Dance Flick

Twenty-two years after Hollywood Shuffle, where Robert Townsend and Keenan Ivory Wayans boldly proposed that black American performers craft ethical screen images, it is Wayans and his family, unencumbered by Civil Rights–era scruples, who have thrived.The Wayanses created the successful Scary Movie franchise (eventually taken over by Miramax). But the new genre parody Dance Flick is all their own. It isn’t highbrow—or encumbered by scruples—but the Wayanses retain their vulgar, adolescent derision of sex, class and race. In this bow down to Hollywood millennium, their irreverence is almost subversive.

These good-looking, talented, unafraidto-be-goofy brothers, fathers, sons, nephews and cousins (Keenan’s nephew Damien Dante Wayans is the director, and there are at least seven other Wayans in the credits) for taking Hollywood at face value—and on their own (Marxian?) terms.They tease recent dance flicks that exploit hip-hop and the musical genre without advancing the artistic expression of either genre (although You Got Served had awesome choreography). If not the principled, uplifting route that Townsend suggested in his own respectable but mediocre projects The Five Heartbeats, Meteor Man and The Parenthood TV series,Wayans parody takes back what was stolen and gives audiences the license to laugh at inauthentic Hollywood:The doughy-faced Nikki Blonsky chick from Hairspray is perfectly mocked, so is Dreamgirls in David Alan Grier’s two tons of fun travesty, as is the genre’s “homophilophobia” in a Fame lampoon that allows a gay male teen total free declaration. 

No matter how many people get verklempt over the lugubrious Benjamin Button, I know in my soul that history will avenge the Wayanses’ superior age/masculinity farce Little Man and fans who have already forgotten Eminem’s 8 Mile will one day catch up to Damon Wayans’ insightful hip-hop burlesque, Marci X.

You only need to resist Hollywood’s sham seriousness (and moral superiority). Dance Flick’s raucous satire rescues us from the insult of movies like High School Musical 3, Step Up, Crunk and Save the Last Dance.Yes, Dance Flick’s white girl (Shoshana Bush) falls for black boy (Damon Wayans, Jr.) plot is just a pretext for comic vignettes—like an extended episode of the old In Living Color TV series—but it’s more invigorating than Chicago, Dreamgirls or Hairspray.These post–Hollywood Shuffle years have given way to the Obama years’ post-racial potential, thus,Wayans comedy ignores most pieties. There’s a lesson to be learned from this.