"Stomp The Yard"

This last week, I rented and watched a buncha movies on DVD. Mostly, they were movies I had already seen before, and were either better or worse than when I first saw them in the theater: "Lord Of The Rings 3 - Return Of The King" (better); "Superman Returns" (worse); "Spiderman 2" (better).

Almost as an afterthought, I picked up the new dance movie, "Stomp The Yard". In my television-free exile, had seen no advertising on it, so I had no idea what it was about. Since I don't follow sports either, I knew nothing about the Black Southern College sports tradition of Step Dancing. And since I hardly know any African Americans at all, my ignorance was damn-near complete. Just a babe in the woods over at Blockbuster....

The imbd synopsis states:

After the death of his younger brother, a troubled 19-year-old street dancer from Los Angeles is able to bypass juvenile hall by enrolling in the historically black, Truth University in Atlanta, Georgia. But his efforts to get an education and woo the girl he likes are sidelined when he is courted by the top two campus fraternities, both of which want and need his fierce street-style dance moves to win the highly coveted national step show competition.

Very interesting movie! The movie purported to show the introduction of individualistic krumping-style break dancing moves into the presumably-stuffier group-oriented tradition of step dancing. Two teams are featured - not as cartoonish as 'Lord Of The Dance' Good Guys and Bad Guys, but along the same lines.

For me, since this kind of step dancing was so new that I barely had ever heard of it, it was disorienting to see it portrayed as the older style. Like, where have I been for the last 30 years, or so? Then, the newer krumping styles are so staccato, yet fluid, I found them amazing. I skipped through the DVD, ignoring most of the plot (kissing, ewww!), stopping just to glance at the fun shots from Stone Mountain, outside Atlanta, and looking again and again at the dancing. Maybe it's best that I did so, since some of the criticism of the movie is that the plot line is predictable, but it seemed darker - grittier - than other movies in the same genre, at least, as far as I could tell....

In a featurette, the director, Sylvain White, described how he kept the two teams motivated, and how the last dance was a ten-minute choreographic challenge he threw at them when they had had been worked into a frenzy of excitement. Amazing! The director described how he had reviewed all the dance movies of the last 20 years, to use what worked, and leave out what didn't. What distinguished this movie from previous dance movies, in his view, was the sports component, and the emphasis on pride. He also used a Taiwanese kung fu movie style of cinematography, so as to embed the viewer in the dancing, rather than keeping the viewer removed in a detached audience.

Check it out!