Tonight is the final of So You Think You Can Dance, billed as the search for Britain’s favourite dancer.
The contestants aren’t bad I guess but for one of the most amazing dance routines ever filmed take a look at this clip from the finale of the 1943 musical Stormy Weather.
This film featured, among others, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller and Lena Horne, but just wait until 4:46 when Fayard and Harold Nicholas make their appearance.
Neither of the Nicholas brothers had any formal dance training but you can see from this clip why many considered them the greatest tap dancers of the time. Janet and Michael Jackson studied with them and Mikhail Baryshnikov called them the most amazing dancers he had ever seen in his life.
Fred Astaire said this “Jumpin’ Jive” dance number from Stormy Weather was the greatest movie musical sequence he had ever seen.
I just watched Napoleon Dynamite. I was expecting the usual crappy teen movie (a genre I kind of like anyway) but it turned out to be a genuinely entertaining film.
The film has a plot so thin it’s barely there but the real interest is in the characters. The eponymous Napoleon Dynamite, played by Jon Heder, is a study in supreme nerdiness. In fact most of the main characters are painfully awkward.
It seems to have got mixed reviews but if you like quirky humour and you were even slightly nerdy in school I recommend giving it a go.
It also has a great soundtrack. Here’s a sample courtesy of Seeqpod:
The Simpsons Movie opens next week. There has been some great promotional activity for this film including transforming a number of 7-Elevens in America into Kwik-E-Marts selling Squishees and Krusty-Os and a doughnut-brandishing Homer Simpson painted next to the giant on the hill above Cerne Abbas, Dorset.
On the Simpsons movie site you can create your own characters. Here’s me as a Simpson:
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