This is a mix of Dirty Dancing, Grease and Cry Baby (any Johnny Depp fans will know what I'm talking about). I find nothing wrong with this movie at all. It's trying to recreate a genre that was forgotten about for quite a while and honestly they have done a pretty good job. Sure it's a little bit silly and the storyline is rather vapid but that is the point. It's supposed to be imitating something not creating something new and groundbreaking.It probably helps that I personally enjoy musicals but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who is a bit more serious. The songs are fun, dorky yet pretty catchy...I dare you to not start singing along. Overall I think it's another decent movie from the team at Disney original movies.

Has anyone else noticed this movie is a mixture of Pleasantville, HSM and Grease. Well a wannabe of those movies? When I turned it on I couldn't believe how much it reminded me of Pleasantville. Getting trapped within a movie where the guy knows the movie front to back sounds a lot like how the male character in Pleasantville and his sister get stuck in the T.V. show he knows front to back. Then the girls sleepover come on stop trying to imitate Grease. This will never be HSM, Pleasantville or Grease. Get more creative and maybe you'll have a winner in the future. In the meantime stop stealing other movies ideas.

This is one of the few better Disney Channel films. Maia Mitchell is cute and a very talented actress and Ross Lynch as well and very, very bright. This is kinda an annoying film at times, and features several made for kids trademarks, such as horribly cheesy characters and dialogue, but makes up for it with the music, which is very original and catchy as well as the opening which really set the characters feelings, and at points I wish they'd stayed in that world. All together a decent kiddie fair, that is annoying yet watchable. The film tries to be good, but is mostly waterlogged and predictable! Still children will enjoy the catchy tunes and cast. C

Having been alive for the original beach movies (with stars like Fabian, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, et al) it is hard not to bring a pretty jaundiced eye to anything that attempts to reproduce the naïve silliness that these films represented in their innocent lack of any serious content.If you drop your 21st Century cynicism for a bit, Disney did it with this.Not only did they nail the hyperactive, pun-filled, sight-gag filled recklessness of the originals, (minus most of the pretty-overt sexual content of many of those films) they did it using a storyline that managed to both echo and enhance the original beach films. Being an early 60's and 'surf music nut', I was more than surprised how close the orchestrations and choral pieces managed to channel the infectious fun of those old tunes - or maybe I'm just being nostalgic for a simpler time.I recognized all of those old tropes from every film mined for the 'plot' and every song mined for the structure of the film's. Maybe I'm just missing those old simpler days, but I was more than pleased.People who complain about this film obviously have forgotten that the originals were never 'Academy Award' material (remember "The Monkey's Uncle"?). They were silly, weightless fantasy, and "Teen Beach Movie" (from the company that gave us Beach-Film queen, Annette) follows that tradition without impugning or complicating it. It is what it is advertised to be: silly, harmless summer fun.There are very few films that I can totally recommend without reservation to both my 92 year old mother and my 10 year old neighbor - and this is one; my mother for the nostalgic look back at a sweeter, more innocent time, and my neighbor for a painless history lesson.Disney's crystal-ball gazers hit it again - proved by their numbers this week. I don't know how they do it.