Every year, as things are wrapping up, we enter the
Christmas holiday season. Hanukkah
happens. Then Christmas. Kwanzaa quickly after that. Festivus is in there somewhere too (it’s tonight,
in fact). All these holidays get crammed
into December. With them come the
holiday music. Television shows air
their Christmas episodes then go on their winter break. And movies get Christmassy too. Not all the movies, but a good number of
them.
Looking in the theaters, you might not notice a big spike in
holiday fare. There was, what, The Grinch this year? That’s about it. It’s on the small screen that many of the
holiday movies end up coming out. Most
notably, Lifetime and Hallmark become filled with holiday movies throughout
December and much of the latter half of November. Most of them involve a man falling in love
with a woman. One of people had a job
that was the focus of their life. Then
they met the other one who changed them with the holiday feelings and their
romance took over, making them both better people. That’s most of the movies.
Sometimes, though, within that basic heterosexual romance
storyline that they so often employ, they use other story beats to tell their
tales. The framing or structure of the
movie might be playing off a different, more well-known movie. Take 2012’s Holiday Spin, for example. It
was basically a made-for-television version of a Step Up movie. A guy fell in
love with a girl through dancing with her.
Getting into more specific territory, it felt like Step Up 3D in terms of story.
The place to start would be to lay out the storylines of
each movie. Holiday Spin was about Blake (Garrett Clayton), a teenager from
Carolina who wanted to be an MMA fighter.
On the eve of a big fight that could rocket him to stardom, he got in a
car accident. His mother died in the car
accident, and he was forced to go live with his estranged father Ruben (Ralph
Macchio) until he turned eighteen. While
staying with his father, Blake fell in love with a dancer named Pia (Allie
Bertram). They connected through dance
and became a pair of top competitors in the Holiday Spin contest.
Step Up 3D told
two stories. One was about Moose (Adam
G. Sevani), an engineering student with a background in dance. He was being lured out of his student
lifestyle and back into the dance world by a group of street dancers. The dancers were trying to raise enough money
to keep their dance studio/hangout afloat.
Meanwhile, the leader of the dance crew, Luke (Rick Malambri), was an
aspiring filmmaker who wanted to use film to showcase the dance talent he
knew. He fell in love with Natalie
(Sharni Vinson), and their relationship bloomed throughout the film.
If you just read all of that, you might be wondering why I’m
so hung up on the two movies being similar.
They’re both dance movies. Dance
movies tend to have the same kinds of stories.
People dance. People fall in
love. That’s a dance movie for you. That’s not it though. Some of the more specific similarities have
already come through in the synopses.
Some of the other ones were left out of the synopses and will be
highlighted soon.
The storyline about the main character striving to do one
thing while being brought back into dance was the most apparent similarity
between the two films. Holiday Spin had Blake training to be an
MMA fighter and being brought back into the dance he had been raised on. His mom was a dancer. His dad was a dancer. As a child, he had been a championship
dancer. When he was bullied at school
for his dancing abilities, he shifted gears to become an MMA fighter. That way, he could fight back against the
people that bullied him. Moose, from Step Up 3D, was an engineering
student. Before diving into engineering,
he had been a dancer at an arts school that was featured in the first two films
of the series. He met a guy running a
dance crew, and that guy convinced him to dive back into dancing. Both Blake and Moose became the key figures
in their dance teams, bringing glory when all seemed lost.
This brings everything to the second common element. Along with the being brought back into dance
element of the stories, the events were unfolding in a city that the characters
were new to. Blake had been transplanted
from his Carolina home to Miami, to live with his father. His mother had passed away in a car accident
and, because he was underage, he was forced to move to Miami. It was where his estranged father, and new
legal guardian, lived. Moose began Step Up 3D by moving to New York for
school. He had originally come from
Baltimore, and had left to pursue his career in engineering, a career that
would be hinted at again in Step Up: All
In. The two characters were out of
their normal environment, and as such, were able to shed the shells that they
had built to be the best dancers they could be.
There was a common romantic thread to both movies as
well. In Holiday Spin, Blake fell in love with Pia, a dancer from out of
town who was staying at his father’s place while training for the Holiday Spin
competition. She had a falling out with
her former dance partner and ended up falling in love with Blake while also
training with him for the competition. Step Up 3D saw Luke (not Moose this
time) falling in love with Natalie.
Natalie had left her previous dance crew and started training with
Luke’s crew while their relationship bloomed.
The connection between Pia and her former partner was that they were in
a relationship and the partner had cheated on her. The connection between Natalie and her former
crew was that the leader was her brother.
Those weren’t the same connections, exactly, but they were tarnished
relationships that led to romance with a dancer from another team.
One other thing about the ruined relationships was that the
female character would end up having to go against the male character she had
left in the final dance-off. During the
Holiday Spin competition, Pia and Blake faced off against the man who had
cheated on her. In the end, the main
characters were victorious, and the cheater got the comeuppance he
deserved. Step Up 3D saw Natalie teaming up with Luke’s crew during the final
battle where they were against her brother’s crew. She had fully turned against her brother and
was helping Luke and his crew come out victorious in the end. Happy endings were a part of both movies
thanks to the woman turning against the villainous man.
An obstacle that was shared between the two films was the
loss of a training location. In Holiday Spin, that location was the
studio in which Blake and Pia trained. The downstairs studio in the house where they
lived was vandalized one night. They
could no longer use it, and suspected that Pia’s former partner was the cause. That was never confirmed or denied. They had to find another location to practice
their dancing and found it afterhours in a gym.
Step Up 3D was a little
different in the reasoning and specific locations, but the loss had the same
impact on the story. The loft where the
dance crew hung out and trained was foreclosed because Luke couldn’t make the
payment. They now needed to win the
competition to get their loft back. For
the time being, though, they needed a new place to train. Moose got in contact with Jenny Kido, someone
from his Baltimore days, and she let them use her family’s closed arcade in New
York. They worked out their dance moves
there and ended up going on to win the competition.
Holiday Spin put a
Christmas twist on a dance story that had been told before. It added some new stuff including a martial
arts fight against a bully, and some cheating sex. Those were simple cosmetic additions
though. At its core, Holiday Spin told the same story as Step Up 3D. It’s something that happens in movies a
lot. One movie will come out with a
story that harkens back to something you may have already seen. There’s usually something to make it a little
different though. Christmas movies are
notorious for it. Retelling a story is
as much a Christmas tradition as your family getting drunk on egg nog. But, as has been said many times in this blog,
it’s not about the originality of a story so much as the originality of how
it’s told. Christmas movies are usually
told with originality, which makes them a great thing to have at this time of
year.
Now let’s get to some notes:
- Garrett Clayton, who played Blake in Holiday Spin, was also in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure (week 39).
- Holiday Spin featured Dan Joffre. He was previously in Air Buddies (week 270).
- Finally, Ralph Macchio made his return in Holiday Spin, after being featured in Up the Academy (week 136).
- Have you seen Holiday Spin or Step Up 3D? What did you think about them? Do you think they’re as similar as I’m making them out to be? Let me know in the comments.
- The comments and Twitter are good places to suggest movies I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies. I like suggestions because they could be movies that I don’t know about that help me broaden the movies I cover.
- Sometimes when I’m watching bad movies, I share bits and pieces of them on Snapchat. Add me (jurassicgriffin) if you’re interested in that.
- It’s time to figure out what next week’s movie will be. I still don’t have my schedule back, so I’m going to have to pull this one out of thin air again. Next week is New Year’s week, so I want a movie that involves that holiday. I think I might have actually scheduled this one for next week originally, but I’m not sure. I’ll be watching 1980’s New Year’s Evil. I’ll see you then.
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