When I was doing my reviews leading up to the Oscars I thought about watching CENTER STAGE, the ballet movie that was the big screen debut of Zoe Saldaña, who ended up winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for EMILIA PÉREZ (where she also danced). But I decided not to rush it because I knew myself and that I would end up wanting to watch both of its straight-to-cable sequels. Now I have done that and I present to you my review of the entire CENTER STAGE trilogy.
CENTER STAGE (2000)
Directed by Nicholas Hytner (THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE)
Written by Carol Heikkinen (EMPIRE RECORDS)
Choreographer: Susan Stroman (Director/choreographer of THE PRODUCERS [2005])
The first CENTER STAGE picture introduces us to the American Ballet Academy, an elite (fictional) New York City ballet school run by revered stick-up-his-ass choreographer/director Jonathan Reeves (Peter Gallagher, SEX, LIES, AND VIDEOTAPE), who turns each year into a cutthroat competition between the students. Their education culminates in their performances in workshops that will help the faculty decide which three boys and three girls will be invited to join Jonathan’s very prestigious American Ballet Company. From the speech he gives on day one it kind of sounds like this school will be the golden ticket to dance stardom for a handful of students, and a miserable, torturous waste of time, energy and money for everybody else. Most of them. Almost all of them. And they should all be ashamed of themselves. Okay, good talk! (read the rest of this shit…)
BLACK BAG is the latest-latest from prolific retiree Steven Soderbergh. I’m mad at myself that I didn’t see his ghost movie PRESENCE in theaters last month, so I wasn’t gonna miss this. It’s one of his clever, expertly-executed genre exercises, this time reinventing the spy movie. The novelty is that it works completely as an exciting espionage thriller, with betrayals, murder, interrogations, trickery, etc., but done on a small scale, in a mere 2 (two) countries, centering around two dinner party scenes. And that flows naturally out of the fact that the main characters are a happily married couple. (And that it’s not about either of them being kidnapped.)
Zeiram (Mizuho Yoshida, who later played Gojira in GODZILLA, MOTHRA AND KING GHIDORAH: GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK) is the name of a villainous alien on a rampage. He looks like a guy with a Boushh-style slit mask and a wide brimmed hat. The hat has a little kabuki-white face on the front that sometimes looks like a doll head, but in closeup appears to be a living person. Sometimes it extends on a long wormy neck. Eventually it’s revealed that he’s a “forbidden biological weapon,” and the “hat” is actually Zeiram, the rest is a biomechanical attachment. He’s basically a manta ray driving a mech! Spoiler. 
DIRTY ANGELS is not the newest Martin Campbell joint – that’s CLEANER starring Daisy Ridley – but the one from 2024, now on DVD in Canada. I don’t exactly know the events that shifted Mr. Campbell from A-lister who kicked off the 
SING SING is an unusual movie with a simple appeal: it’s about a theater program in a prison, and most of the cast is made up of actual graduates of the program playing versions of themselves, so there’s an unmistakable feeling of authenticity completely outside of a normal Hollywood production. We see interjections of unscripted or documentary scenes – auditions, video of real plays – but mostly we just see very natural performances by actors/characters speaking or drawing from their hearts in ways that cut deep.
This is just me but when I found out there was
LEGENDS OF THE CONDOR HEROES: THE GALLANTS is the unwieldily titled new Tsui Hark joint, which I was grateful to be able to see in a theater. (This puts my lifetime Tsui Hark theatrical screenings at four, after 
THE ORDER (2024) is a gritty, not too showy but completely riveting true crime movie about neo-nazi bank robbers in the Pacific Northwest, circa 1983. The protagonist is an FBI agent, but one of his specialties is going after bigots, and I support him in that. Anyway it’s kinda like 
