Two years ago, MTV Films released “Election” and missed its target audience by being too smart for its own good.
The popularity of Total Request Live alone should tell us MTV’s audience isn’t growing old with the network; it’s being replaced with a mid-teen army, swearing allegiance to their Justin Timberlake posters.
That’s where “Save the Last Dance” comes in. It’s a musical love story that falls somewhere between “Dirty Dancing” and “Krush Groove.” This relatively inoffensive confection explores the notion that love is blind, as long as it can move.
Poor Sara (Julia Stiles) - her mother died in a horrible car accident on her way to Sara’s ballet recital and now she blames herself for the death and just about everything else for not getting into the Juilliard School of Performing Arts.
So she’s forced to move to Chicago’s South Side to live with her estranged father and is destined to become the most unabashedly white girl ever to grace the local urban high school.
“Save the Last Dance” is barely a movie about trying to fit in, though. Sara quickly befriends Chenille (Kerry Washington), a black, unwed single mother whose younger brother is the handsome and gifted Derek (Sean Patrick Thomas).
By the end of her first day of school, Sara is already dressing up, learning the lingo and joining her new friends in hitting the clubs, forsaking the Gap and using the term “slammin\'’” over the ever-tired “cool.”
Basking in the glow of acceptance, Sara forms a bond with Derek, a talented young man, full of good looks, ambition and a dream of going to Georgetown University. Derek also teaches hip-hop dancing on the side. In an effort to be as slammin\'’ as the rest, Sara practices with him after school and soon rediscovers her love of dancing.
But Thomas’s character is not without his tension. “Fredro Starr (“Moesha”) plays Malakai, Derek’s boyhood friend who can’t seem to give up the gangbanging, nor his friendship with Derek.
But whenever the scenes of street life get too heated, director Thomas Carter reminds us we have dancing to live for.
Product placement by Coca-Cola and Pepsi, however, help to remind us that those who are different can live in harmony.
But Stiles is awesome, Thomas is dreamy. Please commence cooing.
