Try to keep me away
Step Up indeed: Now this is what 3D is made for — cheesy dance awesomeness
If you're not already familiar with the Step Up franchise, it's kind of a delectable fluffy dance equivalent to the prime time soap opera or a Nicholas Sparks novel. Just as you don't watch Gossip Girl for the acting (it's the fashion) or read Nicholas Sparks' books for the mind-bending (it's the mush), Step Up is good for just one thing — the dance.
I compulsively see every dance movie that hits theaters IN theaters. Stomp the Yard I paid premium popcorn prices for twice. So you can bet your rear end that mine will be ensconced in red velvet this weekend, not least because my favorite character from Step Up 2: The Streets has been promoted to protagonist in the third installment — Step Up 3D.
Moose, a mop-headed, scrawny lighting design student at the fictional Manhattan School of the Arts, runs off to NYU to pursue engineering but keeps on dancing on the DL in a Brooklyn warehouse-cum-melting pot for artistic outsiders.
But we're not here for plot. The Chicago Tribune reports that the choreography pays some homage to old-school musicals, borrowing moves from Singin' in the Rain for a number danced to Fred Astaire's original "I Won't Dance." And 3D glasses will surely add to the experience of those single-take sequences I so appreciate.
Why has no one thought of this before?! If sword-launching is more epic in 3D, surely so is a grand jeté.
Fingers crossed that Channing Tatum makes a cameo for the franchise that made him a star — most lately in a Nicholas Sparks movie. Ah, we come full circle.