JUST A STEEL TOWN GIRL ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, LOOKIN' FOR THE FIGHT OF HER LIFE: Join hands and hearts and voices, voices hearts and hands as we review Vulture's Amanda Dobbins' attempt to
rank the Top 24 Dance Movies of the Modern (starting with Saturday Night Fever) era, based on Danciness.
Oh for goodness sake. Did she ding Footloose basically for having a plot and yet Save The Last Dance doesn't get dinged (granted, Save is obviously better, but still)?
ReplyDeleteDirty Dancing is ranked far too high for being just plain bad in every respect except Jerry Orbach,
No The Company? Serioiusly?
I agree with Finn - THE COMPANY should be there. So should PINA (which is different, I guess, in that it's not a fictional/narrative movie, but a performance/documentary. Also, PARIS IS BURNING.
ReplyDeleteGod, now I'm angry I forgot PINA. (But yeah, documentary.)
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, having never seen the Step-Up movies, I had no idea before Magic Mike that Tatum has legitimate movies.
There's a lot of Adam Shankman on that list. I can't call myself a dance-movie aficionado, but I enjoyed the Japanese version of Shall We Dance and would have thought it would make the list somewhere. I applaud the inclusion of of Strictly Ballroom, in which I believe (without being sure) that the dancing is not technically high-quality, but which has the advantage of being utterly insane from beginning to end. And I'm disappointed to see the omission of the first Breakin', which (despite all of the jokes about the name of its sequel) was a decent snapshot of the style as it existed at that exact moment.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, is anybody else having trouble logging in through Disqus?
I think Step Up 2's final dance sequence is far superior to any other in the entire Step Up series. However, I probably just generally give extra credit to dances performed in the rain. (See also: Angry Solo Rain Dance in You Got Served).
ReplyDeleteNeeds the John Waters' "Hairspray." No good reason to have left that off. Move "Strictly Ballroom" to number 2 and the number one movie should be "All That Jazz." How did they miss a Bob Fosse movie about Bob Fosse? It also includes the best dance dialogue:
ReplyDeleteVictoria Porter: [crying] No, you're right. I'm terrible. I know I'm terrible. I look in the mirror and I'm embarrassed. Maybe I should quit. I just can't seem to do anything right.
Joe Gideon: Listen, I can't make you a great dancer. I don't even know if I can make you a good dancer. But, if you keep trying and don't quit, I know I can make you a better dancer. I'd like very much todo that. Stay?
Victoria Porter: Are you going to keep yelling at me?
Joe Gideon: Probably.
That kind of reads like bad Sorkin dialogue. Search and replace "dance" with "produce the news" and you have a Sorkin power-imbalance romance.
ReplyDeleteGood call on Shall We Dance which I should have remembered since I just wated it again a few weeks ago.
ReplyDelete