Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez, photo courtesy Disney Channel
It’s actually a light weekend, programming-wise. You’ll have your choice of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett retrospectives to choose from. TVLand, for example is airing the first two episodes of its reality series Chasing Farrah at 9 p.m. on Saturday,preceded by two episodes of Charlie’s Angels, the series that made Fawcett famous (be aware, it was pretty violent). Then on Sunday, the channel is doing back to back airings of its five-hour mini-series “The Jacksons – An American Dream” at 2 p.m., then again at 7 p.m.
For your tween girls, however, tonight is the big night. Disney Channel is premiering its movie Princess Protection Program – a rather silly bit of fluff that actually starts out bad and gets better.
Disney, of course, is big on the whole princess thing, so of course, if you’re going to get two of your hotter stars (in this case Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez), you want to do a princess theme. The hard part is that if you’re going to a modern-day tale, there aren’t a lot of European-style monarchies left to hang your story on. So obviously, you’re going to have to create a fictional country. That’s fine.
In this case, it’s Costa Luna. The king has died and Princess Rosalinda (Gomez) is about to ascend the throne, even though she’s still a teen. The only problem is bad guy General Kane (Johnny Ray Rodriguez), a neighboring dictator who assumes control of the tiny country by holding Rosalinda’s mother hostage.
Rosalinda, however, is rescued during the takeover by Joe Mason (Tom Verica), an agent in the Princess Protection Program – a top secret world agency that protects princesses in danger. Because princesses are always in danger, right? But for some unexplained reason, he takes this one home to hide with his own teen daughter Carter (Demi Lovato), a tomboy who helps him run his bait shop.
So we’ve got a fish out of water story, a find your true self story and plot holes the size of the Grand Canyon. The good news is that when the story is focused on the two girls as real human beings, it actually works after a fashion. It’s all the artifice surrounding the princess thing that doesn’t. We see Rosalinda as a very nice, almost deferential young woman at home, then all of a sudden she gets imperious and orders Carter around when she first gets there. It creates conflict but doesn’t make sense in terms of the character.
I could go on and on. The bottom line is that while this isn’t the best written script by a long shot, there are good moments, such as when the girls chose to learn from each other, and face up to the real-life dilemmas of being a teen-ager.
One final note, however. The notes say that the movie was shot entirely in Puerto Rico, even though the American scenes are supposed to be Louisiana. The problem is, I didn’t see one African American character in the entire film – and if there were any Blacks among the extras, I couldn’t find them. And this is Louisiana? Don’t think so.
Anne Louise Bannon
Your Family Viewer