One Direction redefines the boy band

MANILA, Philippines - Ilike your stuff,” Martin Scorsese says to One Direction, minutes before the band’s Madison Square Garden concert. Here is an acclaimed director, not to mention a great rockumentarian, huddling around the band with his granddaughters, raining praises on a boyband whose average age is just as old as his 1993 film Age of Innocence. Scorsese is an unlikely character to endorse One Direction to non-fans, or even film critics scratching their heads, wondering why a bunch of big-time kids (like Justin Bieber and Jonas Brothers) are snaking their way yet again into 3D glory. Scorsese may not be in line to make another in-depth documentary on One Direction the way he did for Bob Dylan and George Harrison but as Slant Magazine’s R. Kurt Osenlund wrote of Scorsese’s appearance in This is Us, he makes a good point of emphasizing the band’s appeal. “Scorsese seems to be doing a tear-inducing favor for an accompanying girl (his granddaughter, perhaps), but he brings up a point that this film boldly illuminates: What’s not to like?”

This is Us is unabashedly a film made solely for fans. It serves up the band in a gilded platter, doused with plenty of bubblegum pop and cutesy moments. Director Morgan Spurlock (yes, the guy who did Super Size Me) makes no bones about the band’s popularity and plunges us headlong into their world. If you’re not a fan and you just accompanied your kids/significant other to watch the film, there’s a possibility you might not distinguish the boys, Niall Horan (the Irish one), Louis Tomlinson (the goofy guy), Liam Payne (called ‘Daddy Direction’, Harry Styles (Taylor Swift’s ex), and Zayn Malik (high notes guy/Daniel Radcliffe’s Asian counterpart) after it ends. But that’s also one of the fair points of the film, something that the band admits themselves: One Direction is a collective of strong and disarmingly charming personalities. There are no favorites, no special treatment, just a bunch of boys roughhousing and having the time of their lives.

Barkada film

In many ways, This is Us is the quintessential barkada film: a chronicle of five boys, barely out of their teens, growing up and learning the ways of the world on the road. Spurlock throws them into every senti moment possible to mull about how far they’ve gone: fishing trips, camping, tour bus downtimes. If it were any other band, it would have looked too forced, too planted, but One Direction has an uncanny way of making each moment look like a rowdy time in class, when everyone is hyped about the weekend. They admit that they couldn’t imagine the band without one of them (they thought of kicking out Zayn early on in their career when he failed to show up at a meeting), they couldn’t imagine doing this physically and mentally exhausting world tour without each other’s support.

Having achieved almost every dream a teenager could hope for (selling out tours in hours, number one singles, millions of fans screaming at your face), there’s still the occasional look of shock when the boys are faced with the fact that in three years, they’ve become the biggest crossover boyband in the world. Growing up in the shadows of Nsync, Boyzone, or even Spice Girls, the band is conscious on how surreal everything has been, considering they were just The X Factor UK’s runners-up. This way, we become implicit to the rise of the “ordinary person” as a celebrity (“We just come from normal, working class families,” Zayn says as the film proceeds to outline the most boring jobs the boys had prior to their success). Every single one of One Direction represents that time in our childhood when singing with a hairbrush meant a future of stage lights and adoring fans; a time when watching your favorite band on TV meant every possibility on the horizon.

This is Us captures a momentary blaze in the lives of these five young boys. They all acknowledge that this fame that they’re enjoying right now can be gone within a couple of years. The average shelf life of a boyband may be growing short as the industry finds more fodder for the audience’s pop dreams but right now all we can do is live vicariously though them, just like the angry Asian dad who watches his kid realize his dream of becoming an Ivy League-educated doctor. Or not.

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