Stumbled into Step Up 2: The Streets (2008) on cable Holy Thursday. It's a little-known probably direct-to-video film that is actually quite good. Sure, it's a typical boy-meets-girl story, with both coming from opposite ends of the track (he's rich and comes from a classical ballet family, and she's poor and literally dance on the streets), but it's done so well and so sincerely that you can't help but buy into the success-against-all-odds plot. School expulsion and old-gang ostracism notwithstanding, Andie and Chase create their own dance crew, challenge the powers that be on both the high and low roads, and end up winners. And, yes, they get accepted back into the school.
Here's the video of their final dance:
Admittedly, I haven't kept up with all the versions of High School Musical, but the physically challenged aspect of me (I'd flunk gym class in high school and metaphoricaly speaking, had my shoes stuck somewhere as illustrated in this ad) likes watching cinematic dance scenes over and over. Here're a few of my favorites:
Dance as a form of combat in a gang war had its cinematic roots to as far back as West Side Story in 1961 where rival Poles and Mexicans duke it out in a community ball. The Romeo and Juliet plot also didn't allow for a happy ending:
Street dance crashing into the ballet school scene was made famous by Jennifer Beals in Flashdance (1983):
And when Kevin Bacon at first found his dance freedom restricted in a town scared by rock and roll, he let off steam in this famous scene in Footloose (1984):
And the solo dance scene to end all others which had John Travolta's simple paint store clerk transforming into the King of Disco in Saturday Night Fever (1977):
The underground dance scene finally comes out with a bang in safe, staid middle America in Dirty Dancing (1987) which had critics raving that Patrick Swayze had out-Travolta'd Travolta. I'm afraid you have to Youtube it as the site has disabled all embedments upon someone's request.
Now here's what happens when someone from the establishment (Antonio Banderas) goes out of his comfort zone, teaches a group of bright hungry kids classical tango, and then merges it with their hip hop in Take the Lead (2007):
It doesn't have to be all combative and competitve as Gene Kelly does his showstopper in the now-classic Singing in the Rain (1952):
Friday, April 2, 2010
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