Center Stage (2000)

Why so much hype?

Brilliant and touching

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Pretty Jodie Sawyer (Amanda Schull), rebellious Eva Rodriguez (Zoe Saldana) and Maureen Cummings (Susan May Pratt) are new roommates in the American Ballet Academy in NYC. Both Jodie and Eva are new to the program. Maureen has been there since 9 and has the best techniques. Jonathan (Peter Gallagher) runs the company and is choosing dancers for the final gala. Maureen is supposedly the top girl. Eva has the ability but her attitude clash with the teacher Juliette (Donna Murphy). Jodie seems to be the weakest but she has IT.It's a lot of pretty people dancing. The story has been told many times before. I'm sure some are even about ballet schools. This one brings the big archetypes. I don't think Amanda Schull has a big enough presence to justify being the lead with the IT factor. There is a lot of dancing that doesn't actually add to the story drama. Unless this is only for ballet lovers, those scenes should be trimmed. This doesn't have the edginess or surprises. However it follows the formula quite well.

Center StageThe main difference between attending ballet school and public school is that at ballet school they encourage you to sleep with your teacher to get ahead.A fact at least one student in this drama proves.With only a few openings for the prestigious ballet academy workshop, a group of aspiring dancers (Zoe Saldana, Susan May Pratt, Amanda Schull) compete against one another and themselves for the coveted positions.Meanwhile, there is a power struggle between the troupe's current choreographer Jonathon (Peter Gallagher) and Cooper (Ethan Stiefel), the lead dancer looking to replace him.Tackling the commonplace concerns facing ballet dancers, from eating disorders to complex love triangles that can only be explained through exaggerated movements, Center Stage is a realistic yet ridiculous look at the cutthroat art form.Besides, wouldn't sex with a ballerina have to involve 5 additional ballerinas, just to make it feel like there's someone else there? (Yellow Light)

I understand that a movie must be about emotional expression, otherwise people would not like it, but a film about dancing should be, in my view, more about expression through dance. This film was not like that and, even if it had some nice dance scenes in it, the rest was sadly disappointing.I may be biased, since I am watching the second movie in as many days about a self-obsessed blonde dancer who believes her feelings are more important than anything else, but I found the main character hard to sympathize with and the rest of them really cliché. The black girl with talent but lack of self control, the black gay guy, the blonde dance god and the nice muscular perfect boyfriend, the bitchy perfectionist and the overcontrolling mother, they are all in here, playing their cardboard parts in hard to believe scenes on the music of Michael Jackson and the like.Bottom line: if you are passionate about dance and/or ballet, you might want to check it out, but bare in mind that the dancing here could have been replaced by sports or literature or automechanics and the script would have remained mostly untouched and the film very similar to something you've seen before on TV.

I didn't even know about this movie, until a few days when i saw an empty DVD package a local thrift store - Goodwill. And I was lucky to find a copy at a local library. Wow, I can't believe that this movie was released in 2000! That is nine years old, but it felt so contemporary. I wonder what those actors look like now, and what they have been doing after this? Anyway, I first watched another movie about ballet dancers called "The company", released in 2003. That movie was so dull, the storyline was weak. This movie is far more better, there was no dull moment. And everyone seems to be so real. I can't even tell which one is the real ballet dancer, which one is not. They all seem to be able to dance so well. The only part was when Sergei dancing on stage, it seems that they used a real dancer for some of his scenes, but I can't be sure.I like the Jim Gordon character, he can really act. However, he was supposed to be a premed student in college in this movie. At that time, the real actor was already 24, so he did look a little too old for that role. The dancers certainly can act. The dancing scenes were well choreographed, nice to watch. And there were scenes of guys wearing tights which the movie "The company" seem to avoid. Those leading actresses also performed well, I felt as if that is who they are in real life.I especially like the scenes which they showed how the ballerinas prepare their dancing shoes, who could have thought about that. Unlike watching the movie "the company", this movie made me realize that dancing is not as easy as it looks. Those dancers really have to spend a lot of hours of practicing before they can actually dance on stage. This is not an easy profession, and they only have such a short lifetime which they can actually dance. They have to retire way early than normal people. Indeed, they are doing this because they love to dance.