by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched two “world premiere” movies on Lifetime
that were not thrillers about psycho
husbands/wives/lovers/maids/nannies/children/Uber drivers/whatever but were
instead “inspirational” stories about young heroines trying to achieve their
big dreams despite the opposition of those around them. The first was called Center
Stage: On Pointe (“pointe,” so spelled, is
the ballet term meaning to dance while standing on your toes), which made it
seem like a PBS documentary about dance but was in fact a fictional film and,
according to an imdb.com “trivia” poster, it’s actually the third in a series
of dramatic TV-movies made in Canada about young dancers competing with each
other for a slot in a ballet company. The plot centers around Bella Parker
(Nicole Muñoz, who looks as Latina as her name makes her sound and who doesn’t
look all that credible as the sister of the actress playing her sister in the film), who’s working as a waitress
and studying modern dance. She’s the sister of star ballerina Kate Parker
(Rachele Brooke Smith), internationally famous ballerina, and she has a
big-time crisis of confidence because she knows she can’t do ballet anywhere
nearly as well as her sister. She’s also surprisingly stocky for a dancer — or
an actress playing one — in 2016; she’s a nice-looking woman but
“full-figured,” as the euphemism goes, and though she moves well she doesn’t
seem all that agile. She decides nonetheless to try out for the American Ballet
Company just when its artistic director, Jonathan Reeves (Peter Gallagher), has
been told by his principal funder that classical ballet is no longer popular
enough to sell tickets and he must therefore add modern, jazz and hip-hop
dancing to his programs, which means finding new dancers who can do those
styles. So Bella, using the last name “Miller” (I found it amusing that she
starts the movie as Charlie Parker’s namesake and ends it as Glenn Miller’s!),
signs up just when the company is looking for people with her sort of talent,
though the company’s repertoire demands that its dancers know both ballet and modern.
Bella makes the first cut of
auditions despite the opposition of the dragon-lady ballet instructor who
doesn’t think she’ll ever be a
ballet dancer, especially since she didn’t start training at age three (I
remember reading Agnes DeMille’s memoir of her first days in ballet school and
her recollection that she was
looked on as a late bloomer because she started at the advanced age of seven).
This qualifies her to attend the company’s “Training School,” a sort of ballet
boot camp (the phrase is actually used in the script) in the country, isolated
not only from social distractions but wi-fi and cell-phone signals as well,
during which the dancers will be paired off in male-female teams and eventually
judged as a unit — either both team members will make the company or neither
will. What ensues is basically Lord of the Flies meets The Hunger Games — the aspiring dancers may not literally be killing
each other but they do pull
tricks like trying to trip or drop each other during practices, and the
unscrupulousness and nastiness of the rivalries between them, as well as the
budding romances between male and female students, sometimes with their
partners and sometimes not (though this is the world of ballet the script
defies the stereotype by making none
of the males openly, or even clandestinely, Gay), and the nastiest dancer, an
arrogant little prick named Tommy (Kenny Wormakl, who assuming he’s doing his
own on-screen dancing instead of using a double would actually be a good choice
to play Gene Kelly in a biopic if anyone makes one), takes himself out of the
running by doing a leap his teacher warns him he isn’t ready for, landing badly
and breaking his leg. Bella (one wonders if the writer, unidentified on
imdb.com, deliberately cribbed that name from the heroine of the Twilight cycle) lets slip to another of the students, Allegra
(Maude Green) — who already washed out of a similar training program in Dallas
and whose last chance to make a ballet company this is — that she’s Kate
Parker’s younger sister. Allegra tells Tommy, and Tommy immediately starts a
rumor that Bella has been guaranteed a slot in the program in exchange for
superstar Kate Parker making a guest appearance with the company. It’s not
true, but the Black girl who helped spread the rumor is thrown out of the
program.
At the last minute, Allegra’s partner quits the trials to go off to
Paris and join a dance company there with his girlfriend (whom we hear talked
about but never actually see), leaving Allegra bereft. Bella nobly agrees to
sacrifice her own ambitions and lend her partner Damon (Barton Cowperthwaite)
to Allegra so she can have her
shot — but Damon, who’s in love with Bella (as she is with him), refuses to let
her get away with that. Instead the three dance as a group and the imperious
ballet mistress announces that if they’re going to dance as a threesome,
they’ll be admitted or not as a threesome. Of course they are, and the finale shows the company with its new
members giving its first fusion performance of ballet and hip-hop, Bella on her
way to stardom and her sister showing up backstage after the performance to
congratulate her. It’s a reasonably well-done movie, decently acted and with a
lot of hot shots of nice-looking young men, twinkie-ish but at least muscular (which turns me on a lot more than the boyish
concentration-camp victim look common to most Gay male porn these days), though
alas only in the opening scene, with the American Ballet Company giving one of
its pure-ballet performances to an audience that hasn’t filled the hall, do we
actually get to see one of these hot guys shirtless. Center Stage: On
Pointe is an O.K. movie whose best aspect
is its skill in dramatizing the clash between ballet and more current forms of
dance, and in particular how Bella is torn between them and how she’s a skilled
modern dancer but has to learn
the ballet vocabulary from the ground up. She’s also put on the spot when she’s
asked to help teach the ballet
specialists in the class about modern dance, and we get some quirky lines from
the script about how ballet turns movements into feelings and modern dance
turns feelings into movements (I’m not sure exactly what that means but it sounds convincing enough, and it ties in with the film’s
depiction of modern dance as freer, looser and more improvisatory than ballet).
One aspect of the film that amused me was that its direction was credited to
“Director X.” At first I thought this was a latter-day version of Alan Smithee
(the made-up name used between 1968 and 2000 by Screen Directors’ Guild members
who were so embarrassed by the low quality of a film that they didn’t want it
credited under their real name — though one critic actually did an auteur analysis of the films of Alan Smithee as if he were
a real person, and not surprisingly concluded that the main characteristic of
Smithee was the wide variety of styles and genres with which he’d worked — and not many directors used
the “Smithee” pseudonym because it would mean giving up residual royalties for
the film), but it turns out “Director X.” — with the period at the end — is the
birth name of Black director Julien Christian Lutz (he’s mixed Trinidadian and
Swiss), who specialized in making rap music videos for such major names in the
rap field as Drake, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Wiz Khalifa, Usher, John Mayer, Korn,
and Iggy Azalea. (I’ve heard of some of these people but I’ll have to take
imdb.com’s word for it that “Wiz Khalifa” is a star.) His first film outside
the music-video world was Undone,
also known as Across the Line,
filmed in 2015, which from its imdb.com synopsis seems to be much like Center
Stage: On Pointe except it’s about an
aspiring male hockey player instead of an aspiring female dancer: “A young
Black NHL hopeful living in a racially divided Nova Scotian community finds his
career prospects in jeopardy when tensions in his community come to a head. On
the strength of this film Director X. looks like a potentially good filmmaker
and it’ll be interesting to see if he can broaden his range of subjects.
