Hottoceame The Age of Commercialism

Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Murphy Howard I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

haunt_freak The reviews were written either by people who worked on the movie or people who KNOW someone who worked on the movie.The singing in this is just plain awful. If you're going to make a musical, make sure you get actors who can sing. This was not interesting or memorable, just bad. The characters are boring, uninteresting and it is difficult to care about any of them. Skip this one. Your eardrums will thank you.And now, to fill 10 stupid lines, I will recite from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. "Twas Brillig and the Slithy Toves did Gyre and Gimble in the Wabe. All Mimsy were the Borogoves and the Mome Wraths Outgrabe."

marcslope Flawed, certainly, but a bracing and energetic evocation of disaffected youth, and one of the most assured live-action musicals of the decade. This study of three young friends trying to escape dead-end futures in a dispiriting San Francisco suburb tracks along the same themes as, say, the Broadway musicals "Spring Awakening" and "American Idiot," but it's much less monotonous about conveying its theme of oh-I'm-so-young-and-sad-nobody-understands- me. And the soundtrack is varied and clever, the best musical moment being the "Cupid" number, the closest thing we'll get in 2006 to a great production number. Jake Moreno isn't the greatest actor, and the cinematography is muddy, and the idea that these three are living among the dead isn't sufficiently developed--we don't know how literally to take it. But writer-songwriter-actor H.P. Mendoza is clearly a very, very talented young man, and he catches familiar themes of youthful angst in fresh ways. And L.A. Renigen is a completely convincing wonderful-best-friend. All three kids are persuasively made up of good and bad traits, and we keep rooting for them even when they screw up. Made for nothing, it's an invigorating little movie, and at the end, when the credits thank "the town of Colma," you do get the impression that the whole town rallied behind these gifted young people to make their dreams come true. It's a nice feeling.

Roland E. Zwick What would it be like to grow up in a town where the dead outnumber the living by a ratio of more than a-thousand-to-one? That's the case with Colma, a working-class community located just south of San Francisco that is more notable for its vast cemeteries than for anything related to the folk who actually live there. Dubbed The City of the Dead, Colma has a population of around 1500 above ground but over a million-and-a-half below, with roughly 75% of the town's land given over to tombstones and gravesites. That hardly seems the ideal setting for a movie musical, but then "Colma: The Musical" is not your average, run-of-the-mill, afraid-to-take-a-risk movie. Thankfully.Three of the live people who call Colma home are Billy (Jake Moreno), an aspiring actor who's so straight-arrow he's never even had a drink; Rodel (H.P. Mendoza, who also co-wrote the screenplay), a gay prankster who fears coming out to his traditionalist dad; and Maribel (L.A. Renigen), a fun-loving free spirit, who often has to serve as mediator between the two guys. Recently graduated from high school, these three best buddies suddenly discover themselves on the brink of adulthood, trying to find their way in the world and wondering what the future holds for them.Like a modern-day "Umbrellas of Cherbourg," "Colma: The Musical" is a cinematic operetta in which the characters define their relationships and express their feelings almost entirely through song. The score by Mendoza is lively and bouncy - if a trifle redundant at times - with lyrics that capture the fears and yearnings of the teenage heart with uncanny accuracy. In addition, this stylish and stylized movie features appealing performances, an endearing sense-of-humor, a hint of surrealism, and an artful use of that rarely employed, but often highly effective, tool of cinematic grammar, the split-screen.With its youthful exuberance and anything-goes audaciousness, this quirky, independent feature has much of the feel of experimental regional theater about it. And the fact that it's still a trifle rough around the edges only adds to its authenticity and charm.Filled with amusing and touching insights into this wonderfully complex and exciting thing we call "growing up," the movie understands the paradox that Colma, like all hometowns, serves both as the soil to plant one's roots in and as the place to break away from when the time is right. That's the lesson that these three likable young people learn in the end - just as the countless others, now residing in those graveyards, learned before them.

IamGel821 Colma is a suburb of San Francisco where the dead outnumber the living. That's the running joke anyway. Known for its grave sites and "Daly City fog", Colma is the foundation for director Richard Wong's feature film debut, aptly titled "Colma: The Musical." Written by the talented H.M. Mendoza (who also supplies his talents to the songs, score and lead character), "Colma: The Musical" is a refreshing, funny and poignant independent musical ("independent musical" - is this the first?). It's amazing how Colma's entertainment value equals that of classic Hollywood musicals seeing as how it's missing all the elements that made those classics great. Production design, lavish costumes, an epic story and intricate choreographed dance numbers are nowhere to be found. What it lacks from the classics, it makes up in creating a new type of musical. A musical of simplicity, where the story is relatable, the characters real, the direction artistic without being artsy and, most importantly to a musical, the songs memorable.The story of "Colma: The Musical" focuses on three friends trying to figure out life after high school. Billy, a "thezpian", is torn between two things: his new, going-nowhere job that he "really needs for something big" and his aspiring acting career; and new possibilities with "girl's name that's always on his mind" and his ex who he can't quite get over. Rodel is a poet trying to find "his happy place" after a break up with his boyfriend and a turbulent change in his already strained relationship with his father. His thoughts he writes on scraps of paper and his friends are the only things that keep him going. Maribel is the centered one of the three; the glue, really, that is holding the friendship. She's just trying to find ways to live out her youth – to party, drink and get laid – as herself.As in real life, reality takes its aim on these three friends and challenges the staying power of their friendship. As not in real life (and sadly why not), it all happens while they sing, sometimes in the most unlikely places and with the most unlikely of people. *SPOILER* (On top of alarming cars or in a bar with Hulk Hogan?) In essence, what Richard Wong and H.P. Mendoza has given us is a remarkable piece of film art. Film art's intention is to reflect back to us, like a mirror, things that we may not be able to see because we're to busy in our lives to see them. Colma represents "nothing and everything" in our past that is comfortable, secure and what made us happy at one point. We all have a Colma in our lives. Whether it is Somerset, NJ or Mikey, or high school memories, we've all been in a state of Colma: a state where we don't know what is anymore, yet we can't let go. And it's only us that can choose whether to stay in Colma or come out of Colma and into the unknown forward...closer towards "our happy place."