Disney Channel haven't forgotten how to fashion/manipulate/stoke/corrupt/enhance the young imagination. They've made culture-spanning franchises of High School Musical, Hannah Montana and the Jonases: on TV and CDs, in concert and on the movie screen. Early box office returns for the Jonas boys' movie indicate they're not yet in the Miley Cyrus empyrean. JB 3D, which analysts had said would gross $30-40 million, took in just $4.8 million on Friday, for a projected $15-18 million weekend total. Compare that with the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour movie, which earned $31 million its opening weekend a year ago, and in fewer theaters. As movie stars, the brothers are lukewarm, not red hot. But with a TV series starting this fall, they should remain the favorite boy band of 8-year-olds at least through the recession.

I was ready to indulge the fans of Kevin, 21, Joe, 19, and Nick, 16 — I've now learned the Jonases' names and ages — because I can recall another pop band that had a little impact. Back in 1964, the Beatles made the same four-media triumph in the U.S.: on records, on The Ed Sullivan Show, with their film A Hard Day's Night and on an American concert tour. When I caught them, in Philadelphia's Town Hall (honest, I was an infant back then), they could have been a mime troupe, so helpless was their music against the sonic shield of the audience's screams.

In a story commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Fab Four's conquest of America, I detailed the initial mainstream U.S. response: that they were a passing fancy, that their music was derivative, and that the funniest thing about them were their haircuts. It was the last gasp of an adult establishment that felt secure in dismissing anything new, scorning anything young; and the Beatles were both. (George Harrison, when he and his mates made their Sullivan debut, was younger than Kevin Jonas is now.) In the intervening decades, the mainstream has learned its lesson: not to deride what kids love but to embrace and exploit it. Just like Disney.

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See pictures of movie costumes.

For the movie debut of its first boy-band sensation, Disney has followed the Beatles template. JB 3D is basically A Hard Day's Night, but with the proportion of onstage to backstage material reversed: more of the former, less of the latter. It's constructed as a day in the life, following the lads from early morning through some guest appearances, an interlude in a park and then the big show. Like the Beatles movie, this one has the motifs of captive celebrity — the brothers lithely escape from fans chasing them down city streets — and of the stars taking their fame with sensible aplomb, as if clarity comes only in the eye of the media hurricane. At one point watching clips of the Beatles and other teen idols on Sullivan, the Jonases are presented as people schooled in the history of pop-mania, its skyrocketing and fizzling. Their mission is to enjoy and survive it.

So do their fans, some of whom "waited 72 hours in the rain" for tickets to the Madison Square Garden concert that is the movie's centerpiece. They reach across police barriers for a healing touch from the god-boys. (The 3D effects, which include the flinging of sunglasses, guitar picks and other sacred relics into the crowd, are meant to bring the Brothers this close to their young viewers.) Throughout, the tone is hopeful, exuberant; if the crowd included desperate stalker girls, you can bet they were edited out. In a way, the fans are as knowledgeable about their role as the Brothers are about theirs. One shows up with Jonas-style sideburns charcoaled on her face. Three guys presenting themselves as faux-Jonases get a modicum of attention from the girls. That too is a hallowed tradition: dressing like a famous person in order to get attention and maybe some action.

That's a dividing line between old and modern pop-music culture. The Beatles were just about the last gigantic group that was pre-sexual. The guys stood still, played and sang; their girl-fans screamed in veneration, not in venery. The Rolling Stones changed that. From then on and forever, the public playing of rock 'n' roll was a physical activity, and the focus was on the lead singer's sex appeal. By now that tradition is so dominant that it may not even be sexual; it's simply the language of pop performance.

It has also exalted the theatrical element over the musical. It happens that the Jonases write most of their own songs, which on first listen did not make me eager for a second. But the basic impact is visual: they're meant to be simultaneously cheerful and lubricious, to fulfill their fans' childlike idolatry and blooming sexual awareness. That's how the brothers' antiseptic image, and the movie's G rating, can coexist with the Jaggeresque poses and wind sprints of the one in the center, Joe Jonas.

Would they have reached these heights if Joe weren't so dreamy-cute, so very nearly David Cassidy? His brothers are presentable — soccer-boy Kevin using the stage's long runway as a launch pad for acrobatics, choir-boy Nick strumming or drumming in relatively oblivious repose — but Joe is the teen meat. All eyes, hearts and prepubescent yearnings focus on him, and he gives it back, pleased to be watched, in true exhibitionist showmanship. A few songs into the set, he removes his jacket to reveal a sleeveless chartreuse T shirt and a golden physique, not over-muscled but taut and downy. (Look, I'm paid to observe these things.) When the guys go backstage to change shorts, Joe goes briefly topless, exposing a rivulet of hair from his navel to his briefs. He flashes a mock-stern look at the camera, but the shot is in the movie. That can't be an accident.

Nor is the concert's big special effect, when the brothers pick up large hoses, hold them at their waists and — I'm not making this up, ask anybody — squirt jismatic spumes of white gooey stuff into the audience. The Jonases may have vowed to remain virgins till marriage, but they can have simulated sex with the girleens in the Garden. And the fans can end the evening feeling both clean and sticky.

This has got to be part of a Disney expansion strategy. Where once the company aimed to keep its target market in perpetual childhood, now it is priming kids for the more overtly erotic signals of puberty. The Jonas Brothers concert is like a very gentle sex-education lecture given by the most adorable young teacher around, and his two brothers.

—Richard Corliss

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• Belinda Luscombe and Richard Corliss
• The Disney boy band's 3D onscreen adventure, as viewed by a mom, two tweens and a seasoned film critic