Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-11-25 (Monday)

On 11/26/24 11:32 AM, Arthur Lipscomb wrote:

On 11/26/2024 9:13 AM, Ian J. Ball wrote:

On 11/26/24 1:30 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
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What did you watch?

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After grading and teaching, I finally got to Thanksgiving Break yesterday. So, I "celebrated" by watching a couple of movies, and...:
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[snip]
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Center Stage: Turn It Up (Tubi) - So, apparently, Tubi has all 3 "Center Stage" films, but is losing them by the end of the month. I've seen the first one multiple times, and I've seen the third one, "Center State: On Pointe" once, but I've never seen the middle one, from 2008 - this one. So I jumped on it, 'cos who knows if it will be available anywhere after Tubi?!!
    "On Pointe" is pretty much a straight up sequel to "Turn It Up" - Nicole Munoz is in both films (as is Kenny Wormald); Peter Gallagher and Ethan Stiefel are in all three films... But Munoz is literally a *child* in "Turn It Up" (they say she's 13, and she was actually 14 at the time, but she honestly looks younger), playing the lead's sister. In "On Pointe", Munoz (who was 22 by 2016) is the lead, trying to get out of her sister's shadow... I'm disappointed to what happened with Munoz - I saw her in something recently (must have been either "Wild Cards" or "Tracker"), and she was all tatted up, and didn't look good at all... FTR, "On Pointe" was the weakest of the films, to my recollection.
    Anyway, the lead in this film is Rachele Brooke Smith, in pretty much her first acting role, ever! and it's clear in 2008 that Smith was still a dancer first, and an actress second. (It'll take Smith another decade before she starts doing Lifetime films!)
    The movie plays a lot more like a "Step Up" ripoff

 I was just about to ask if this series was a "Step-up" ripoff.

The first "Center Stage" is definitely not, and even predates the first "Step Up" film by half-a-decade. (IOW, it's likely that "Step Up" was inspired by/ripping off "Center Stage" (and "Bring It On"), not the other way around!!)
This sequel, OTOH, plays a lot closer to a small-scale "Step Up" film than it does to the first "Center Stage" film (which was pretty much all ballet).

than a "sequel"
to "Center Stage" - Smith's character misses the cut into Peter Gallagher's snooty ballet academy, and ends up working in a bar where she does "sexy" dancing rather than ballet. Wormald's character, who is like the most promising male ballet dancer in Gallagher's academy's new class, ends up hitting Smith up for off-the-books "training" in pas de deux.
    You know where this is going...
    I don't know if this was filmed lousy, or if this was a lousy print, but it looked bad on Tubi - maybe even "480p/DVD-rip" bad. I wonder if there's a better print/rip of this out there somewhere...