Reviews

Channing Tatum pulls out all of the stops playing the world's oldest living high school senior and dance prodigy in Step Up.

Tyler (Tatum)is the pretty white boy living in a rough,black Baltimore neighborhood. When he's not car jacking with his home boys, he is busy popping moves and busting bad ass dance routines on the b ball court.

Then one night, after having a gun pulled on him at a party, Tyler and crew break in to the oddly located Maryland Academy of the Arts. The boys proceed to crap all over the drama departments Caligula set when they get busted by a rent a cop.

Tyler takes the fall, letting his buddies make a run for it, he ends up in court facing serious court ordered community service at, you guessed it, the Maryland Academy of the Arts.

We also learn that our boy Tyler has a lengthy police record and is the world's oldest foster child. Anyway, back at the school, Tyler is amazed when he arrives and sees all of these other kids pursuing their dreams and actually being productive members of society.

Given the job as mop boy, he mumbles his way through the first few days of his service when, you guessed it, he sees the school's top female dancer and its love at first site.

It's at this point you can turn off the movie and imagine the remaining time in your head.

Boy and girl end up dance partners, montage, montage, montage, no one understands, they don't communicate, he learns to control his dancing while she becomes more of a free spirit. Her mom thinks Tyler is white trash. His foster parents could give a crap. His friends freak when they find out he is at school dancing in tights instead of carjacking with them, oh the humanity!

There is also this second tier romance between a DJ from the school and star dancer's best friend, but I digress. In the end Tyler and star dancer pop and lock their way to winning the schools big talent showcase, he of course gets accepted into the school and star dancer gets her bring break with a dance troupe!

This movie rips off everything from every dance movie ever made before it. Throw in some embarrassing fashions, dialogue and dance numbers and you have Body Rock, Breakin and Flashdance all rolled into one phoned in production.

Looking has turned out to be the best therapy ever!

The writers on Looking have done an excellent job flushing out three personalities, all of which have major issues when it comes to finding "the one".

Patrick (The Star)lives under a velvet curtain of shame. Shame about sex, shame about being gay, shame about the men he is attracted to (Richie). He makes bad choices in order to please his overbearing mother and he has no confidence in his ability to make choices, usually he screws up.

Agustin is a self destructive narcissist who makes one bad choice after another, usually ending up in another dirty gutter in the Tenderloin. Addicted to everything, he uses his friends for a place to stay and food while he spends his money on drugs and booze. I guess he gets it from his wealthy family, because he has been unemployed pretty much since the start of the show. His friends enable him and he seems to like it that way. He is a manipulator who will sabotage his friends relationships to ensure his own survival. He is my least favorite character.

Dom is a dreamer, he wants big things, but I think in the end he is to lazy to actually achieve anything. He is easily prone to anger and there are times I think he could get violent. His interest in Linn seems to be more opportunistic than anything else. He is also a sex addict with skin as thin as rice paper.

Patrick's boss, Kevin is a total DB. A cheating liar who only has two years to find a yank to marry so he does not get shipped back to the council flats in London. Kevin's boyfriend is a mean drunk and it's obvious he does not really love him. I think Kevin is using Patrick for both his needs in the present and the future.

Richie and Linn are the only decent guys on the show. Honest and with big hearts, they have been hurt in the past and they tread lightly. Linn is very self protective and I don't think he really trusts Dom, he does not let him in and until Dom can prove himself I don't think he will.

Richie is a man with integrity and is true BF material. Patrick is to caught up in his own crap to realize it and I don't think Patrick loves Richie anyway. I think he feels bad that he has hurt Richie but he is afraid of what his family will think so he destroyed the relationship, which sounds like its been a pattern.

Besides the aforementioned emotional problems, their apartments are horrible. Linn is the only one with a nice place, the other apartments are nasty old places that I would never live in. I can't imagine wanting to live in SF if that is the only place you can afford. Even Frank's (less expensive) apartment in Oakland looked like a crime scene from COPS.

So if you want to feel better about your own place in life, check out Looking, it is a good show and I like it, but it is also one big pot of mess.

I checked this out on In-Demand last night. Over all I liked it, I thought the docustyle worked well here. It was creative and unusual, especially the dash cam pov used in the beginning. The film moves quickly and is certainly not boring. What didn't work was the cartoonish characterizations of the Mexican gang members. They were so over the top that I found them more funny than scary, especially the main Latina gang member. She looked like Lady Ga Ga on crack. The ambush scene at the end, totally over the top and unbelievable. The director had one to many red bulls the day they shot this scene, a good old fashion "Bullitt" style car chase would have been great, with the bangers chasing the cops ending in a massive I-5 pile up, now that would be believable. The worst scene was the cop and the black dude getting all cage fight at the beginning, what cop would do that? and if one of them was to do it, Jake's character should have been the one, not the family man side kick. There was a lot of promise but just a few bad scenes really brought it down.

Michael Perry was a sociopath. He never took responsibility for the murders,never showed remorse and he got exactly what he deserved. He took three innocent lives because he wanted a car (I guess working for it didn't cross his mind). The bottom line of the story is: Two white trash losers from Texas make the choice to steal two cars from a family, who's son was an acquaintance of theirs. The victims where upper middle class, normal law abiding citizens. Perry and his sidekick methodically and brutally murdered a mother, her son and the son's best friend. They stole the victims cars and went to some redneck bar and gave the other white trash losers joy rides. These two give stupid a new meaning, within a week they are both caught, jailed, tried and convicted. Perry received the death penalty and for 10 years lived off the taxpayers of Texas until finally he was put to death in 2001. His family did not even have the balls to appear in the film or offer any kind of public apology to the family of the victims. The film is well done, the filmmaker is anti-death penalty and the film is slanted in that direction, however I do believe the facts were presented in an unbiased way and the viewer can make up their own minds on whether justice was done. In my opinion both men should have received the death penalty and both should be six feet under. I give the film a 7 knocking off for its slanted view on the subject.