A white midwestern girl moves to Chicago, where her new boyfriend is a black teen from the South Side with a rough, semi-criminal past.
Director: Thomas Carter
Stars: Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas, Kerry Washington.
Randy Duncan ... ballet choreographer
Fatima Robinson ... choreographer
Another inventory-browse purchase.
36 songs in the Soundtracks.
Enjoyable. The (good) ending got to me, so I was engaged enough for that to happen. But the dancing was Meh and the story was not so dynamic as all the featurettes would make it seem.
JS does most of her own dancing, and she's amazingly credible as a ballerina for someone who just started a month before shooting. (They did double her for some of the ballet.) But the "merger" of hip-hop and ballet for the finale was more just shrug-worthy contemporary dance. Nice use of the chair prop, though.
I also shrug at the interracial romance. The transplanted white girl doesn't really struggle much with acclimating to her (nearly) all-black environment. So all the dramatic issues the film touches does little more than that: touch the issues.
Rated 6.2 (53,772)
distr. Paramount, dir. Carter; 6
