Let's start off with an extremely important preliminary question. Why is every single side character in this movie written to be a complete and absolute d. bag with zero self-awareness? It's a bit like watching an abject commitment to failure from the word go. "We know we don't have the talent to actually be funny, so instead let's present a very stylized portrayal of what it means to be obnoxious." Louis C. K. had a really good comment about this type of "comedy" writing, which I'll attempt to paraphrase as follows: "It's arrogant too, because it comes from a sophomoric school of thinking that places its own value up on a pedestal, merely based on the fact that it's adhered to in its own circle, and accepted as a normative standard, without any real basis of comedy behind it."
All this being said, the plot of the film, the bones, if you will, is fairly sound and easy to accept for a film which SHOULD be primarily about showcasing dancing, without needlessly distracting from it. (Teenager ends up doing community service at a dance school, and ends up discovering his love of dance). Fine. Somewhat cliched, but it's fine, and more to the point, even pretty much all the micro plot points of the film are fine. It's the horrendous writing and unbelievable characters that ruin it. I thought it would be interesting to check out an original Google produced movie to see what they had to offer, and in short, it's everything you could hope an SJW oriented censorship-happy company would bring to film.
It's actually a great testament to the type of person who wants to end bullying and censor all negativity. These are people who want so badly to live in a world where everyone agrees with their personal aesthetic, which in their view should prevail eternally untested, and more to the point, unchallenged. Guess what. NOBODY thinks you're funny, and anyone who thinks your writing is cute is simply too good-natured and impressionable a person to deserve being tarnish by your authoritarian Nickelodeon universe, because artistically speaking, that's what this movie is, a Nickelodeon universe where the dopey protagonist occasionally calls one of the d. bag side characters an a. hole. Oooo. Edgy, guys. You know, something for the adults to enjoy, lest you thought this was a film targeting a child audience, and yes, there's enough sexual innuendo here to let you know that this film was ACTUALLY intended for a broader audience. Yuck...
Also, it would be remiss of me to avoid commenting on the irony of me complaining about a film being too pc oriented, when I can't even cite a direct quote from said movie, as per Amazon's contributor guidelines, who apparently are even more pc oriented than Google. YIIIIGH! ...In case you're wondering, the previous exclamation was my attempt at trying to spell out the literal sound of vomit hitting the inside of a toilet bowl, but anyway, I digress... When you hear the protagonist swear at the film's goofball of an antagonist, who much to my enjoyment looks a lot like John Snavely, aka Champ, from the highly popular DancingBear series, more than anything, all this does is highlight the fact that the way these characters act would NEVER pass in the real world, and now that we're bringing this back to the real world, and real life consequences for one's failures...
If this movie proves one thing, it proves this: bullying is not a real and serious issue that our society is facing. If it was, the people who wrote this trash would have had this particular creative aesthetic bullied out of them long before their pens ever touched paper, the point being that the characters they create would NEVER be allowed to be that obnoxious and that outspoken and confident in the real world, because they would be at the receiving end of some major kickback. Sorry, but you guys just clearly didn't grow up in the same world that I grew up in. You really have to ask how is it even possible for someone to have such an ANNOYING and obnoxious personal aesthetic, and not only have zero self-awareness, but be unleashed upon the world like a hideous deformed cyclops, by producers with even less awareness, and if you think I'm being cruel or unfair, you have NO IDEA how much I'm censoring my true feelings here. I'll probably just end up taking it out on some poor inept customer service agent later this week, so I hope you're happy, Amazon. Remember... People actually got PAID... GOOD sums of money to write this trash, and to one extent or another, they're making a career out of it. Eugh... How many ways can one person spell "vomit inducing"?
Granted, the Dancing With The Stars world does tend to embody a lot of this "positive positive double plus good" 1984 authoritarian pseudo happy energy where things are seldom challenged, and everything is GREAT. Oh no! Len Goodman gave a valid criticism! That's not good, and if it's not good, it's not positive, is it? BOOOOO! And thus trash is allowed to be presented as quality artistic expression... My family used to watch this show on a shared tv, so I'm not without battle scars, and the cameo appearance of Bruno Tonioli in this film, I think makes it a very fair point of contrast to draw up. Ultimately, in regards to fans of the show, the only target demographic worth considering really, I refuse to believe that these people are wholly without taste.
I personally don't care that much about dance. I care a LITTLE bit about the people who do care about dance, hence the lack of guilt I feel over this scathing review, and I definitely didn't expect to get out of this what they may have expected to get out of this, with them most likely coming away feeling far more short-changed than myself. To tag another reviewer's comment, in quite possibly the most ill-conceived way that I can cook up, what I realistically expected to get out of this movie was scoping out Meg Diangelis' butt, and you couldn't even let me do that in peace.
In the end, people who enjoy campy dance routines have a right to like what they like, and so do I with my animalistic butt scoping, but I'm pretty sure we can both come together over one thing, and that is to slam this film with a resounding no. I think as another fair point of contrast, I should bring up the now legendary "high school musical" series. Like this film, campy beyond belief, yet unlike this film it ACTUALLY showcases song and dance in a strong enough way for it to at least be appreciated by its target demographic on SOME artistic basis... and better shots of Ashley Tisdale's butt, to be honest. For lessons on everything that NOBODY wants, I highly recommend Dance Camp, which follows, and was conceived by the great Google standard of content etiquette. A 4.0 rating out of 10... That's what your years of content censorship amount to. Good job guys! Let's see how long you last when the free market rears it's ugly head, which does still exist, despite your countless objections to it.
