Marilyn Hotchkiss' Ballroom Dancing & Charm School (2005)

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Just what I expected

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is the sort of movie millions of people love because it pushes all the right buttons at all the right times, and it pushes them hard. It seems real enough that they feel like it is talking directly to them personally, and yet it is unreal enough to create in them a wide range of intense emotional reactions within a relatively short time. The vast majority of reviews here prove that the formula works like a charm for a lot of people. If you are one of them, you will love this movie as much as those reviewers did. But this kind of movie has the opposite effect on me, and since there may be a few others like me out there, it is worth giving my reaction to it too.I am allergic to the heavyhanded emotional manipulation movies like this use to get the response I just described. To me it rings as false as a three dollar bill. The culprit is the screenplay, which goes for the emotional jugular in every scene, making every word, every action by every actor so fraught with emotion that I begin to feel suffocated. The result for me is an experience that is neither believable - at all - nor moving in any positive or pleasurable way. It leaves me feeling manipulated and cheated. A lot of great acting talent was squandered on this tripe.I do not mean to offend those who love this movie but to caution those who - like me - do not react well to emotional manipulation. I love being genuinely, spontaneously moved emotionally by a movie, but the heavyhanded technique used here backfires on me.

*Warning - no plot spoilers ahead, but movie spoilers nonetheless...* My significant other rented this for me thinking it would be a terrific romance with an all-star cast. Wow - very, very wrong. This movie is an overdone, overwrought, and overly sentimental excuse to theatrically release a student film 15 years after it was shot! The copyright date on the box said 2005, yet during the very first flashback sequence I was looking at the clothes and hairdos that were supposed to be the early 1960s, and noticed that the girls especially were wearing late 80s/early 90s dresses and hairdos. It looked as if it had been shot a good 15 or 20 years before the rest of the film! I tried to convenience myself that it was a flashback, and therefore supposed to look old, but it looked WWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY more 80s than 60s or even 21st century trying to be 60s... then an adult coworker of the lead character turns up, and he looks just like the boy featured in the flashback sequences (yet it's a different, much older character whose youth is featured in the flashbacks). I was completely confused until I saw in the special features the short film included - it was all the flashback sequences, shot in 1990 as a complete student film of the same title as this movie! It also features commentary that includes the little boy all grown up (and indeed acting the co-worker in the 2005 scenes). Thus, this movie is just a shell of story woven around an old, re-cut student film put together as an obvious excuse to get it up to theatrical running time. The shell story, shot in 2005, is mostly about a man who has lost his wife and finds healing and redemption at the dance class that he promises a dying man he will attend in his stead (something about a promise made by the dying man in the early 60's to his girl that they would meet on the "fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the new millennium - an excuse to shoot the segments around the old film in 2005?) These new scenes and plot might have been OK except the awful, overly sentimental score that repeats ad nauseum over almost every single new scene and the clichéd action that permeates the new movie. Don't bother. There's a reason why you've never heard of this movie even though it has a well-known cast - it's terrible.

Do you like long, slow, artsy-fartsy movies with lots of black & white flashbacks that go on forever ? Then you'll love this one.There are some good actors here, but this film represents their worst work. John Goodman's performance, as an accident victim, is lost. He looks about twice as obese as I remember him, and his face crowds the screen. Frankly, I couldn't get through it, and Donna Grayson's previous comments are completely inexplicable. She must have been involved in the production and is trying to beat the dead horse of promoting the film.Avoid this film like the plague, and you'll be a much happier person.

CHARM SCHOOl stars Robert "Ravenous" Carlyle as a grieving widower who comes back to life after a run-in with errant motorist John Goodman sends him to an old-fashioned dance school, where he encounters new love, new life and new meaning. Marissa Tomei (where has she been?) plays his newfound love, an emotionally fragile woman who is in the thrall of her mean-spirited stepbrother (Donnie "Sixth Sense" Wahlberg), who also attends the dance studio. Nobody and nothing is quite what it seems in this simple little tale of love lost and found, as you will discover by the end. The biggest shocker involves Carlyle tracking down Goodman's long-lost love, which I guarantee will have you talking about the movie long after it is over. A wonderful film, populated by some of Hollywood's most recognizable faces (David Paymer, Ernie Hudson, Camerin Manheim, Adam Arkin and Danny DeVito) in small roles -- although this is the kind of movie where no role is really small. Along with the wonderful Carlyle and Tomei (I kept saying to myself, imagine running into Marissa Tomei in a rundown dance studio) Mary Steenburgen absolutely shines as the oddly repressed daughter of the woman who founded the dance school. Steenburgen's character hysterically launches every session by remarking that her mother, who has been dead since 1972, "cannot be with us this evening." Based on a short film from 1990 by the same director. Make sure you watch that short, which is included on the DVD and narrated by William Hurt. And keep a box of tissues near at hand.