MAD HOT BALLROOM (DVD)

Director: Marylin Agrelo (no major film work)
Starring: Documentary

Mad Hot Ballroom is a documentary about ballroom dance classes in New York City public schools and a corresponding citywide competition for the children. I found the film to be mildly cute, despite it being incredibly thin as a subject/story. There simply wasn’t much to talk about here after we saw the awkward boys and girls spinning around the dancefloor once or twice.

Yes, there is no doubt it’s fun to watch 10 year olds in poor neighborhoods like Washington Heights doing the tango or rumba. Unfortunately, I think the filmmakers were well aware there wasn't much to show except for these kids dancing. So that’s what we get again … and again ... and again. This was no Spellbound, a moderately enjoyable recent documentary about funny little kids in spelling competitions. In that film the story was about the families and children themselves. The spelling competition was just a foreground. In this film we never really get to know anything about the kids except for a few snippets on their views of their dance classes.

I’m guessing here, but I’m assuming that the filmmakers intended this to be a story about the power of art (or dance as it were) on the poor. If that’s true this film really only enforces the notion that trying to free the downtrodden masses with art is a vaguely silly idea. The kids in this movie were generally the nerds of their schools, whether in a middle class or poor school district. I’m guessing they took the class to fulfill their gym requirement. Now I have nothing against this. In fact, I’m all for giving the nerds some new experiences. These are the kids who are the most likely to get out of their situations, and broadening their horizons can only help that. However, I doubt that ballroom dance did much of anything for most of the future gang-bangers or the next generation of the underemployed. At least this film didn't show me anything that suggested otherwise.

In the end this is all speculation on my part, because other than a very few bits here and there the film never really touches these sorts of things. It just watches the kids dance. So, I give the film some minor credit for cuteness and for giving some exposure to the dance program, but frankly I think this would have worked much better as an hour-long Frontline episode on PBS than it did as a feature film.

Standouts: Cute kids dancing their hearts out.
Blowouts: It’s a very thin story in the end.

Grade: C

12/19/2005