The top 20 is finally here! Look at them dance! Your host is Cat “best host ever” Deeley. Your judges are Nigel Lythgoe, Mary Murphy, and Adam Shankman, who just wants you to know he loves the whole world and everything in it. Be prepared for an onslaught of praise, because “top 20 week” is synonymous with “be generous to the dancers so everybody will think it is a good season regardless of how good the actual dancing is.”

– Jeanine and Philip: hip-hop. I feel that I should call Philip Philipchbeeb, because everybody thinks of him by his full name thanks to his decidedly non-average trajectory to the top 20 and also because when your last name is “Chbeeb,” you are Chbeeb for life. Anyway, he absolutely killed this. Killed it. This wasn’t a particularly hard-hitting routine by any means (come on, it’s Napoleon and Tabitha), but Philipchbeeb’s stops and starts are some of the crispest and cleanest I have ever seen, and he elevated what would have otherwise been a perfectly average Naptha lyrical faux-hop to something pretty damn good. Jeanine, for her part, was present, but Philipchbeeb partnered her very well, pointedly drawing the eye to her with his armwork on more than one occasion.

– Asuka and Vitolio: Broadway. This was god-awful shit. Asuka and Vitorio did not dance it well, and Tasty Oreo’s routine was a boring, boring, boring number (and Adam Shankman was pretty clear that he wanted to say so, but Adam Shankman is a polite nice man who loves the whole world, so clearly he could not do that). This was a mountain of suck in a mountain rage of blow-ass. Asuka clearly drew the short stick tonight, being the sole non-contemporary dancer to have to dance entirely out of her native style. But in fairness, Vitolio was stiff and generally not very entertaining either.

– Karla and Jonathan: cha cha. The judges raved about this, but I wasn’t very impressed; for a Latin ballroom dancer, Jonathan’s dancing wasn’t exactly inspired, the tricks weren’t executed very cleanly and Karla’s basics weren’t that great. On the plus side, the two of them have good chemistry, and that should carry them along for a while. On the down side, sooner or later you have to deliver, and based on this performance I’m not hopeful for delivery.

– Randi and Evan: jazz. Tasty Oreo again, but I am more generous to Tasty’s (usually good) jazz pieces than his overhyped Broadway numbers. This was a strong number, both in the choreo and in Randi and Evan’s dancing. Not as glorious as the judges made it out to be, not by any means – but it’s good. Good partnership, good chemistry, good technique, good everything. I have nothing else to say, really, because this was Perfectly Acceptable Dancing.

– Paris and Tony: hip-hop. This was pathetic. Tony was actually not as good as Paris in this, and hip-hop was, as I recall, supposed to be his specialty. This is not to say that Paris was particularly good, because she was not good; off-beat for most of the routine and hitting her beats softly. She was just better than Tony. The design of the routine itself was mediocre at best. Hopefully after this week we can have different hip-hop choreographers than Napoleon and Tabitha, because they are very nice people who very frequently choreograph very whiteboy hip-hop.

– Caitlyn and Jason: Bollywood. This felt kind of auto-pilot for me. Caitlyn in particular just seemed to be doing the steps rather than actually feeling the dance; she never really lost that look of “I’m concentrating on the routine” and got into the moment. Jason was better and sharper, but wasn’t in sync with Caitlyn for the unison movements. Still, this wasn’t a bad routine by any means, but it was very middle-of-the-road in terms of quality; good enough to get by this week (especially with the novelty factor that Bollywood still has for the voting public), but not good enough down the line. Then again, Bollywood is a hard style to do on this show, so it’s hard to assess them.

– Jeanette and Brandon: foxtrot. Brandon started out very, very stiff and eased up as the routine progressed, but never really got to that slinky glide that really good foxtrot demands; his footwork went from nervous stutter to okay-but-nothing-special steady walk. However, his lifts were nothing short of insane. He’s like one giant muscle. Also, he looks like Donald Faison on Scrubs, and Jeanette’s hairdo could make her a plausible J.D. substitute. (Not that this matters.) She, for her part, was very good. The routine as a whole was good. Not great, just good, and a promising start.

– Ashley and Kupono: jazz. It’s a Wade Robson thing about crash test dummies, and – well, Wade Robson sure does avoid the choreographer cliches, you got to give him that. This was memorable and weird and fun and danced really well. Kupono’s headbobs in particular added a lot to the piece, but Ashley was good as well. This was strong.

– Melissa and Ade: contemporary. It’s a Mandy Moore piece about falling in love, so if you’re playing the SYTYCD drinking game, take a shot. Melissa, we are reminded, is a slutty naughty ballerina who is 29 and therefore must chug Geritol every night. Ade, for his part, likes music! And this is a very strong piece indeed; the unison is dead-on for some extremely difficult portions of the dance and Ade and Melissa have excellent chemistry. Neither of these two were favorites coming in, but I think they’ve got a shot at frontrunnerdom now.

– Kayla and Maksim “Max”: samba. This wasn’t quite as good as the judgegasm would have you believe, but it was definitely very strong; Kayla’s footwork and bodywork in her role very good, especially for a ballroom novice, and she and Max played to the camera and the crowd excellently. Hot ending to the show.

Predicted bottom three couples: Asuka and Vitolio, Paris and Tony, Karla and Jonathan.
Should go home: Paris and Tony.
Will go home: Asuka and Vitolio.

This was requested repeatedly in comments and then in email, and I didn’t have a post planned for today, and the first competition episode of season 5 is tonight, so I decided “what the hell.”

Group dances in SYTYCD follow an interesting evolution. There weren’t any group dances in the first season (beyond a very brief reunion dance in the final episode which was all too perfunctory). They arrived in the second season as Fox decided to put more money and airtime behind the show and the producers needed something to fill time on the elimination episodes – they were the natural and logical next step after the group-sings on American Idol. This attitude was fairly prevalent during the second season’s group dances, most of which were fairly bland affairs.

However, starting in the third season, choreographers started realizing that the group dances offered them opportunities for fancier, more elaborate choreo than could be put into the brief 90-second competition routines, and started to take advantage of this fact. Still, it wasn’t really until the fourth season of the American show that group dances really started to come into their own as a distinct portion of the show’s entertainment value.

continue reading "The Best Of So You Think You Can Dance, Part Five: Group Dances"

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

LIKED

– Batman and Robin #1 I liked for two reasons. Firstly I liked it because it was a fantastic, fun comic and return to form for “good” Grant Morrison (as opposed to the “eh” Grant Morrison of Final Crisis). But more importantly, I liked it because now I can start a pool wherein whoever is closest to figuring out how late each of the first twelve issues is wins the pot. (I am guessing #1-3 on time, #4 a week late, #5 three weeks late, #6 five weeks late, #7-8 two months late, #9 two months two weeks late, #10-11 six weeks late, #12 one month late.)

– For Dead Set, the British miniseries about zombies attacking the set of Big Brother, I will make an exception to my “zombies are the new tired old meme” belief, because at least this is zombies with a clever twist, and so long as I don’t just get handed another frigging zombie story (which most zombie stories, let us be honest, are), I am fine with it. Come on, you have to love any series that turns Davina McCall into a zombie and does it straight up.

– Also an exception to my general zombie disinterest: Pontypool, the zombies-as-memetic-disease horror film from Bruce McDonald. Given that Bruce McDonald (Dance Me Outside, Highway 67, and so forth) is generally a pretty awesome filmmaker, I went into this with high expectations. I was not disappointed; he’s still got that same clever sense of timing that always makes his films so surprising when you don’t expect it.

DIDN’T LIKE

– I got to see Land of the Lost for free and that is about what it was worth. Why doesn’t Will Ferrell do more movies like Stranger Than Fiction? I mean, it was a critical success, did okay at the box office (not that Ferrell needs it, he’s got to be richer than Midas by this point), and Ferrell said he enjoyed making it, so why aren’t there a few more good quirky dramedies being offered to him? It would be nice to see Ferrell play something other than Loud Shouty Asshole (But Not Really An Asshole) Guy again and again.

– Got about twenty minutes into Sex Drive, which I watched because multiple people told me it was a cut above the usual dumb sex comedy, and then gave up because it is decidely not a cut above the usual dumb sex comedy. In fact it is rather below a cut. Can something be below the cut? This was below the cut.

– Wow, that is one shitload of contemporary and jazz dancers. By my count there’s one hip-hop dancer (Tony), one pop-and-locker (Philip), two ballroom girls (Asuka and Janette), and one ballroom boy (Maksim – oh, I’m sorry, “Max”). I suppose the ballerina could maybe count as not-a-contemporary dancer if you really want to push it. Be prepared for a season of weak hip-hop, everybody! (Yes. Again.)

– This kind of irks me because it’s an especial flaw of So You Think You Can Dance that hip-hop and other urban styles get a tragic lack of respect. I have lost count of the number of times a contemporary dancer has come out, danced some whiteboy hip-hop and been told they “hit it” when in fact they did no such thing. Hip-hop dancers are routinely judged (or at least handicapped) on their lack of contemporary technique; contemporary dancers are almost never judged on their inability to hit beats as hard as good hip-hop requires.

The bias towards contemporary, especially on the American version of the show, is pretty damn blatant. It’s why Vegas week featured three routines suited primarily to contemporary dancers (Sonya’s jazz routine, Mia’s contemporary and Tasty Oreo’s Broadway). It’s why Napoleon and Tabitha’s lyrical hip-hop gets such a push on this show: it’s hip-hop that contemporary dancers can actually perform without looking lame. (And I like lyrical hip-hop just fine, but compare the hip-hop on this show to anything on, say, America’s Best Dance Crew and you start to see the difference, you know?)

– Mia Michaels spent Vegas week in total bitch mode, apparently. My god, but her comments to Brandon were unwarranted. Lil’ C was a lot more polite about expressing his issues with Brandon’s style – it was basically a repeat of how Mia treated Danny Tidwell in season three except that time Shane Sparks was the one expressing polite unenthusiasm. My mild dislike for Mia Michaels remains entirely justified, I think.

– Should have been Ryan, rather than Evan. Ryan’s just better at pretty much everything.

– Nathalie’s cut was incredibly obvious bullshit. She does the routine with everybody watching twice in a row, nails it the first time and the second time doesn’t do so well so she gets cut? I’m calling that a “casting for the fall season” cut. (Much like Brandon last year was a “casting for season 5” cut.)

– Complaints aside? Even with the flood of contemporary dancers, the season looks strong. But then again, the season almost always ends up being strong.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

LIKED

– Pixar films, at this point, are either an A+ (Wall-E), an A (Ratatouille) or an A- (Cars). On this scale, Up is a solid A – not quite reaching the peaks of Pixar but definitely not one of their “lesser” efforts (where “lesser” is something just about any other filmmakers would kill for). Ed Asner’s voicework fits his character perfectly (and if you don’t at least sniffle in that first ten minutes, what are you made of?) and the little kid character steals just about every scene without feeling forced. The second great summer film of a thus-mostly-starved 2009.

– Panic Breakout is really only fun the first one or two times, but what a one or two times!

– Finally got around to reading Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and really enjoyed how a treatise on the history of modern Chinese food could serve as commentary on globalism, cultural mutation, immigration, racial attitudes, appropriation and reconcilation. Fascinating, and also brings with it a number of “oh, must try that” food ideas.

DIDN’T LIKE

– Mental is a terrible case of medical-procedural-by-the-numbers, pretending to be daring because it’s dealing with mental illness, but come on – using special effects to make schizophrenia more exciting is both overdone and tasteless. Chris Vance, in the lead, is particularly ill-equipped to handle his role; of course, even if he were a great actor, he’d still have a boring “look I’m kooky and nontraditional for no explicable reason” character to deal with, but he’s not a great actor; half of his work feels like a weak Hugh-Laurie-as-House impersonation minus the balls that makes House so interesting.

– “The Princess and the Dragon” expansion for Carcassonne? Oh my god, is it bad. Mutates one of the best board games of all time into an unrecognizable, not very-fun mess. Avoid. Do not get this expansion.

– Man, what a terrible set of audition episodes for So You Think You Can Dance this year. I went back and speed-rewatched the most recent set of Australian audition episodes for a comparison, and then last year’s Canadian and American auditions, and it’s not just me; this year’s American auditions focused more on jokey bad auditions that were supposedly funny much, much more than average, and the American show is the only one that still even bothers to show many bad auditions at all; in the Aussie and Canuck versions you can literally count the number of joke auditions on one hand, which ironically makes them funnier because they stand out in sharp relief to all the really great dancing. I’m honestly a bit nervous about this season now because I can’t help but wonder: did they not have enough good dancing to showcase?

I never, ever want to see dancin’ Sex on my television ever again. Hey, remember season two? When you said you didn’t want psycho fame-whores on your dancing show? What happened to that? Why do I now have to watch not only Sex, but also a subpar Dmitri the Lover wannabe jumping up and down?

What happened to the good auditions in Seattle? I mean, you put twenty people through to choreography on day one; surely some of them must have done some small bit of dancing that was worth watching and worth putting on television. This isn’t Idol. Watching people dance badly isn’t fun; it’s just painful. Watching you mug for the camera while you watch the bad dancers isn’t fun either. PS: it’s not fun when you mispronounce people’s names for a laugh either.

(Also: watching Philip Chbeeb and Ariel dance together made me think that he’s desperately in love with her and she thinks they’re really great friends.)

(Also 2: Adam Shankman is awesome, and I forever forgive him for all the terrible movies he’s directed.)

1.) My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

2.) My article this week for The Court is about R. v. Middleton, a sentencing case. Be forewarned the topic matter is so dry I nearly fell asleep twice while writing it.

3.) Finally, I made a rare PODCASTING APPEARANCE on Hour 42 yesterday, wherein I articulated poorly about the potential of Gooch the Dark Wonder Dog, among other things.

LIKED

– The “sneak preview” of Glee. Although I think airing the premiere episode of a series Fox doesn’t plan to air for another three months is, how shall I say this, idiotic and a programming strategy that only Fox could come up with, this was one of the best pilots I’ve seen in a while; funny and clever, with great musical numbers, and it built to a ringing, enthusiastic finale that nonetheless obviously showed room for development and growth. All the better for it being unique among the current crop of television shows.

– Tower of Greed. Simple in execution yet incredibly addictive. The first Flash game I’ve played in a while that felt really fresh, despite the “keep going up or you die” concept being far from original; ToG’s system of giving you occasional options to opt out to finalize your score really puts a stamp on the style that’s a good gameplay twist, and the 80s-ish pixel graphics are exactly what I like to see in a platformer like this one.

– Marcos Martin’s “Saga of Captain America” backup feature in Captain America #50. Hey, what if all those Marvel Saga-type summaries Marvel is putting in their books these days to justify the extra dollar in price were actually something you wanted to see because they had gorgeous new art with a strong sense of design? Wouldn’t that be cool? Well, that’s what they did here. Marcos Martin has permission to draw anything he wants to for ever.

– Gaby Rojas’ audition on the first episode of So You Think You Can Dance. One of the rare times when Nigel’s praise was not in fact even a bit hyperbolic. Absolutely astounding, and one of the best solos on this program ever, be they auditions or competition or whatever. (Other solos that were excellent: Peter Sabasino the tapper, Kayla Rodomski who made her grandpa cry when she got through, and of course Natalie Reid and Brandon Bryant, who both would have made top 20 last year if it weren’t for the producers trying to spread out talent and also give a street dancer the best chance of winning.)

DIDN’T LIKE

– Terminator: Salvation. Loud and stupid and disappointing in all the wrong ways. A couple of really great action sequences, sure, but then again Star Wars: The Phantom Menace had a couple of really great action sequences and nobody says that was good (and the acting and dialogue in Terminator is as near-witless as the acting and dialogue in Menace). With the exception of Star Trek, the summer movie season this year is just floundering in terms of quality.

– Nigel Lythgoe’s burst of homophobia when presented with a same-sex ballroom couple (who were actually quite good technically despite a screwup). Nigel, your jokes weren’t funny (much like, you know, all your jokes ever), but worse you went from unfunny to outright offensive this time. Save the moralizing for… well, never.

SYTYCD has gotten more adventurous with genre during its evolution as a show, verging out tentatively into various “world” and cultural areas of dance. Of course, these are mostly just dips of big toe in the proverbial water compared to the prevalence of the “big three” genres, and there have been as many missteps as there have been classic moments. (Twitch and Joshua’s trepak from season 4, for example. Or the horrific experience that was wasting Allie and Natalli on a go-go routine in the first Canadian season.)

Tied in with those dances are the ones that don’t quite fit into the “big three.” Disco isn’t quite ballroom – it has jazz and funk elements to it that shove it somewhere into the middle. See also the “nerd ballroom” dances and the nu-swing dances – Lindy hop and West Coast swing most prominently. And of course, there’s always “Broadway,” that catchall for musical theatre-inspired routines, be they Bob Fosse-inspired or alternately inspired by Bob Fosse. (I kid! But not that much.)

So here is the final “best of” list, because there’s too much that doesn’t fit into the round holes on this show not to include.

continue reading "The Best Of So You Think You Can Dance, Part Four: Everything Else"

Contemporary, jazz and modern dance is the hardest of the three “major genres” in SYTYCD to rank and judge for many reasons. It’s the most widespread form of dance in the show, so there are more options to choose from. Contemporary dance doesn’t have obvious, objective rules for a “good” performance as ballroom or hip-hop do. The franchise attracts top choreographers in the contemporary field more frequently than it does choreographers of ballroom or hip-hop. And let’s be honest: because contemporary dance is more obviously determinable to be Art than ballroom or hip-hop (which have the intolerable caprice to appear visibly fun to do), this is the area where award nominations get made, where Mia Michaels becomes Emmy-Award-Winning Mia Michaels, and thus you have critical opinion weighing down upon any list.

Which is a pity, because let’s be honest: a lot of contemporary dance on the show is so, so predictable. Even before a routine starts, the odds that it will be one of “People Fall In Love,” “People Fall Out Of Love,” or “Somebody Dies” are, like, fifty-fifty at absolute least. Which makes it a little more difficult to judge, because you tend to inwardly overvalue, perhaps, the contemporary dance stories that are a little more original but maybe not danced quite as well as some others with more, ahem, traditional stories. A good example of this is the Camilla/Sermsah “kung fu” jazz piece from the first Australian season, which is certainly a good routine but honestly not quite on par with the really best – but I found myself leaving it as a contender right until the end because it wasn’t yet another frigging dance about a boy and a girl falling in love.

You know what I want to see from contemporary dance on this show in the future? More creativity in storytelling. Less “boy meets girl” and more, I dunno, “happy clown tries to cheer up sad clown” or “hacker inflitrates living computer” or “luchador versus evil vampire.”

(And yes, not all the award-winning performances made the list. The infamous Sabra/Neil “table” routine by Mandy Moore was one of my last cuts.)

continue reading "The Best Of So You Think You Can Dance, Part Three: Contemporary"

I know it’s a bit schizophrenic to shove so many dance styles into “ballroom,” because ballroom dance is incredibly varied; a champion salsa dancer can have trouble with a Viennese waltz and vice versa. But even if you remove some of the more obvious outliers (I put West Coast swing, Lindy hop and disco all into the “other” section, just because they’re more fringe and hybrid forms than “traditional” ballroom dances), you still get a wide variety of dance, from the supposedly strict quickstep to the barely-a-ballroom-dance paso doble.

Ballroom performances on SYTYCD are a mixed bag. Trained ballroom dancers don’t tend to last long on the show: Benji and Heidi from US season 2 and Lacey and Pasha from season 3 are outliers because they were so naturally talented at everything. The best most ballroom dancers can hope for is to make the show’s midway point before being eliminated. This means that outstanding ballroom performances on the show tend to be only moderately technically proficient at best, and usually have to get by on the dancers’ personality and ability to master the basics. True ballroomers watching the show (and there are lots because whether they admit it or not, absolutely everybody in the dance world watches SYTYCD and most of them love it for what it is) often use the phrase “hot mess” to describe a “good” ballroom performance on it.

But there’s nothing wrong with a hot mess, even if every once in a while one wants a technically superb performance too. (Again: high quality viewing recommended where possible.)

continue reading "The Best Of So You Think You Can Dance, Part Two: Ballroom"