Morgan Spurlock’s “One Direction: This Is Us” about the forenamed band, is a fun, zippy look at five ridiculously charming and uber cute lads from the UK. I watched it in a theater filled with teenage hormonal girls and their unabated deafening shrieks were filled with unabashed adoring love. How could they not? The dreamy guys are Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik and the band is the creation of the musical genius Simon Cowell.
The seasoned and respected Cowell admits in a candid moment that the phenomenon caught him completely by surprise. Cowell again — as he did with American Idol and X Fact0r– finds the perfect zeitgeist of fan adoration via the Internet, Facebook, Twitter. All of which helped spur One Direction’s meteoric rise to the mega worldwide stars.
Older folks will smile, the film is just plain fun to watch and the music is poppy and quite lovely at times. These young men are actually talented, the boys can sing, which Cowell of course got spot on.
Spurlock gives some touching cameos to the parents of these seemingly normal working class kids, one especially said how he was just a plain rural Dad and seemed truly befuddled by his son’s success. All the parents are still shell shocked, they still don’t know what quite hit them. You can’t blame them, the scenes of the global swarms of screaming girls harken back to the Beatles. “One Direction” is the social networking version of that kind of hysteria. And hysteria it most certainly is.
After watching Miley Cyrus’s debacle on the VMAs I think parents will herd their teenagers into the theater to watch genuinely nice, mischievous young men not misbehaving. Spurlock does more than a good job of making their story an enjoyable, albeit harmless and light foray of boy band fodder.
