I'm a sucker for dance movies, even teen dance movies.
Its one of the most basic pleasures, to see young people dance and if I am lucky, to dance with them.
I'll tell you straight out that this is one of the very best of these. Yes, it has problems. Those first. Its stuck with this teen notion of "being yourself," to not let adult traditions become expectations that guide your life. Like all such movies, it itself is a rigid expectation, and the "freedom" here has our gal move into the most commercially defined trend in all the world. Its hardly free and individual to follow an adult template (refined to capture your ticketfare) which guides you to a mere collection of styles (appropriated and packaged to collect other dollars).
Today, there is no genuine Hip Hop. Anywhere. And there are problems with the movie as well. There clearly were huge cuts. An entire story line involving a modern dance teacher seems to have been excised, even to the point that the actor isn't even credited! Some edits are really bad. All of the background characters are offensively trite.
And maybe the worst offense is that the hip hop dance sequences aren't energetically photographed. Shucks. Our girl, is pretty. Very pretty. But the makeup is so perfect and extreme that it fights the impression we are supposed to get.
Because this was made cheaply, it rents stock footage of New York and the exteriors of the center. One shot has the skyline with the twin towers. Its so jarring it breaks the flow.
But forget that, because what's good is very good. I saw this young actress in "Forsaken" where she was merely the designated boobs. She's come a long way. She's credible in this rather constrained character. She seems natural, perhaps because she actually went through a similar experience.
She really is a dancer, with a dancer's body. Strong back which we are allowed to see move. Ballet moves that because she is a real ballerina seem genuine. I see in the credits that she is doubled by a real dancer, but I could not see where. She is credible in both the ballet and "street" dancing.
The male interest is also playing a role close to who he is, or thinks he is. So he does well.
The story is a bit choppy, but it isn't at all the typical fare. There's a real surprise here that raises deeper issues of family than you expect. It really is nice to be surprised in the middle of one of these things. Its not predicable at all.
The one ballet performance is photographed well, really well. Its only few moments, but dear, borrowing from Altman and "Red Shoes." Now, let me tell you why I want you to see this. Teen projects almost exclusively start and end clumsily. Its because they are so formulaic they needn't introduce you to the world because you come to the theater already tuned. This project starts so expertly I was charmed from the start.
Our girl is in a chair with a small table, white background. She is speaking directly to us as if we were interviewing her. She explains the background of the predecessor movie as the background behind her changes. It seems she is controlling the staging of what we see while she is giving it.
This is a scriptwriter's intelligence. The central notion in all these is to fold the audience in the theater to one on screen watching the climactic performance. This opening tells us that we will be a folded audience all the way through. Its a schooled technique, but I was glad to see it.
The story comes to a close with all sorts of hanging threads. In an ordinary production, you'd see each of these in turn being resolved. Does she quit? Does she move in? How are the upset parental issues resolved? Thankfully, all these are left hanging. The final image we see is our girl in a frozen ecstatic leap, in the midst of a fusion dance, free. In a sort of Olivia Newton John wild girl outfit. Juices flowing.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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