Colma: The Musical
Directed by Richard Wong
Lyricist H.P. Mendoza pens verses as elegant as his name. In Colma: The Musical, an ultra-low budget cinematic songfest about three high school pals living in the eponymous California town, Mendoza’s clever melodies and pointedly constructed rhymes rescue the movie from the detriments of its tired plot and unfocused pace. Tapping into his thespian talents, Mendoza (a rising star whose MySpace page deserves your attention) also plays the only consistently endearing character, a scathingly witty loose cannon named Rodel. Playing against his multilayered “other” status as an Asian American and homosexual, Rodel is a finely crafted crackerjack with the energy to spark a party—and the cynical perspective to shoot it down.
The finest set piece arrives near the end of the first act, when Rodel and the rest of his underage trio, aspiring actor Billy (Jake Moreno) and aspiring slut Maribel (L.A. Renigen), crash and pervade a dispirited college party. Fed up with the perceived superficiality of the collegiate elite surrounding him, Rodel decides to shoot them down with a tune. (“Oh god. He’s singing,” mutters a crowd member in a nice moment of reflexivity.) The hilariously satiric edge of “Can We Get Any Older,” which finds Rodel addressing select partygoers and singling out their lifestyle defects (“This one looks like he still lives at home with his mom/This one took his best friend to the prom”) pinpoints the ferocity of youth-fueled despair dating back to Holden Caulfield.
Phonies, all of them: A drunken girl stricken with giggles at Rodel’s spastic declarations unknowingly receives the brunt of his anger. “Something random and quirky!” he shouts, and she quivers with delight. It’s a crucial moment; shameless and dejected, Rodel reprimands the world, and it turns him into a drunken joke.
Sadly, a memorable protagonist and euphonious songs don’t entirely sustain the meager production values. Colma is directed by fellow San Francisco dweller Richard Wong with occasionally strong framing (particularly when the joyfully-inebriated ensemble performs “Goodbye Stupid”), but numerous sequences are marred by cumbersome graphics—split screens, twirling frames and other off-putting devices used to compensate for the inability to stage grand set pieces.
Still, it’s neat to see another product of the shoot-on-the-fly approach enabled by digital video that explores a genre often relegated to major studios—and manages to maintain its street-smart attitude rather than becoming sappy all at once. It does, however, go that route eventually, and by the extraneous final act, the drama and dawdling bursts of soul-searching elegies sound exceedingly redundant. But maybe that’s the point: In the end, the characters wish to leave Colma, and viewers do, too.
