Over and Out: WICKED: FOR GOOD

Now movie audiences will have to confront the question that Broadway audiences have known for 20 years: how can Wicked have an Act 1 so solid, and an Act 2 so weak? It’s especially stark when the Acts have been split into individual movies separated by a year. That gave us time to appreciate the first half all the more. Introducing two big charismatic performances with Cynthia Erivo’s green-hued Elphaba and Ariana Grande’s tickled-pink Glidna allowed us to enjoy their antagonism slowly softening into friendship only to end in betrayal in one coherent story. They’re fully realized fantasy creations in an Oz that’s part Baum, part MGM, and all modern big-budget spectacle with sprawling CG landscapes behind backlots and impressively large sets in which catchy numbers spill out around every corner of the world-building. Sure, it ends in a cliffhanger, but after two hours of terrific musical theater sequences and fantasy gobbledegook, “Defying Gravity” has such incredible narrative, emotional, and melodic uplift that it makes the story so satisfying in and of itself that it’s no wonder the Broadway show had a problem of people leaving at the Intermission assuming that was the finale. (They presumably dance up the aisles with visions of Dorothy filling in the Act 2 in their minds.) Maybe that’s how it should be. 

With Wicked: For Good, the filmmaking craft remains consistent. Director Jon M. Chu has the same cast in the same colorful, backlit sets, draped in the same dazzling Paul Tazewell costumes and strutting along to the same score. It’s still a grand spectacle, but it loses its spark in a jumble of character decisions and reversals that never quite make sense or add up to a logical emotional through line. By the time our leads belt out their big climactic duet, in which they claim because they knew each other they’ve been “changed for the better,” I found myself wondering how, exactly, they’ve been changed, and if it’s really for the good. Why give Elphaba, now an anti-wizard activist, a big early number in which she encourages Ozian dissidents to stay in Oz and fight the authoritarian Emerald City—there’s no place like home, after all—if she’ll end up exiling herself in the end? Why introduce a more compassionate Glinda, now a propaganda tool of the wizard, after a movie’s worth of push-and-pull between her best and worst moral choices if she’ll end up lying again in the end—albeit we’re supposed to approve of it being For Good. The story is loaded with dramatic reversals and decisions made just to rearrange characters and twist them into what the plot requires for any given moment. It even loses interest a few key supporting players along the way, though how they’re feeling about the climax would seemingly be of interest. The first Wicked film worked so well in expanding everything that worked about Act 1 on stage. This sequel dutifully doubles down on everything that’s so out of shape about Act 2. 

A big part of the problem of all these twists and contradictions is that the plotting relies on the audience’s knowledge of The Wizard of Oz to fill in gaps of its own storytelling. Yet this is the case while having, in the process, changed so many of the classic characters and their dynamics that no existing version of The Wizard of Oz could function as we know it. Better to forge its own revisionist path down that yellow brick road, perhaps, than try to dance between and have it both ways. But although the results feel so sloppy, and have surprisingly little in the way of musical delights, I do appreciate the attempt to make a second act that critiques and complicates rather than just repeat. There’s some real emotional tension between the characters here, though it’s regularly undercut by adding up to such an incomplete picture. In the moments when it’s most alive, like numbers with Jeff Goldblum’s Wizard explaining his con man skills, or a romantic duet a wicked witch has with Jonathan Bailey’s Prince that slowly levitates, it’s emerging out of something rooted in the character conflicts established. Even the swooping fight scenes and stirring sentimentality tend to work because we care about these witches. Those performances are still comfortable and charismatic, playing to the rafters with every glance. Because of that grounding, and the effects swirling around them, watching the production unfold I had the sense of a grand spectacle almost working. No one scene is particularly bad, but the cumulative effect of its choices is to thrash these characters about just to arrive at unsatisfying, and pretty dysfunctional final moments. It fizzles right when it should explode. At least we’ll always have Part 1. 

Which One: WICKED

Director Jon M. Chu is a reliable steady hand behind the camera. He simply makes movies that work well with broad audiences. He honed his skills on two Step Up movies and a G.I. Joe effort, an underrated Jem and the Holograms pop musical, a couple Bieber concert docs, and an adaptation of rom-com novel Crazy Rich Asians. That he’s not strictly a big-budget franchise player allowed him to develop some skill with bodies in motion and human-scaled emotion. He clearly has an old-fashioned love of blocking and staging, but enough modern facility with digital embellishments to give it a contemporary unreality. Those efforts are often pretty appealing. But all of that made him especially situated to modulate his modes of filmmaking into adapting Broadway hits. They bring his skill to life in even more vibrant, earnest ways with clear passion for the material and the genre. These bottle up some extra passion in the sturdy professional polish. His version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights has a great sense of place and mood in a heightened block party appeal. Its best moments have a kind of rolling crescendo of dance and high spirits. That movie, about thwarted and kindled hopes and dreams for family and friends and careers and romances, has such a joyful expression of character and community that it’s hard to resist. It’s a mode to which his career’s been building.

And now Chu turns his attention to the biggest musical of the past couple decades: Wicked. It’s also his best movie yet. This is a big-hearted, well-crafted, crowd-pleasing spectacle of music, dance, humor, and pathos. He marries a potentially large canvas of a fantasy musical with something grounded in a simple character story of two women who grow to respect one another before getting torn apart by circumstance and politics and personalities. This Part 1 tackles just the first Act of this well-known reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West and finds enough material for a full, satisfying experience in and of itself. Turns out it’s a great time to revive Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s production in which young women experience prejudice, creeping fascism, and dawning political consciousness. That it is in the guise of Wizard of Oz fan fiction gives it a fantastical frisson, even as Chu deliberately steers away from the perfectly outlandish artifice of the 1939 classic inspiration and into something a little softer and more inflected with a rounded-edges pseudo-reality. It’s a little silly, and a little synthetic, but it’s such a wondrously big-hearted experience that believes in itself so fully that it’s easy to get pulled along. The proceedings take place in enormous sets—fake forests, palaces and schoolyards that are lush prosceniums ornately decorated—and find figures in costumes lavishly detailed in jewels and frills and flowing angles. There are some phony computer-generated animals and the usual over-cranked background enhancements movies of this size get these days. But throughout there’s a spirt of the stage to its staging, and even some Disney Renaissance to its wrangling of small crowds, big reactions, and lovely gestures—like skipping across a pond on a row of stones. (This is what all those dire live-action remakes wish they felt like.) It’s comfortably old-fashioned underneath its new-film shine.

Amid all this design, we meet the emerald-green Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) as she arrives at the magical Shiz University. Her reluctant roommate is privileged blonde striver Glinda, who’ll one day be The Good Witch. She’s played by Ariana Grande in a sensational flouncy performance in which each line reading is deeply motived with both dramatic tensions and comic filigrees, sometimes in the same expression. Those choices flow out of her characterization and into song with a dazzling fluidity. It’d be a star making turn if she wasn’t already a pop star. It’s a performance built to contrast and support the striking stillness and deliberateness from Erivo as a deeply wounded outcast who slowly starts to imagine herself fitting into the mainstream only to be pushed back by said mainstream's callousness toward the marginalized. It’s a tricky role played for vulnerably and toughness, a self-actualization in the face of others assumptions about her used to manipulate and deceive until she takes command of her own power. This tension is embodied in the character conflicts—and then expressed through a fine ensemble of good performers as interesting characters who stir the pot, and inevitably join them in song and dance. Chu shoots these numbers with attention to choreography and finds neatly complicated and rousing ways to stage them, and draw them out with a uniquely cinematic form of theatricality. It’s feels all so casual and effortless as crowds move in sync or drift into moving solos—ballads both tenderly downbeat and triumphantly bellowed. As all good musicals do, these numbers spring out of deep wells of emotion mere dialogue is suddenly inadequate to express. It makes for a full and transporting experience if you give yourself over to it—and ends on such a perfect high that a 12-month intermission seems almost bearable.

Block Party: IN THE HEIGHTS

At a moment when so many feel isolated, disconnected, left behind by the vagaries of a difficult year and a stratified society increasingly emphasizing everyone-for-themselves lonely responsibility, here’s a story of a neighborhood. It’s disappearing, in the process of getting priced out by gentrification, and in danger of losing its distinctive personality. That’s New York City for you. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton musical In the Heights tells this story, inhabiting the world of Washington Heights, where the Latin music flows  in melodious Spanish lyrics and salsa rhythms, and the food simmers as the people dream—some yearning for escape up the ladder of success, while others find comfort in the world they and their neighbors have built for themselves, a little bit of their home countries carried over into their American dream. The movie adaptation, scripted by the stage production’s co-author Quiara Alegría Hudes, is as broad and generous and alive as it is specific and well-observed. It’s a constant delight in its unfolding, a musical that leaves you feeling for the characters as much as humming the tunes on the way out.

All told, it builds to a moving expression of communal spirit and togetherness in a fountain of color and movement and dance, bringing each member of the cast to center stage for winning spotlight. The story — textured and swirling — takes place during a heat wave, and circles the concerns of a wide ensemble of characters. We meet Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), a young bodega owner who hopes to return to the Dominican Republic someday. He’s crushing on the pretty young stylist (Melissa Barrera) who enjoys her gossipy co-workers at the salon (Daphne Rubin-Vega, Stephanie Beatriz, and Dascha Polanco), but would prefer to be a fashion designer. Usnavi’s business-minded best friend (Corey Hawkins) is interested in the cute college girl (Leslie Grace) back for the summer visiting her entrepreneur father (Jimmy Smits). Elsewhere is the undocumented teenager (Gregory Diaz IV) and his alcoholic father (Marc Anthony), a sweet elderly woman (Olga Merediz) who plays abuela to the entire block, and a snow-cone vendor (Miranda) who harbors a resentment of the ice cream truck. They’re all interconnected, even when they don’t want to be.

As the intersecting dreams and dramas play out against the sizzling sidewalks and easy flow of the hip-hop merengue, the musical numbers strut out in broad, bold studio style, a modern Arthur Freed slick spectacle with a little break-dancing here, a little Gene Kelly there, a little Busby Berkeley everywhere. Director Jon M. Chu brings the sense of movement and space that made his Step Up 3D so beautifully expressive, and commits, with that series’ choreographer Christopher Scott, to showing the full glory of dancers in perfect synchronicity and deeply felt emotive power. Here a community pool becomes a glorious watery number Esther Williams would recognize, the side of a fire escape becomes the site of a couple so in love they could float up the wall, a subway becomes a tunnel of ghostly memories, and an apartment courtyard becomes a “carnaval del barrio.” The best numbers go on and on and I felt I could revel in their joyous eruption of togetherness for hours. The movie succeeds by tapping into the show’s empathetic imagination, proudly sensitive and sentimental befitting its pounding backbeat, but wise to cast a somewhat hard-edged eye on the limits of the American dream. After all, this neighborhood is slipping away, but the traditions will live on for those who dare to keep them alive. This movie loves this place and these people too much to let it go away unnoticed, and throws a massive block party of a musical to celebrate. What a well-timed ecstatic burst of a lively tribute to the restorative power of community connections.

Center Stage: JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS

An unlikely down-tempo, live-action, very loose adaptation of an 80’s cartoon, Jem and the Holograms is a watchable feature likable at heart. It’s an ordinary star-is-born rock and roll movie made with some earnest attention to what makes some modern stardom different. It starts when Jerrica (Aubrey Peeples of ABC’s Nashville), a shy teenager, puts on a pink wig and David Bowie face paint, then sings one of her original songs into a camera, introducing her alter ego as “Jem.” Embarrassed, she thinks she deletes the video. But one of her sisters (Insidious 3’s Stefanie Scott) uploads it to YouTube, where somehow this modest, unassuming thing goes the most viral possible. The whole world is asking, “Who is Jem?” A record label emails about signing a contract with her. She’s reluctant, but her sisters (the others are Chasing Life’s Aurora Perrineau and The Fosters’ Hayley Kiyoko) are excited, and ready to be her band. You’re Internet famous, they tell her.

Ryan Landel’s script has a largely benevolent web culture play the petri dish in which a layer of authenticity can grow, ready to be plucked fresh and naïve from obscurity to be co-opted by corporate interests. These modern trappings give the movie its way into the usual star-on-the-rise metaphor for finding your true self. Jerrica and her sisters kiss their guardian (Molly Ringwald, projecting maternal warmth) goodbye as they are taken to Los Angeles and bankrolled into showbiz by a record executive (Juliette Lewis, delighting in fun line readings) who tells them they can’t be who they are. A flashy presence – introduced strutting in silver pants – she’s only interested in selling “Jem,” in selling the mystery. A snappy businesswoman, Lewis selling every sneering retort and forceful order, she plans new looks with a team of stylists, coaches, choreographers, musicians, and one cute intern (Ryan Guzman) young enough to flirt with love interest status.

The girls spend their time trying on other’s expectations, trying to decide who they really are in the crucible of celebrity. “I’m having a secret identity crisis,” Jem says, even as her public image is an instant sensation, the public clamoring for her first concert. Their boss puts them up in the company mansion, and has three pop-up concerts planned to unveil their first three singles. She expects them to conform to her rules: no social media, no bad behavior, and no staying out past curfew. With a group dynamic that’s sweet and encouraging, the young women are excited by the glamour of Hollywood just on the horizon. They argue, but interpersonal conflicts are mild, as they mostly get down to the business of building their brand while staying true to themselves. It’s sweet, a charming story of glitter and sparkles and sisterly love that stays totally PG in its portrait of the downside of instant celebrity. Once the contract is signed, will they even have time to sing together for fun? (Hint: you bet.) It’s like a squeaky clean Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains.

Loaded with lots of fashion montages, hangouts, and performances, it hits the beats you’d expect, plus an unexpected but not entirely unwelcome prominent subplot about Jem’s late inventor father’s unfinished robot. Named 51n3rg.y (pronounced “synergy”), the thing, looking like two silver spheres stacked on an RC tire, bleeps to life and intermittently leads the girls on a scavenger hunt for its missing parts. The only remaining vestige of the far more outrageous fantasy cartoony source, aside from a weird sequel tease in the end credits, it’s another metaphor for piecing your identity together out of the past and future with the help of those closest to you. That’s nice, part of the movie’s utterly pleasant approach, where the story is a little cliché and larded with underfed melodrama – romances and professional jealousies flicker, then fade fast – but effective anyway. The girls are generally kind, their only conflict how to stay friends amidst the craziness. And Lewis plays not so much a villain, but takes for granted she can make or break these girls, and will do so depending on how it helps her.

The movie is intercut with amateurish YouTube, Instagram, and Tumblr videos from Jem fans, sometimes providing a Greek chorus of testimonials to the power of being yourself, other times featuring music that flows into or out of bits of score. Often distracting, it still makes a nice point about web content as the soundtrack of our lives, even if it pushes way too hard on the sentimentality. People like Jem for the image they’re sold, but do the crowds like the real her? The girls are positioned as avatars of authenticity who bring their normalcy into outsized pop music, creating songs that are catchy, and certainly no better or worse than what you’d hear on the Top 40. Their performances are entertaining, high energy. (A funny detail is a tossed off line bragging that MTV, Billboard, and Slate are competing for exclusives about Jem.) It’s not hard to see why they’d be popular, but it’s also easy to tell they’re the sort of look a record label could fill with any halfway decent group of musicians.

It’s a midpoint between the director Jon M. Chu’s Step Up 3D, far and away his finest work yet, and his portrait-of-a-young-star documentary Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. Jem is colorful, with fun costumes and bubbly performances, wall-to-wall pop music, while having a gentle perspective on the novelty and fluke luck it takes to break into the industry via social media, buffeted by viral communal energy and corporate demands. It’s a slick and relaxed movie, often content to fall back on stereotypes, but in appealing ways. It’s comforting to know the nice people won’t finish last. There’s something kindhearted and real at its center, a lack of cynicism about connection and community leading to its best moment: a club losing power mid-performance, but the show going on acoustically, the beat held in stomps and claps, the stage illuminated by the glow of a hundred strangers’ phones.

Accessories Sold Separately: G.I. JOE: RETALIATION

In the latest based-on-a-line-of-toys action film, elite teams of American commandos known as the G.I. Joes are locked in combat with the worldwide terrorist organization known as Cobra. When one of Cobra’s master impersonators takes the President’s place, he implicates the Joes in an assassination and orders a strike that leaves all but three of them dead. The survivors, somehow able to immediately determine the cause of this betrayal despite being stranded in the desert, vow revenge. This kicks off G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which follows in the footsteps of its predecessor, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, by having just enough really cool special effects shots to fill a two-and-a-half minute trailer, giving the rest of the runtime to endless exposition, repetitive action sequences, bad jokes, and haphazard characterization. It’s a movie that’s probably on the whole a bit less fun than watching a six-year-old play with action figures, although how much less fun exactly would depend on the six-year-old. All the movie’s best ideas seem to have come out of just such a scenario anyways, moments like protecting oneself from throwing stars by machine gunning them down or jumping off a motorcycle which then splits apart into several missiles and continues straight ahead to a target.

Retaliation’s surviving Joes out to carry out said retaliation are Dwayne Johnson, called upon to be his usual muscular but loveable self, D.J. Cotrona, a bland goodie two-shoes, and Adrianne Palicki, as the token G.I. Jane who at one point gets to wear a tight red dress for mostly no good reason. (The star of the first movie, the suddenly-everywhere Channing Tatum, puts in a glorified cameo, but is otherwise smart enough or lucky enough to sit this one out.) There’s also Byung-hun Lee as bad ninja Storm Shadow and Ray Park as good ninja Snake Eyes, who have an almost entirely peripheral side plot involving all kinds of ninja acrobatics that includes (1) an underground prison break, (2) a cliff-side, mountaintop sword battle, and (3) bit parts inhabited by Walton Goggins as a morally ambiguous warden and RZA as a grizzled ninja mentor. That’s where the fun, such as it is, is happening here, but once these characters join up with the central narrative, the glimmer of fun slips away from them too.

The script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick does what it can to salvage the colossal and bland confusion of the first film, but doesn’t improve upon a core concept that seems to be little more than living action figures acting out ridiculous scenarios for the benefit of little more than emptier-than-usual spectacle. Director Jon M. Chu, so good at staging fluid, visually energetic and sustained dance sequences in Step Up 3D, finds little in the way of coherent action, choosing instead to shoot it all in the quick flashes of bloodless bloodshed we’ve come to expect from our PG-13 shoot-‘em-ups. That it’s all a bit more disquieting than usual comes from the narrative that jumbles more than in coheres in the telling. Since the villain is impersonating the president, it makes the countless dead the Joes leave on their way to him uncomfortable. Sure, he’s clearly evil (and Jonathan Pryce is having a good time playing that up) and many of his staff positions are filled by Cobra agents, but it’s hard to tell if some of those around him are just good old army boys and Secret Service agents gunned down for no better reason than failing to spot the fake POTUS in their midst.

That it also happens to be one of those movies that ends on the kind of happy note that boils down to something like “who cares if a major world capital was just wiped off the face of the planet, the Rock got a medal?” is just indicative of the slapdash laziness of the plotting. When a movie can threaten the entire world with nuclear holocaust in its final climactic moments and completely fail to raise my heart rate, something’s gone horribly wrong. G.I. Joe: Retaliation is a slickly put together piece of Hollywood craftsmanship. It’s easy enough to stare at, but it’s empty to the core. The character who is most indicative of the movie’s approach is a retired Joe the crew picks up on their way to the final confrontation. He’s played by Bruce Willis in a performance so relaxed and weightless that if you told me he did the whole thing lying down somewhere and was green-screened into all his scenes, I’d probably believe you. He contributes little to the plot, besides providing the things that go boom for the finale, revealing in a montage that his house is essentially an armory with weapons of every kind hidden in every nook and cranny. It’s supposed to be funny and rousing, I suppose, but is nothing more than a sad prelude to yet more numbing exposition and endless gunfire, not a lick of wit or strategy in sight. I guess the only thing that can stop a bad Cobra with a gun is a good Joe with a gun.

Dance Dance Revolution: STEP UP REVOLUTION

Like the Final Destination and the Fast and the Furious movies, the Step Ups have a concept that’s simple and adaptable enough that it’s become a dependable series that can move to an entirely new location with new characters and still retain audience affection. The first Step Up took place in a dance academy; Step Up 2 the Streets took dance battles outside. Those movies had small, somewhat forgettable, charms and, despite some athletic choreography and good intentions, it wasn’t until Step Up 3D that the series truly became something special. Director Jon Chu made great use of 3D in staging energetic dance numbers that served a cornball dance competition plot so engagingly good-natured that it was hard to resist.

Now here we are with Step Up Revolution, which isn’t up there with the best of the series, but is amiable enough, I suppose. It moves the action to Miami where we start in medias res with a gang of ambitious, young, talented dancers who express themselves through splashy flash mobs and call themselves, unsurprisingly, The Mob. The group is made up of characters new to the series, aside from Twitch, who turned up in the last one, but you get the idea. They want to win a YouTube contest – first one to a certain number of views wins a hundred grand! – but along the way they decide to make their dances more activist in nature. The kids’ vibrant, low-income neighborhood is being targeted for “beautification” by a big-time developer (Peter Gallagher, always welcome). They think their surprise public performances will be enough to change his mind, or at least change the city’s agreement.

As if the let’s-put-on-a-show and big-bad-real-estate-mogul plotlines weren’t enough, the suit’s daughter (Kathryn McCormick), a student at the local dance academy, has fallen in love with a waiter (Ryan Guzman), who happens to work at her father’s Miami hotel. He also happens to be co-founder of The Mob. It’s nice when all the tropes can dovetail so nicely, isn’t it? The leads settle into the by now standard Step Up romance of the hunk and the babe from different worlds who love dance almost as much as they love each other. Part of the reason why Step Up 3D works so well is the way it added a parallel, and far more believable, romance between two appealingly dorky, but no less talented, dancers. Revolution’s predictable script by Amanda Brody keeps things moving along efficiently by having characters flat out state what they’re feeling at any given moment, which is just as well, since the romantic leads are best at delivering exposition and dramatic revelations with the same slightly unconvincing blankness that passes for emoting in this movie.

But even though it could be (should be, maybe), this movie is not really about the story and the filmmakers know it. It’s about the dancing, which is lively and most definitely the product of very talented dancers who clearly worked long and hard to achieve such physicality and fluidity. It’s a shame that first-time feature director Scott Speer, handed such nice choreography capably shot by director of photography Crash (yeah, just “Crash”) so often seems content to chop it up, dashing from one angle to the next without sufficient space to fully appreciate the rhythmic athleticism on display. Even the best uses of 3D, like a great moment that looks head on as dancers bungee jump off of shipping containers, is marred somewhat by Speer’s need to cut away from time to time when one long dizzying shot would do. That the dancing ends up functionally enjoyable is a factor of the performers’ skills, not the director’s.

Still, for all of Revolution’s exhausted clichés and awkward editing, it’s not an altogether unenjoyable movie. It passes the time well enough. The movie’s slickly corny without getting too earnest, sexy without getting sexual, and up-tempo, even when things get, like, heavy, man. The social and class-conscious story has some nice resonances (even though the last few moments of the movie are essentially the thematic equivalent of “eh, whatever”) and the music picks up a nice salsa flavor from the fresh Miami setting. The acting’s not the best, but the performers are good looking and are great dancers. And for all the tired dance movie plotting, the climactic moments, improbable as they are, sort of had me going. It’s nice when one of the best characters from Step Up 3D steps in for a welcome cameo, but when The Mob comes together and pulls off a big statement dance that, well, I guess it’s a spoiler. But if you can’t see what’s coming next then you just haven’t seen enough dance movies. 

A Star is Born? JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER

The massive publicity machine behind Justin Bieber: Never Say Never may have people thinking that this is a concert film pitched exclusively at the multitude of young girls who have already become ecstatic fans of the 16-year-old pop star known to the population at large as much for his coiffure as he is for his music. To a certain extent, it’s true that the movie will appeal to that demographic. This is a movie that is bound to please the hoards of fans that will flock to it this weekend. But it’s not exactly the hagiography his most venomous detractors will assume. Oh, it’s flattering all right, but it presents a somewhat honest, if also fairly calculated, look at the making of a pop star in the age of the Internet. If you have any interest in pure youth-centric pop music this could be of interest. It’s a bubblegum dispatch from the front lines of youth culture.

The movie takes great pains to say that Justin Bieber is just a regular kid, and while that’s quite possibly the internal case, the movie shows external differences. He’s surrounded by a support system of stylists, choreographers, vocal coaches, back-up dancers, security guards, technicians, drivers, and celebrities. That’s not too normal. But when he is normal, just, to use the parlance of the film, a small-town kid from Canada, the movie’s actually kind of interesting. We see early footage of a pre-fame Bieber and a mid-tour sojourn that finds him back at home. His grandparents seem delightful, grounding forces. His friends from before his fame seem like normal kids. No matter how carefully collected the footage, it’s clear that this kid comes from a normal background that, at least to some extent, stuck with him.

The movie makes a gloss of his personal background. It has no intention of elaborating on why his young mother and father broke up when he was only ten months old. And that’s okay with me. This is not meant to be an in-depth psychological profile of a young star’s family life. This is a professional chronicle, at least when it is at its most interesting. I most enjoyed the movie’s glimpse into his meteoric rise. Home videos show his early musical aptitude, drumming, singing, and guitar playing from such a young age that the instruments dwarfed him. They also show his eventual steps into public performance through a competition in a local talent show and singing on street corners. But once he hits YouTube and gets discovered by an up-and-coming producer, his career takes off.

It may be hard to remember, living as we are in an age of Bieber omnipresence, but he released his first single less than two years ago. It’s encouraging to see a young performer break through the stranglehold of Disney’s tween celebrity machine to become a star on his own terms, even if those terms just happen to be set by a different set of corporate overlords. A social-network fueled storm of tween buzz kicked it off. The movie treads a fine line between praising his fans and pointing out just how crazy many of them are, showing both glowing, tearful fans and crazed mobs of stage-jumpers and clothes-clawers. The size of the crowds that greet him grow until, finally, he sells out Madison Square Garden in twenty-two minutes. There’s some kind of phenomenon happening here, even if sometimes I felt like these squealing girls who are interviewed were speaking some unknown foreign language.

By now, I feel like we’re on the precipice of the next stage of his career. Will he become a true star, breaking out of the child-star box in which so many people see him? Will he fade into obscurity? Of course it’s too early to tell, but history will naturally make this documentary a smidge more interesting, adding layers of subtext once we know where his story goes from here. For now, the movie’s fairly enjoyable in a way that’s slightly more than a promotional behind-the-scenes peek. Bieber’s music is smooth, listenable pop. The songs often have a nice groove and always feature good production value. His song “Baby,” especially, has some undeniably sturdy pop-music mechanics driving it forward. It’s quite an earworm.

I went in to the theater neither a fan nor a hater of Justin Bieber, but I definitely left interested in seeing where he’ll go next. The guy’s got talent. Director Jon Chu, of the delightful Step Up 3D, shoots lively concert footage in sometimes striking 3D. Otherwise, the footage is a mishmash of home videos, YouTube videos, and TV clips, typical for the documentary genre but not particularly well suited for the 3D format. (Not that that will matter to the target audience). Under Chu's direction, the movie is fluffy and lumpy, but it's also a slick, professional product with a nice sense of humor that sporadically pokes through.

By it’s very nature it can’t get as close to the truth as such legendary rock docs as the Maysles brothers’ Rolling Stones film Gimme Shelter or D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan feature Don’t Look Back. But nor are the stakes as high. As a surface treatment of a true-life Horatio Alger tale, Never Say Never achieves its goals. Bieber’s image is thoroughly varnished. What it means to future pop culture scholars will depend on whether or not Bieber can push past his early success and massive cult to achieve not just popularity, but greatness as well. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” his mom asks him at one point in footage from his toddler years. He grins and stares into the camera, but Chu cuts away before we hear the answer.

In Your Face: STEP UP 3D

Step Up 3D is hardly innovative on the plot level. How many other modern dance movies feature dancers who need to win the big competition to meet their goals? How many other dance movies feature fresh-faced kids conquering all problems through their smooth moves? Over the last decade we’ve seen the same basic patterns of against-all-odds, wrong-side-of-the-tracks dance-battle uplift repeated in such unmemorable would-be spectacles as You Got Served, Stomp the Yard, Step Up, and Step Up 2 the Streets. Those movies saddled their dancing with too much dumb plot and then chopped up the dancing into bits of visual stimulation that flew by without a chance to appreciate the talent and physicality in the performers’ movements. Step Up 3D works better by downplaying the plotting, and toning down the dumbness, while foregrounding the glorious dance, holding shots (sometimes) long enough for us to truly appreciate the choreography.

I saw and immediately forgot the earlier Step Ups, so I entered this movie with only vague memories about what happened in earlier installments. It turned out, that works just fine. This movie seems to have almost no narrative connection to its predecessors. It follows a kid nicknamed “Moose” (Adam G. Sevani) and his best friend, but not girlfriend, Camille (Alyson Stoner) as they arrive at NYU’s freshmen orientation. They’re the breakout stars of the picture. For me, they were the two members of the cast most adept at navigating the often clumsy dialogue. They had as much of an ease with the acting as with the dancing, something that could not be said for almost anyone else in the cast.

Early in the movie, Moose’s dad gets to solemnly look at his son and express happiness that a future engineer won’t also be a dancer. That’s good for a laugh. Moose almost immediately gets into a dance battle while wandering away from the campus tour. He’s subsequently drawn into the plight of a cool dance crew that desperately needs to win a dance competition in order to pay the back rent on their warehouse that has been converted into a combination house and practice space.

Led by an aspiring filmmaker and dancer (Rick Malambri), the dance crew contains a bunch of young, talented, barely differentiated dancers that also happen to be a good cross-section of various demographics. They’re mostly background for two romance plots. Malambri falls in infatuation with a new member of the dance crew (Sharni Vinson) while the friendship between Sevani and Stoner might become something more. Those plot threads are in turn just a device to draw us in to the competition, in which there’s substantial financial stakes and a rival dance crew that wants to win at all cost. That too, is ultimately just a backdrop for the dancing, just as it should be.

Under the direction of Jon Chu, the movie looks good, with the 3D actually enhancing the content in surprising and engaging ways. Sure, those dancers are dancing right at you, but the camera’s more locked down than usual. As a result of planning and shooting in 3D, and using it well, the shots and editing are mostly planned for clarity and impact. I loved the choreography and the chance to appreciate the skill on display. Of course, I would be lying if I said I didn’t get a kick out of the 3D effects, which had me smiling while leaning back to avoid all those dancers getting up in my face.

This is a movie that’s plenty entertaining, driven by nothing more than a desire to delight. The direction is stylish; for once I felt the 3D really enhanced a live-action experience rather than distracting. The performers are engaging and their dancing is excellent. It doesn’t even matter that the plot is all second-hand clichés and 3D gimmicks taped together in an earnestly silly way. Underneath all the popping and locking, behind the thumping, toe-tapping bass of the soundtrack, Step Up 3D feels like a throwback. It’s best sequence is actually set to the welcome sounds of Fred Astaire and features a long, unbroken shot of two characters dancing down a New York City sidewalk, paying homage to the steps and spirit of the old-school studio-era musicals. There’s a charm and innocence to a movie that simply wants to dazzle with dance and actually achieves it.