Jamie
I don’t have much of a relationship to the Breakin’ franchise, so let’s get into it with Shabba Doo. Most interesting fact? His wikipedia page is under Shabba Doo and not his actual name Adolfo Quinones. I guess it’s because it was his professional stage name as a dancer, but it was a bit unexpected. After that I’m just more interested in where I can get me some more Shabba Doo. It appears that we only have one more BMT left with Lambada and even that is a bit questionable. Seems to have a wide enough release, but a sparse official review count. After that his only “major” release was Steel Frontier starring Joe Lara and Brion James. Which reminds me, I was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the hosts said he always liked Brion James… I’ve never heard anyone say that. Brion James. Huh.
To recap, Kelly is a dancer trying to make it in LA. She’s working with the best (the best!), a choreographer named Franco, who very much wants to sleep with her. This is really upsetting to Kelly. While thinking over how to rebuff Franco, but not burn that bridge, her friend takes her to Venice Beach where she witnesses the future: break dancing. She’s invited to a club by the two best dancers, Ozone and Turbo. Once there she witnesses a dance-off, where Ozone and Turbo get torched by a rival dance team after they unveil their secret weapon: a girl. Gasp! But wait, Kelly’s a girl, isn’t she? And she dances too!. But can she learn to let it all go and feel the rhythm of breakin’? Let’s just say the answer is an emphatic YES and Special K is born. Kelly’s agent is a bit skeptical, but also really believes in Kelly. He likes her too, but keeps it strictly professional, unlike Franco. Kelly wants them to enroll in a competition where Franco will be the choreographer for the winners in a big showcase. Kelly’s agent agrees, but when they show up at the competition Franco is infuriated that his former student is there with this street trash and trash dancing and demands that they be kicked out. The group won’t have that! They just start dancing… hard. They dance so hard that the judges can’t stop from tapping their feet and soon are telling Franco to shove it. We end with the big showcase which obviously is the most amazing thing anyone has ever seen and changes dance forever. THE END (or is it? (Ha! No!))
There is something very wholesome and sweet about this film that can’t help but endear you to it. For one, it is shockingly not at all problematic, which was a pleasant surprise. Kelly doesn’t want to sleep with her teacher. The idea that he might not care about her dancing, but rather just about her body is upsetting. Franco is powerful in the world she wants to be in. She makes the hard choice to leave that world rather than compromise and in turn finds a friend, a potential love interest (although they take it slow), and an agent who respects her boundaries. The scene where the agent is like “it’s cool. I get the picture, but I believe in you” almost brought me to tears. Very sweet. For two, the dancing actually is a load of fun. So how much do I want to make fun of a couple amateur actors and the end dance scene being silly? Not too much. It’s a fun movie. Check it out.
Hot Take Temperature! They simply would not win. You think those judges would go against Franco (the Franco) just cause their toes were tapping a little bit? The rules were very clear: they had to do traditional dance. They would be choreographed by Franco. It ain’t happening. Once they dabbed the sweat off their foreheads and composed themselves, having let loose for a moment under the spell of breakin’, they would realize that it was just that. A spell. That these kids tricked them with some kind of voodoo dancing magic and would need to be taken care of. And taken care of they would be. Hot Take Temperature: Scorching hot dance moves.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me pop locking in fools’ faces while Ice-T reads out a spoken word album in the background* Let’s go!
The Good? Everything? Well, not really, but the movie is highly entertaining, and a small scale demo of pop locking mastery. Now, I’m not really that into dancing, let alone break dancing. But there is something decent here where it seems like a genuine love letter to a new form of expression. Add in Christopher McDonald, Ice-T, and a very brief glimpse of Jean Claude Van Damme, and you have a real cult classic on your hands.
The Bad? The acting is dire. Like really dire. But what do you expect? You are taking two very good break dancers and asking them to act … the thing is that as much as the main character holds her own, you could maybe have gotten a slightly better actor in there. But beggars can’t be choosers.
The BMT? Hmmmmmmm, well, no, on a technicality. You see, the movie is good. Calm down everyone, this isn’t the end of the world … because we got a second one.
Now this is what I call uh … AI scraping? In reality only a tiny bit of this is using AI, but it is still pretty good. Naturally, it is in line with some of my prior ideas on the subject: it is decent at extracting structured data from unstructured data (e.g. descriptions / keywords from an image), and it seems like it can be borderline SOTA object recognition, OCR, or generalized PCA type stuff. For this I decided on a fun project that is in line with the second part of that.
A while ago I scraped all of the New York Times listing pages. To do that there was a somewhat annoying (although practically not very difficult) step of getting listing page numbers from the New York Times. I set up a whole system using PCA and my own eyeballs and a UI to do this and it worked well, outside of dev time (which I’m fine with, this is how I learn) it probably took me like 10 hours to get the listing pages, mostly watching Seinfeld in the background.
But with AI it is kind of possible to do this much more quickly. Step one: scrape all of the small pages from an issue, non-trivial, but I had done it before. Step two: chop these small pages into single pages and reassemble them with ffmpeg into a movie, one page per frame, one frame per second. Step three: using Gemini I uploaded the video and asked for timestamps for any full page advertisement. Step four: I parsed the output and then scraped the larger size (which is actually a pattern of blocks … this ain’t my first rodeo, remember?) pages. And then I reassembled it. Et voila. For May 4th, 1984, all of the “full page” advertisements from the New York Times:
I mean, pretty good. For Breakin’ 2 I think I’ll just look to refine the query a bit, and probably scrape slightly larger initial pages just to make it more possible the program can figure out which are movie advertisements maybe. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with that one.
I’m going to invent a category here, which is the Bizarro World Twins (Who?) for the three other break dancers who are also two men and a woman who the crew battle throughout the film. Setting as a Character (Where?) up the wazoo since they very obviously head right to Venice Beach for one of the break dancing demos. The excellent MacGuffin (Why?) of the big dance audition against the other antagonist, the eeeeeevil dance instructor / pervert. And Worst Twist (How?) for the obvious end that the judges are moving to the groovin’ for this new dance phenomenon. And as I said, this film is Good.
Read all about break dancing maybe in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 