Remember, kid, you're BFABB

I just typed a 1,250 word review of Step Up 3D. Then Blogger made it go away. Fuck that.

I liked it.

UPDATE: found it!


So today I present to you a couple of normal films; not the pretentious foreign, expensive-to-purchase, and/or IFC films available to a very small percentage of the population. This blog really does not represent my love for popular cinema and summer blockbusters, partially because it's been a dry year for that kind of film.

First up is William Friedkin's wilderness-survival heavy The Hunted. Benicio del Toro is a psychopathic, man hunter escaped from a military holding cell. Tommy Lee Jones does his best Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive impression, brought out of retirement to catch the psycho, but with an awesome beard and a stubborn unwillingness to untuck his shirt. The movie is slight, and often stupid, but Friedkin makes his action scenes big and exciting, and the fight scenes brutally ugly, raw, and personal. It's well worth the 94 minutes for those few great scenes. Tommy Lee Jones also kind of prances around while trying to track del Toro, whose frequent mini PETA rants really work to kill his already shaky performance.

The Hunted: 5.9/10



I now realize my next review will not make me seem normal.

Here's what's up: I loved Step Up 3D. I sat in the theater tapping my feet to the music and smiling through the whole thing. I loved it almost as much as I loved Step Up 2 the Streets. The third film doesn't have the amazing final dance sequence that Streets provided, but it has a plethora of varied styles of dance scenes, all brilliantly staged, filmed, and edited, and some truly amazing performers to execute them.

(This is almost wholly SPOILER-free. As though you'd care)

In the third film, returning character Moose (Adam G. Sevani) is starting college at NYU, having given up dancing to face the real world. He brings along his best friend Camille (Missy Elliot video vet, Alyson Stoner).
Moose literally follows a pair of shoes to a small dance battle down the sidewalk, and within 2 minutes of the film starting, is dancing again. Moose was the surprise character in the second film, but here he gets more chances to show off his considerable talent and Michael Jackson moves. Unfortunately, it seems that Disney didn't trust a scrawny 18-year-old to anchor their film. So in comes Luke (Rick Malambri), a dancer/filmmaker who owns an insanely expensive loft where his crew of eclectic dancers all live and rehearse. Luke notices Moose and takes him to the loft where he is quickly accepted as a new member. WHAT ABOUT SCHOOL? MOOSE, YOU GAVE UP DANCING! The problem, Luke and the crew can't afford the mortgage, and the club (WHAT!) isn't bringing in the bills anymore. When the crew goes downstairs to Luke's insanely expensive dance club (maybe if you got any of your fucking adult patrons to buy a goddamn beer...) they meet Natalie (Sharni Vinson), a mysterious dancer who looks and sounds exactly like the hotter Briana Evigan of Streets. With these new members, Luke and his crew set out to win the World Jam and it's prize money to save the loft.

Whoah, that's a lot of set up for 15 minutes. But with it finally out of the way,we can really start dancing.

Before I get to what I loved, I suppose I'll continue with what I didn't. I'm sure you could tell from my plot description that I care little for this story. I believe story in this franchise is an obstacle the films have to constantly wrestle with. Streets struggled and eventually crushed its poorly developed opponent. 3D eventually wins out, but it's got a nasty limb walking out of the ring.

The film really suffers from not having a well-defined lead. In Streets, we had Briana with the blond dude as an inspiring love interest, and Moose as the quirky side-kick. Here we have Luke and Moose. Luke gets the love interest. Moose gets the only attempts at conflict outside of dancing. Unfortunately both are underdeveloped and feel silly. Moose's plot seems weird because he's meant to be balancing his two mutually exclusive worlds of school and dance, but ends up not being seen enough in either for us to feel much for him. It seems more like he was just accidentally left out of scenes until one of the dancers is like "Where's Moose?". Then he shows up.

Luke's development is more than minorly annoying. In fact Luke, along with Natalie, threaten to kill the whole thing. They're both charisma vacuums who take up too much screen time. Luke is just so pretentious, and stupid. Traffic makes him feel like he's part of something bigger. He invented the phrase "Born From a Boom Box" (BFABB), and he never shuts up about it. Natalie is just nothing more than a stand-in for Briana Evigan. She even wears outfits that I swear remember Briana wearing also. These problems, though, are not the mortal sins. No. The problem is that we rarely even see these two robots dance. (The actual robot guy was great) These two seem like the least talented of the larger group. Is the crew just using Luke for his sweet crib? The movie says no, but it makes little sense if they're not. But really, this is a problem because our love interests/complications aren't directly related to the dancing and what's at stake. It feels more forced and tacked on than any other part of the ridiculously stupid story.

Okay. That's it for the bad. 700 words in, I'm ready to talk about the good stuff. Dancing. Camera work, editing. Even pacing, to a lesser extent. The film uses all these qualities in great ways. Director Jon Chu might be incapable of telling a decent story, I wouldn't care; but his staging and execution of the dance sequences is a marvel to watch. I can't begin to imagine how difficult these are to pull off, much less piece together coherently. Well, this ain't no Michael Bay film. These basically are just action scenes, and Chu must know his way around one. The spatial continuity and orientation remains intact throughout each sequence. The editing helps make each successive scene bigger more emotional than the last. And the choreography. Holy cow. Most of these dances display talent levels only hinted at in 2 the Streets. Another great thing is these dances never feel repetitive, and they occur at all the right places. I only got bogged down in stupid dialogue one time in the 2nd act.

This leads me to my next point. What am I supposed to actually think of a film like this, and how do I compare it to other films?

It's magnificently stupid, but also a pure joy to sit through. Do we forgive a weak story, and crummy acting when it has so much else to offer. Chu is well aware of the many genres that have influenced the dance film and the choreography that goes into it. One scene has the lead love birds (their only good scene) rehearsing a routine hinged on perfectly and interwoven spin kicks and martial arts-styled moves. Moose hears a Fred Astaire song blasting from an ice cream truck and commences to dance down the street with Camille in a funny, successful send up of the classic Astaire/Rogers musicals.

There are several more of these moments, making me feel good about thinking this might display an absolute love of cinema more than most films I've seen this year.

And here's where people kill me. I felt after this film similar to how I felt after leaving Inception for the second time. I haven't wrote about Christopher Nolan's dreamfest as I've felt unsure about my initial opinion that it was amazing. I enjoyed every minute, but could not help feeling that it lacked important elements, like a significant emotional core or developed supporting characters. I realized that Inception is the perfect summer spectacle. It's insanely entertaining, sparks conversation, and has people thinking even though most of the debates about plot and such feel absurdly pointless. (whether it was a dream the whole time or not feels wholly irrelevant today since it doesn't affect the stakes either way.) Nolan obviously tells a more compelling, intelligent and imaginative story than Step Up 3D, but at their core they are both huge spectacle, that assault the senses on all fronts, meant to entertain more than incite deep thoughts.

Inception is a much better film, but Step Up 3D is an 100% joyful cinematic experience worth your time (and the silly glasses).