Weekend In Reviews

I had a stack of new releases at home but instead of watching a single one, I opted to watch Step Up for the 25th time.


Step Up - A hoodlum from the wrong side of the tracks gets caught vandalizing the Maryland School for the Arts and is sentenced to serve 200 hours of community service at said institution. Our hoodlum is Tyler Gage (Channing Tatum) and along with his best friend Mac and Mac's little brother Skinny, he spends all of his time stealing cars, partying and basically being...well, a hoodlum. Then he meets Nora who's a dancer at MSA and has just lost her partner for the big showcase to a bad sprain. So Tyler offers to fill in and based solely on the fact that Tyler is the only boy in or around the school who can apparently lift her up (some kinda dancers they've got there eh?), she convinces the dean (Rachel Griffiths) to let him stop being the janitor and instead fulfill his community service hours dancing with the pretty girl. Nice work if you can get it.


Obviously Tyler and Nora fall in love because a) they spend all their time touching each other, b) they're both very attractive, c) they're "teenagers" and d) this is a movie. But there are obstacles to their love - her boyfriend, her mother, his friends, wrong-side-of-the-tracks, blah, blah, blah. But when Skinny is killed, Mac finally realizes he's been a dick his whole life and he convinces Tyler to stop acting like he doesn't care about anything and go be Nora's boyfriend and try to get his (tantalizing) dancin' ass into MSA. And of course, that's just what happens.


I'll be honest with you, I like this movie in large part because Channing Tatum is nice to look at and because there's dancing. In much the same way I like nearly all movies about sports, I like nearly all movies about dancing. I'm a pretty simple chick. But my favorite thing about the movie isn't Tatum or dancing. No, my favorite thing is the C-plot involving MSA students Miles (Mario) and Lucy (Drew Sidora). If someone had rewritten this movie such that theirs was the A-plot and Tyler and Nora played third fiddle, I would have totally been on board with that movie.


Anyway, if you haven't seen this one, they re-run it on USA or TNT or one of those cable channels pretty frequently, so you should catch it sometime. It's a fun way to kill a Saturday afternoon.