Make It Happen: Commence Boredom.

Does anyone else feel that Hollywood execs thrive on the joy of peddling out the lamest movie possible? I know for a fact that there is a boardroom in the heart of Hollywood used for show-and-tell sessions where middle-aged white guys spend entire meetings giggling over their new candidate for the crappiest movie of all time and boasting about how many people they can dupe into seeing it. There must be. How else would a movie like Make It Happen make it to the cinemas?

Sure Hollywood has belted out some train wrecks (Speed Racer, Son of the Mask, anything starring Steven Seagal except Under Siege) but this recent onslaught of believe-in-yourself-and-conquer-the-world-through-dance films seems as subtle as a phonebook to the face.

Anyone who has seen Step Up, Step Up 2: The Streets, Honey, Save the Last Dance or pretty much any dance movie ever made has pretty much already seen Make It Happen. It recycles all the usual elements:

• Girl endures hard times (usually a white girl inexplicably a leader/popular member of a poverty stricken black neighbourhood)


• Girl has irrepressible passion for dancing


• Girl irresponsibly risks everything to dance professionally


• Girl becomes champion of the universe and more popular than Paris Hilton and wins the heart of the cute single guy who is a dancer or DJ (and definitely isn’t gay) who simultaneously achieves his greatest dream and they have the best life together ever and all because she wasn’t afraid to dance

And I got all this from watching the trailer for the movie.

"But Make It Happen is totally different to Step Up. It’s not about street dancing, it’s about burlesque dancing! "
- The hordes of misguided teenagers watching this movie

Yeah good point. It’s a slightly different style of dance, so it must be a completely different sort of movie right? Wrong. That’s what they said when they brought out Teen Wolf Too. Hollywood is particularly savvy at this practice. It’s called marketing. Why write a new movie when you can just alter an old one? Change the actors, change the setting and hey bingo you have a brand new movie with a fraction of the effort or skill required of the original.



Also notice how in these dance movies the main actors are white and nearly everyone else is black. This is another marketing strategy from our white friends in the Hollywood boardroom. You’re in the cinema and you say to yourself “this movie feels really edgy” and “hey I can relate to these white characters even though they’re way cooler than me!” but you don’t know why. It’s because they’re surrounded by black people. Hollywood has been doing it for years. Rigid white guys become cooler after spending time with black people. This is textbook Hollywood. White characters leach the cool factor from their black co-stars and make it seem as if they were the cool one all along. See virtually any Eddie Murphy buddy-cop movie for proof.

Q: But why not just have an entirely black cast in dance movies and amp up the cool factor?
A: Because then you wouldn’t get white middle class America/Australia buying oversized tracksuits and getting hooked on So You Think You Can Dance?


Not only are dance movies a blatant marketing exercise, they’re just plain irresponsible. There are some major flaws with promoting dance as a saviour of the downtrodden:

• No one gives you props for breaking into dance in the street


• Dancing will not afford you a ticket on the Hot Tamale Train*


• Not all of life’s hurdles can be overcome with a well-executed pirouette. Try dancing your way out of tax evasion smart ass.
  
  *The Hot Tamale Train is not an actual train. Mary Murphy is a liar.