Dismal din

Actor Todd Graff turns auteur for the third time with Joyful Noise, and he achieves what no moviemaker before him has ever accomplished: He manages to make both Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah boring.

Graff’s last movie as writer-director was 2009’s Bandslam, a teenybopper musical so forgettable, that I had to look up my review to refresh my memory, and even then I couldn’t recall a moment of it. No doubt in 2014 I’ll be doing the same thing to try to remember Joyful Noise.

The plot of Joyful Noise recycles that of Bandslam: New boy in town gets a group ready for the big musical competition, in this case the church choir in the small town of Pacashau, Georgia. Every year the choir enters the big Joyful Noise competition, only to lose out to its regional rival from Atlanta. One year the choir loses more than the competition: Its veteran leader Bernard Sparrow (Kris Kristofferson, wasted) suffers a fatal heart attack on stage, and dies in the arms of his wife G.G. (Parton).

Sometime later, the pastor (Courtney B. Vance) calls G.G. into his office to tell her that the church council has decided to confer the leadership of the choir on Vi Rose Hill (Latifah).

Vi Rose has fallen on hard times. Her husband Marcus (Jesse L. Martin) has reenlisted in the military after two years of unemployment, leaving her to scrape by on his allotment check and what she earns carrying bedpans at a local hospital, and to cope with two teenage kids, daughter Olivia (Keke Palmer) with raging “I-hate-my-mother” hormones and son Walter (Dexter Darden) with Asperger’s syndrome.

G.G. comes home one night to find that her house has been broken into. Grabbing the trusty shotgun that (according to Graff) all 60-something Georgia widows keep just inside the door, she goes stalking the intruder, only to find her grandson Randy (newcomer Jeremy Jordan) raiding her refrigerator. Randy, it seems, has been kicked out by his mother and come to live with Grandma. Like everything else in Graff’s desultory script, the reason is a little vague, as are the exact details of the “rough time” G.G. is always telling people Randy has had.

Before you can say “insert random cliché here,” Randy has joined the choir at G.G.’s church. Young Olivia catches his eye and he catches hers. Vi Rose warns Olivia to stay away from Randy because he’s bad news, even though he looks like a cast member from High School Musical to us. (Maybe she heard about him raiding G.G.’s refrigerator.)

Randy starts meeting Olivia on the sly, walking her home from school (he’s a wild one, all right). He reaches out to Walter, helping him channel his obsessive and withdrawn personality into music. He brings new ideas, new music and new moves to the choir, singing Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed” while staring at Olivia. One of the oddities of Graff’s script is that when Randy and Olivia are walking home from school, he’s a perfect gentleman, but when they’re singing in church, he leers at her like a tomcat in a singles bar.

When the pastor hears the new direction the choir has taken, he’s affronted and withdraws the church’s sponsorship, which means no Joyful Noise competition for them. But …

Zzz …

Huh? What? Where was I? Oh yeah. You know all this, don’t you? You’ve seen it a thousand times. Heaven knows the preview trailer has been around long enough, to the point where we laugh at the jokes (Latifah: “Get those fingernails outta my face, Edward Scissorhands!” Parton: “God didn’t make plastic surgeons so’s they could starve!”) not because they’re funny, but because they’re so familiar, like old pals making stale wisecracks. As for the songs, every one wears out its welcome in the first 30 seconds. We may tap our feet, but it’s from impatience.

Finally, at the big national competition in Los Angeles, the camera scans the audience to show—it had to happen—Todd Graff himself sitting there, making a cameo appearance. Just like Alfred Hitchcock.

Yeah, right. Dream on, Mr. Graff.