Ain't no party like a Bill Murray dance party? Vulture had a front row seat at Cannes: "At the request of [Moonrise Kingdom co-star Jared] Gilman, who just had his bar mitzvah and has a taste for dub-step, Bill Murray led the troop onto the dance floor, where the four kids and their accompanying man-child wiggled and jumped around with abandon. It was a scene of such next-level adorability that nearly everyone in the immediate vicinity pulled out a camera phone. 'We're just chilling! We're just chilling!' Murray shouted out as he put the kibosh on each video in turn. Then he'd go back to more happy wriggling to songs like 'I'm So Excited.'" [Vulture]
Documentaries don’t have to be technically great to be irresistible, and Bess Kargman’s First Position, which follows six young ballet dancers as they prepare for an elite competition, is a case in point. You may think you can guess what’s going to happen by the end of First Position: Some will win and others won’t, there will be some tears shed, this or that dancer will be sidelined by an injury – and yet somehow, even though nothing hugely surprising happens, the details Kargman captures somehow feel fresh. Maybe that’s because this isn’t just a documentary about ballet and the extraordinary discipline it requires; it’s also about youth and its attendant hopes and risks, spelled out in language that’s painfully universal.
more »
Now that everyone has grown tired of touting the allegedly thrilling promise of 3-D, we may have some chance of figuring out exactly what its future might be. While I still think 3-D is almost less than a gimmick, I've come to think that its real promise lies not in big-budget filmmaking along the lines of The Adventures of Tintin or even a picture as wonderful as Hugo, but in the hands of directors working on a more modest scale who simply have a good idea and a spark of enthusiasm for the medium. Wim Wenders has brought that spark to a rather unlikely subject, the late German modern-dance choreographer Pina Bausch. For years, Wenders and Bausch, longtime friends, had been working on a movie together. Bausch died suddenly in 2009, at age 68, and Pina is Wenders's tribute to her, less a strict documentary than a heartfelt -- and visually gorgeous -- celebration of Bausch's work and her mode of working.
more »
Recent reports of Tom Cruise unleashing some sweet moves in a dance-off at the posh wedding of his Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol producer David Ellison, prompted speculative mental images of Risky Business-era Tom Cruise cutting loose on the dance floor. (Or, nightmare visions of Cruise busting out some Les Grossman-style swag. Make it stop!) Well, today brings video evidence beyond our mildest/wildest expectations. Did Cruise just do the worm??
more »
Attention, dance nerds! If you've been following the Jon M. Chu/Step Up/LXD crew like I have, you've got good reason to be excited for Paramount's upcoming sequel, Step Up 4. First of all, it's filming this summer, which puts it right on track for a 2012 release. And though pop choreographer extraordinaire Wade Robson had to drop out of the director's chair, he's being replaced by Scott Speer, a music video veteran and Chu compatriot who directed "Duet," the most beautiful episode of Chu's online dance series, The LXD. Watch a clip after the jump.
more »
