Anyone who watches movies at all should’ve noticed by now that for the most part, Hollywood has completely run out of original ideas. The upcoming release slate, which is like a tidal wave of needless sequels, pointless remakes and horrendous movies based on old TV shows should be proof enough, but sometimes I see something that just really makes me see red.
This last week I saw a commercial on TV (which is no better than Hollywood, but at least you’ve got more options to kill your brain with) for an upcoming dance movie called Step Up. Is that not the best name for a dance movie ever? I mean come on, it works on so many levels. You have “Step up” meaning “rise to the occasion” or “do your very best” but dance moves are also called “steps”.
Holy Crap! Do you see what they did there? How clever is that?
Not very clever at all really, and in case you missed the sarcasm, I think someone, somewhere, should be beaten within an inch of their life for letting this movie see the light of day.
“Why?” you may ask. “Because of the crappy name?” you may wonder.
“No!” I would retort “because this whole movie has been done already less than 5 years ago.”
Does anybody remember a little movie that came out a while back called Save the Last Dance? It starred Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas, and some other people whose names are sadly not important enough to be listed here.
Here’s the basic synopsis:
Upper middle-class white girl with a future as a ballet dancer, loses her mother and her will to dance. Upon moving to live with her Father, she goes to a mostly all black school and hooks up with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who teaches her about hip-hop and urban dancing and renews her interest in dancing and her desire to be a professional dancer.
So then we have Step Up which stars pretty much no one and which can be summarized thusly:
Wrong side of the tracks bad-boy is forced to do community service at an arts school and hooks up with a ballet teacher when she recognizes his street dancing skills. The vaguely ethnic-looking beauty proceeds to teach him ballet so they can be partners in her senior showcase. Life changing stuff ensues.

Now let me set the record straight. Save the Last Dance is far from an original movie, I mean, the whole “opposites attract and teach each other about life” thing has been done just shy of a million times. BUT….Step Up looks like a screenwriter somewhere said “Hey, lets do a movie like Save the Last Dance, and just change all the major plot points around to be the exact opposite?” At which point, apparently a studio somewhere said, “Hey now, this is good stuff, the 12-18 year old movie-going female demographic will eat this up, maybe they’ll all come see it multiple times like the did with Titanic and we can have a huge hit on our hands”
Note to readers, the paragraph above is purely supposition on my part, but if you’ve been watching movies very long you’ll probably believe it’s entirely possible.
So in closing, if you go see this movie, I pity you….because you’re (how to say this politely) less than smart, and people like you are why Hollywood doesn’t even have to try anymore.