Dance Movies

I'm completely obsessed with dance movies. That ridiculous Center Stage movie is one of my biggest guilty pleasures; I've probably watched it fifteen times, no lie. The acting is terrible, the characters are one-dimensional and not believable at all, the story is insipid: ballet dancers can not act to save their lives. At the end there's this epic dancer performance with unbelievably fast costume changes, which could have been made believable by cutting out a couple of the short scenes (to make the story less heavy-handed) and stick with the two longer and more impressive ones. At the end, our blonde and apple-cheeked midwestern hero gets everything she ever wanted, even though from the beginning her turnout sucked. TURNOUT. How do you get in to the most prestigious ballet academy in the US with poor TURNOUT? Anyway.


one of the better scenes

So I'm on a mission now to find more movies about dance. I'm scouring the internets to make a list, then running the list through netflix to see what I can get on the instant streaming. Here is my list so far:

Center Stage
The Red Shoes
The Turning Point
Billy Elliot
All That Jazz
White Nights
One Last Dance
Fame

And there are at least ten or twelve on my first list that don't come up on instant, including

The Company
A Chorus Line
The Tales of Hoffman
Strictly Ballroom
Shall We Dance
Honey
Tango
Flashdance
Ballroom Bootcamp

Not all of them are about ballet because my interest runs far and wide, but I'm looking for more ballet movies. I saw Save the Last Dance when it was in theatres eons ago (I was a huge fan of Julia Stiles as a teenybopper) and I really want to see it again. I doubt if I'd appreciate it now, and I heard her technique actually sucks.

I'm also kind of looking forward to Black Swan, even though it looks like it has some problematic female interactions which I hate in movies. The exceptions I'll make to what I'm willing to watch are incredible when it comes to ballet movies.