Bottom Feeders

Here's a new category: Bottom Feeders, or, things that we think are undeserving of their elevated status, whether a popular movie, book, cd, idea, trend, or just about anything else. This week's award goes to a movie we watched the other night, a 2001 flick called Save the Last Dance. The movie, filled with stereotypes, nauseating predictability, and bad acting, tries to capture the life of a white girl ballerina, who has recently lost her devoted mother and movie with her musician-absentee father to the inner city, which is filled with all sorts of cliches and stereotypes. She falls in love with an African-American young man, who, despite his obvious intelligence and desire to get into Georgetown U., still hangs with the "bad boys." He wants to go to Georgetown so he can get into med school and become a pediatrician, but his life is riddled with the complexities of urban living--and more cliche's and stereotypes than can usually fit inside one character: he at once embraces and rejects his bad boy past and surroundings--somehow he has wormed out of having a rap sheet, even though he should, by all accounts, have one, so he can wear his hip badness on his pate while still working his way towards higher aspirations; his sister, younger than he, has already had a baby, who is being raised by her grandmother, for the most part, while she goes to high school during the day and hip hop clubs at night; his "bad boy" friend, caught up in the tightest stranglehold of city and circumstance, is not a good person and is undeserving of his loyalty, which makes him nearly risk everything to fight his street rivals and save his street cred ass; and his girlfriend, whom he refocuses on her dancing dreams, is the classic white and nerdy girl with glasses, old grandma clothes, and awkward and stilted dance floor moves. Her dancing, supposedly good enough for Julliard, is quite frankly terrible. Her audition dance incorporates classic ballet and her more recent hiphop acquisitions--obviously symbolic of her new fusion of cultures and worlds. What happens next is unbelievable and unreal (sorry, we won't give it away). Oh well. At least the lameness is consistent all around. Save yourself the misery--rent a different movie!