Cortechba Overrated

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

ChampDavSlim The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Frances Chung Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Amy Adler Frank (Robert Carlyle) is a widowed baker, trying to recover from his wife's sudden death. As he is driving the highway, one day, he comes across a serious auto accident involving a single driver, Steve (John Goodman). Told to keep the man conscious through conversation, Frank learns that Steve was on his way to a dance class appointment he made, 40 years ago, with a young girl he had a crush on! He begs Frank, when he can, to go to the Marilyn Hotchkiss Dance and Charm School, find Lisa and tell her why he couldn't make it. Frank does so, reluctantly, much to the surprise of his widowers support group. Once at the school, however, now operated by Marilyn's daughter, Mary Ann (Mary Steenburgen), and featuring a beautiful lady, Meredith (Marisa Tomei), Frank is intrigued. Failing to find Lisa, the baker, nevertheless, goes back the following week, even though Meredith's troubled stepbrother (Donnie Wahlberg) warns him to keep away from his sister. Before long, Frank and all of the widowers are learning to "live again" with the healing power of ballroom dance. But, will Steve remain alive and will Lisa ever be found? This lovely film is easy to recommend to fans of romantic drama and, indeed, all those who admire quality film-making. The story is wonderful, after a slow opening, with some memorable lines and situations. Also, the setting is fantastic, an old but beautiful ballroom, with Mary Ann parting the stage curtains at each class' beginning and following a pattern of etiquette that recalls a different era. As for the cast, Carlyle, Steenburgen, the always lovely Tomei, Goodman, Sean Astin, Paymer, and especially Wahlberg, are made-to-order great. Naturally, the costumes, photography and inventive direction are also strong assets. Want to put a spring in your step and smile on your face? Dance out the door and secure a view soon.

budmassey It seems that dance-themed movies are almost by definition, if you will pardon the pun, a little offbeat. I suppose one could make pseudo-intellectual references to dance as metaphor, but, in the end, I think dance is dance and that's just fine. And so is this movie – just fine, wonderfully, delightfully fine.Writer/director Randall Miller deftly employs the frame story literary device to weave two disparate narratives into a third, unifying story line. While this literary conceit was necessary to incorporate a short film of the same name that Miller made fifteen years previous to this film, it is nonetheless cleverly handled and flawlessly executed. One actor even appears in both time-lines. As a child he plays one of the central characters in his boyhood story, and as an adult, he plays the colleague of another central character. This is done imperceptibly, and is almost in inside joke to those who are aware of the earlier film.Without giving too much away, the story lines all revolve around the eponymous Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School; how one character, recalling his youth there, struggles to return for a rendezvous he promised as a boy to make on this day, and how his struggle leads a grieving widower to make his own journey there, where he will find, well, you'll have to see for yourself what he finds, but, believe me, it's worth it.The cast is surprisingly heavy with A-list (and some solid B-list) talent. Frank Keane (Robert Carlyle: The Full Monty) is a widower going through the motions of his life as a baker, unable to get past the suicide of his wife. Carlyle excels at bringing unexpected layers to his roles, and this is no exception. His character encounters challenges and inspirations that become life changing, and Carlyle renders them perfectly.John Goodman is one of those actors who, despite being gifted, are almost, if you will pardon another pun, too large a personality in real life to be effective in most roles. Here, the circumstances surrounding his character make it work beautifully. Similarly, Danny DeVito, who has but a cameo appearance, is delicately downplayed with surprising effectiveness. One almost wonders how Miller managed to assemble this impressive cast, as if he won some Hollywood casting lottery, but the fact that he is Rhea Perlman's cousin might explain at least DeVito's willingness to do the film. Rhea's father even appears.I have always loved Mary Steenburgen, and her more or less title role as Miss Hotchkiss is no disappointment. Her characteristically cracking voice is just what the character needs to seem somewhat surreal. Oscar® winner Marisa Tomei delicately inhabits the female lead of the story, and brings closure and redemption to the bereaved widower. Camryn Manheim has a brief but powerful appearance, and even Sonia Braga was somehow convinced to join a cast inexplicably overloaded with talent. Add to that Sean Astin, Adam Arkin, Ernie Hudson, and even a deliciously counter-cast Donnie Wahlberg, and you begin to see what I mean about the surfeit of talent.All of that talent wasn't for naught. The ensemble melds beautifully, delicately supported by Mark Adler's gorgeous soundtrack and all orchestrated with preternatural grace and subtlety by auteur director/writer/producer/editor Randall Miller. Films like this go largely unnoticed, and most of its fan base comes from people who caught it as part of some tedious and pretentious film festival or other. I was fortunate to have placed the film in my Netflix queue so I could watch it sans pretense, where I could experience it personally, as it was meant to be seen.Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing and Charm School is simply a delight not to be missed.

shane wood One of those films you'll never understand why it didn't get a academy nomination. I fell in love with Tomei. Robert and John where amazing. Incredible story and well directer. Watched it with the cast at the Temecula Film Festival and just Loved the Film. Would really have loved to have take friends to see it in the theater. Don't let the tittle throw you, not sure it does the film justice. No disrespect to Mary Steenburgen who was wonderful as Marienne Hotchkiss. Not sure what more to say without giving away anything. Just don't look at the tittle and think you know what the film is about. Also interestingly part of the film was shot as an AFI short thesis film and completed years later.

Ed Uyeshima Writer-director Randall Miller tries far too hard to make a multi-layered film about spiritual reawakening that he defaults into either formula or incoherence to move his low-budget movie along. With its unwieldy title signaling its contrivance, the 2006 dramedy, co-written by Miller and his wife Jody Savin, is an oddly unsatisfying film that attempts to track three different timelines through jumpy edits and differing film stock. Filmed in irritating bleached tones, the first storyline focuses on Frank Keane, an Irishman who moved his family's baking business to California. Shell-shocked from his wife's recent suicide, he comes upon a road accident which has left the driver badly hurt and pinned inside his car. The victim is Steve Mills, an overweight, seemingly gregarious man who was rushing to meet Linda, his childhood crush from forty years earlier, in the ballroom where they last saw each other.This kick-starts the second storyline, which flashes back to Steve's pre-adolescence when he accidentally gave Linda a black eye during a rough game of British Bulldog. With heavy echoes of "The Wonder Years", this portion of the movie is actually footage from Miller's 1990 short with the same title. It shows Steve and Linda first dancing at the Marilyn Hotchkiss ballroom. With Steve sharing his memories with Frank and Frank attempting to keep Steve conscious on the way to the hospital, we are given the third storyline which takes place again in the Marilyn Hotchkiss ballroom, this time in the present day. This time, in Steve's place, Frank shows up for dance class trying to find the now adult Linda amid a gallery of eccentric characters learning to dance under the tutelage of the late Marilyn's daughter, Marienne. Even more characters are introduced by way of Frank's therapy support group of recently widowed men.The cumulative result is a hodgepodge of artificial moments that feed into Miller's overriding theme of getting on with one's life in spite of the barriers one faces. For such a potentially strong ensemble, the performances are variable though mainly because most of the actors are not given enough screen time to flesh out their stereotypical characters. With his mangy-looking hair and sad eyes, Robert Carlyle does well enough as Frank, though his zombie-like behavior at the outset is enough to unsettle anyone. John Goodman plays Steve as the accident victim, though the combination of his bulky, uncomfortable-looking frame and his wheezing delivery is hard to watch for an extended period. Marisa Tomei affectingly portrays Frank's new love interest, Meredith, who holds a secret and has an intractable link to her constant dance partner, Randall, played convincingly by Donnie Wahlberg as an egocentric bully who feels he owns the dance floor.Others are simply wasted in smaller roles – an affected Mary Steenburgen as the prim Marienne who demands order and courtesy in her late mother's ballroom; Sonia Braga as a flirtatious dancer; and as members of Frank's support group, Sean Astin, Adam Arkin, David Paymer and Ernie Hudson. The ending contains something of a twist, and Camryn Manheim and Danny DeVito show up late in the film in intriguing cameos. But by that point, it all comes too late due to the overlapping story lines and sluggish pacing. The DVD has rather perfunctory commentary from Miller, Savin and actor Elden Hensen, who plays both Frank's bakery co-worker in the modern sequences and Sam in the vintage flashbacks filmed in 1990 when he was thirteen. The other significant extra is the original 1990 short with William Hurt providing the memory flashback voice-over as the adult Sam. The package strangely does not make clear that this is the inspiration for the later film, so it seems like a patched-together version of the flashback scenes.