The End of the Page

Step Up 3D: Dance, Dance and… DANCE!

Both men decided too late that the Ultra-Mega-Burrito was not a good idea right before dance practice.

Rating: 8 out of 10

3D has become the banner of a film industry looking for anything to spark the box office back to its previous high water mark, but many films use it only for the monetary bump, not to enhance the viewing experience. A few rare choices in the last year have actually made the extra dimension worthwhile, like Avatar, Despicable Me and How To Train Your Dragon, with an honorable mention to the short film in front of Toy Story 3. Even going back to the beginning of the recent 3D craze there was My Bloody Valentine, which truly catered to the technology in the way it was originally intended. So, it was with a true touch of skepticism that I entered the theater, high-tech, battery powered 3D glasses strapped to my head and waited to see what the world of hip-hop and dance could do with their extra dimension.

Step Up 3D has very little to do with the previous two films in the franchise. Moose, the lone holdover from Step Up 2 The Streets, has traveled to N.Y.U. to fulfill his parents dream by getting an engineering degree and leaving all that silly dance stuff far behind. He finds that extremely difficult since on his orientation tour he accidentally enters himself into a dance battle and wins, making himself enemy number one on the hip-hop hitlist of a local dance crew known as The Samurai. Luke, the lead hero of the movie, takes Moose under his wing and initiates him into his own crew, The Pirates, as they attempt to win the upcoming World Jam and earn enough cash prizes to buy the building where they all live and train.

Some people might wonder how I could rate a dance movie so high, only one down the totem pole from Inception, which some would think of as a travesty even being mentioned in the same long, run-on sentence, but my ratings are based on what type of movie it is and if it fulfilled its main objective. Dance films have one driving force – to showcase dancers and their incredible talents. If they can pull together a coherent story and make an audience feel something beyond the rhythm in their seats, then they have moved beyond the grade of a common genre flick. Step Up 3D definitely showcased the dancers, and by default the incredible choreography, by really paying attention to the movement of the camera during the various dance sequences. There is nothing more that I despise than quick, unmotivated MTV-style cuts during dance sequences, fight scenes, highly technical action sequences and the like. All you end up seeing is a lot of limbs flying in front of camera with no context or character. Here, they locked the camera center stage numerous times and only moved back to open up the frame even more, truly featuring the talent on display.

Also, the 3D element did not feel like a last minute add-on for a couple bucks per ticket increase. There were very specific moments in the film where the dancers popped out from the screen and it enhanced the experience of watching their highly technical moves. Even in the non-pop-out moments, the extra depth into the screen really provided a sense of place and character to the dance sequences that I feel would have been lacking otherwise.

As for the acting, where most people don’t expect much, I was shocked by the power and passion displayed by one of the films co-stars, our one man connection to the previous film, Moose, aka Adam G. Sevani. Born into a musical family and dancing since he was a wee toddler, Sevani filled his moments with heart and passion where many others just filled the frame. He stole each and every scene with a touching sense of honesty and a purity towards dance which poured out of the screen. His plotline was technically the ‘B’ story, but he yanked it out of the background and made the entire movie revolve around him. The saddest part of the film ending is wondering whether Sevani will actually keep working on acting, along with his amazing dance skills. Dance as a part of our culture is becoming bigger and bigger every year, with help from numerous TV hits like Dancing With The Stars and So You Think You Can Dance (the latter featuring Adam Shankman as a permanent judge, who also helped produce Step Up 3D). You never know whether another Step Up could be in the future, but if it does find its way onto the big screen, they better bring back Sevani or they can count on my rating being much, much lower.

The End of the Page Recommendation: Best all-around film of the franchise so far, but if you don’t like dance flicks, this will not put the spring in your step.

Thoughts? How’s it compare to other dance flicks?

Daily Musings 3/3

1 – Now Google has finally reached the point of full cultural integration. A young, upcoming flash-in-the-pan Hip Hop star, named Teyana Taylor, has released a track under the masterful hands of Pharell called Google Me. Click here to listen to it [via PerezHilton]. Honestly, the beat and the flow = good stuff, the chorus and concept = borderline retarded.

2 – Back in the day it seems the Hell’s Angels were dangerous on land, but completely inept on the water. They hatched a plot to kill Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones but failed in prime hilarious fashion:

“Mangold said the men tried to reach Jagger by sea. “The boat was hit by a storm and all of the men were thrown overboard,” he was quoted as saying. They all survived but made no other attempt on his life, Mangold said.”

I don’t know who this Mangold person is, but he should be getting phone calls from the studios right about…now! This has all the trapping of Will Farrell’s next mildly entertaining Saturday afternoon movie fare. [via The Superficial]

3 – A final goodbye to Jeff Healey. I won’t write out his whole bio, since the people over at Starpulse have already done such a great job of it, but I will say that Angel Eyes is an amazing song and is in heavy rotation in my “Heartwrenching Songs of the Eighties” folder in ITunes. What? You don’t have a folder like that on your computer? Uh huh. Sure, I believe you. Oh, in case you didn’t know the other amazing thing about this truly talented guitarist, he was blind. Yep, now don’t you feel productive?

4 – Marion Cotillard went from being the widely respected winner of the Best Actress Oscar for Mome La to being the widely chuckled at actress who made some badly worded comments about the 9/11 attacks and the landing on the moon:

The Daily Mail says:

“I think we’re lied to about a number of things,” Cotillard said, singling out the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center as an example of the US making up horror stories for political ends.
“We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burnt for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there [in New York], in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.”
She added that the towers, planned in the early Sixties, were an outdated “money-sucker” that would have cost more to modernise than to rebuild altogether, which is why they were destroyed.
She said: “It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them.”

“Did a man really walk on the Moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don’t believe all they tell me, that’s for sure.”

[via Tyler Durden]

So what did we learn here today? First off, never give awards to the French, they just don’t appreciate it. Secondly, never say something in a interview you can’t blame on too much cough syrup. Lastly, there are indeed still people who don’t believe we’ve landed on the moon, even though we can send robots to Mars. Sure, that makes total sense. I’m going to go back to banging my head against a wall until more knowledge and facts fall out.

5 – Simon Pegg has blasted Warner Brothers and McG for the complete mishandling of his creation, the TV show Spaced. Evidently the pattern of stealing witty and intelligent comedies from Britain and repackaging them, making them terrible and keeping the same name does make some of the original British creators a bit miffed.  [via FilmDrunk]

6 – The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, just finished a two day visit to Iraq and he wrapped up the whole affair by saying “No one likes the U.S.” OK, I’ll admit we are not the most loved country in the world as we would like people to think. It’s not all teddy bears and rose parades when we come to town, but coming from Iran that statement holds just a little bit more irony. When Switzerland or Jamaica starts saying no one likes us, then I’ll be worried about our global image. If we are only being bad mouthed by crazy dictators who continue to talk about wiping other countries off the planet and ignoring absolutely huge parts of world history, I think we are still in the safe zone then.  [via CNN]

7 – I was really hoping for a cool red beam or some nifty sound effects when I clicked on a link that said “Shoots Reporter with Ray Gun”.  But it turns out this is an actual weapon, not one in my imagination, so it’s not nearly as cool. [via GorillaMask]

8 – Office Dare for the day: Ask a female colleague if you may borrow a lipstick. Then pocket it and walk away.

9 – It seems we can’t stop the battle for worst movie ever made this year. In the last few months we’ve seen Blond Ambition open to $64 per screen average, then The Hottie and The Nottie came in with a whopping $2,000 weekend total, now we get Witless Protection which is currently running a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes and is officially being turned away by Canadian theaters. I hear someone shouting, it’s soft but you can just make it out, it sounds like Uwe Boll yelling, “See!! Someone is worse than me!!!” [via FilmDrunk]

10 – Ummmm…ouch: