One Last Dance
|
List Price: Our Price: $2.54 You Save: $7.45 (75%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.64 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of One Last Dance
Movie Review: PATRICK SWAYZE-LAST DANCE
Summary: 4 Stars
I have watched this video 3 times and it is wonderful. It shows Patrick Swayze and his wife at his best with his dancing. He was very good in Dirty Dancing, but I liked him the best in this video. Wish he had done more movies with his excellant training.Movie Review: One last dance
Summary: 4 Stars
Great film about "rebirth" of a company to save their dance school.
Patrick Swayze shows that age does not prevent from good vibes and performance
Movie Review: A happy enough pas de deux?
Summary: 3 Stars
There's nothing more tiresome that watching dancers who are way past their prime trying to recapture a sense of their lost glory. This is what you'll be getting when you watch One Last Dance, a rather costly and pedestrian exercise in ballet melodrama. Full of unmitigated histrionics and rather ordinary dancing - particularly from the three leads - One Last Dance is pretty much a train wreck from beginning to end.
If viewers want to see some really good dancing they would be far better off tuning into You Think You Can Dance, Fox's current reality show - the dancers are young, and unlike Patrick Swayze, their not trying to fake it.
One Last Dance apparently took years to make the transition from idea to stage production to screenplay to screen and it was reportedly a labor of love for Swayze and professional dancer Lisa Niemi. But after seeing it I wondered why, during all those years, nobody stepped in and stopped them from doing any more damage to the world of dance.
The movie centers around three older dancers who are now retired. Travis (Swayze), Chrissa (Niemi), and Max (George De La Pena) are all former members of Alex McGrath's dance company. Through flashbacks it is gradually revealed that Alex treated the trio terribly, he was abusive and nasty, and his constant taunts eventually caused Chrissa to have some kind of mental breakdown.
The principals have now all gone their separate ways. Travis owns several fitness centers, Max gives seminars at schools, and Chrissa performs in a kind of vaudeville show where she's a model for a knife thrower! But Alex is now dead and the artistic director of the company decides to hunt the three out, hoping that they will reunite to bring to life the production they were working on when they decided to call it quits.
The three ex-dancers are all well into their forties, so reestablishing their former level of competency doesn't come to easy. After much panting and sweaty puffing, they manage to develop a semblance of what they once were. They even work on their basics and join and "adult beginners" class where the teacher is warm and supportive, encouraging everyone to find the "heart" in their dancing.
Of course, everyone is bringing back lots of emotional baggage. It is soon revealed that Chrissa has a young daughter whom she is reluctant to let dance. But could this little girl be Travis's? Chrissa also has a bad attitude problem - there are unresolved issues, which were probably to do with her breakdown and to Travis's betrayal of her. Travis decided he couldn't go on after Chrissa left the company, and now he's plagued by stiffness and injury, and Max is carrying abandonment issues.
There's lots of scenes involving angst-ridden confessionals and brooding shots of the actors against the New York City skyline. There's also lots of dance numbers, some of which are better than others. Watch for several younger members of the chorus who really stand out. But the sequences involving the three leads rapidly become corny and tedious, and they go on for far too long. Yes - we already get the point, they're forty and they can still tread the boards.
Will the three ever overcome their petty malice, spite, and neuroses and join together for one...last...dance? You have to wait a full 113 minutes to find out, but perhaps, by then, most viewers will have had enough and switched to Fox. Michael Leonard September 05.
Movie Review: Dirty Middle-Aged Dancing
Summary: 3 Stars
"One Last Dance" is a Swayze family affair (to quote Mystery Science Theater 3000 "have a Patrick Swayze Christmas!"),complete with Swayze's real-life wife Lisa Niemi,choreography from his mother Patsy,and his daughter Bambi part of the corps de ballet. "One Last Dance" sounds like a sappy clunker,but in some ways it's surprisingly good.
The two major strengths of "One Last Dance" are its music and choreography. The soundtrack is incredibly bittersweet and melancholy,a true tearjerker even when the dialogue is maudlin. The dancers are incredibly talented. It's more of a music video than a movie with its focus on the human body in motion. Both classical music as well as a Brazilian dance song highlight the dancers' strengths.
Unfortunately,"One Last Dance" is burdened with a hopelessly sappy plot. Travis (Swayze),Chryssa (Niemi) and Max (George De La Pena) are reunited for a tribute dance concert. Travis finds out he has a long-lost daughter,a child he never knew he fathered. Max struggles with his talents. Chryssa is dealing with her reunion with her former lover. Everything is melodramatically resolved;there aren't any unexpected plot twists.
Since this is a Patrick Swayze movie,there is a requisite shirtless scene and homoeroticism (Travis gets hit on by the artistic director,and he dances sensually with Max in the final pas de trois)
It's not a MST3K-worthy movie like "Road House",but it is like a French appetizer called an amuse bouche.The dancing is a delight to watch,and the soundtrack is worth listening to (even when one can shut out the plot-or lack of it)
Movie Review: Talented actors!
Summary: 3 Stars
This was a paean to and by the Swayze's . . . and if you like their type of dancing this was for you. There was not much of a story line. And in most of the movie two of the main characters were morose, angry at the world, and angry at each other. This didn't help my appreciation of the film.
It is difficult to look upon dance as these dancers do, that it is the be-all and end-all of one's existence. The life span of a dancer as a dancer is so short that if they really felt this way they would end up doing away with themselves after their five or ten years in their field. That the Swayze's have returned to dance after years away, and that they have such passion as they have tried to show, was hard for me to relate to as anything short of fanciful.
It is pleasant to see movie personalities, though, with real talent, rather than just looking pretty for the camera.