Planet B-Boy Movie Finally Coming to Detroit

I have not and persistently do not find ballet and modern dance all that interesting. It just doesn't "speak to me" in the way that other art forms do. I think there is a bit of a high art / low art thing going on in this equation because I really love the dancing in, for example, Singin' in the Rain, or Bamboozled, or even Bring it On. I love the tango sequences in Happy Together, and Tangos, the Exile of Gardel too, but ballet and/or modern dance performed on the stage just feels so archaic (is I guess what it is) to me. Just doesn't connect.

Here, on the other hand, is something that connects with me like the nicest possible punch in the face:



It's a sequence that is cleverly nicknamed "Run DMZ": simultaneously referencing rap/hip-hop godfathers RUN-DMC and the DeMilitarized Zone that divides North from South Korea - the ostensible setting for the amazing dance that unfolds in the clip.

This sequence seems pretty indicative of the stuff your going to get when you go see the movie Planet B-Boy , which you will if you know what's good for you.

From a number of clips that I've watched, this movie seems like the latest in a gathering stream of grassroots-ey media products that celebrate people who take globalization into their own hands, as it were, and use the increasing speed with which cultural ideas and products flow across international borders to create bonds of friendship-in-creativity with people that they could never have hoped to even meet mere decades ago.

If you live near me, it opens at the Main Art in Royal Oak on April 25.

Here's the trailer:

Southland Tales: An Extremely Good Movie

(here's what I sent to IMDB. possible spoilers)

So, did you come here wondering what it's "really" like? Well imagine if Robert Altman and David Fincher co-directed an adaptation of a novel co-written by Philip K. Dick and Chuck Palahniuk. Yes, the fact that I put Fincher and Palahniuk in that sentence together does mean that Southland Tales has an anarchic (in the fullest sense of that word) sensibility similar to that of Fight Club, but I don't think that it's a "guy movie" in the same way that Fight Club is. The sheer originality and depth of this movie is astonishing. Even the way that it achieves its originality is original. What was that? Southland Tales relies heavily on what they call "pastiche" in postmodern theory: it takes a million things you've seen before in a million niches of popular culture and whirls them together like a "Will it Blend: Millenial Americana" YouTube video. Yes, it blends!

There are so many aspects of it that made my jaw drop ranging from the casting of teen idol Justin Timberlake in the role of the facially disfigured narrator, to the bizarre insertion of an incredible precision-choregraphed song-and-dance sequence at the movie's midpoint, to the glorious arrangement for string quartet of the Star Spangled Banner as sung by Mulholland Drive's Rebekah Del Rio.

There were scenes that made me burst into surprised, embarrassingly loud laughter. There were scenes that made me nearly jump out of my seat from the shock. There were scenes that froze me with deer-in-the-headlights terror.

And, oh those casting choices. From numerous Saturday Night Live alumni in both comic and serious roles (including a deadpan, scene-stealing Jon Lovitz) to Highlander Christopher Lambert selling heavy armaments out of an ice cream truck.

Without a trace of irony in his performance.

And that is truly one of the strengths of this film: it refuses to “wink” at the audience. It plays all of it’s irony fast and straight as a Bladeless Lasik IntraLase® laser. It doesn’t have the time to wink, and it doesn’t give you time to blink either. Writer/director Richard Kelly knows how complex and irony-laden this stuff his and he trusts the intelligence of his viewers to keep up with him and not have to be told when to laugh.

And it is a complicated movie, but if it weren't complicated it wouldn't be so good.

See it today!