This Friday marks the arrival of Step Up 2 the Streets, the Briana Evigan-led sequel to 2006's teen dancing drama Step Up. Aside from continuing the Evigan family tradition (remember papa Greg in B.J. and the Bear?), Step Up 2 the Streets adds another chapter to the long history of actors hoofin' it in major motion pictures. Although it's a genre critics haven't always been kind to -- the original Step Up, for instance, only netted an anemic 21 percent on the Tomatometer -- audiences have been historically dismissive of all the critical contempt, pushing dozens of fancy-footed extravaganzas to the upper reaches of the box-office charts.

For this week's Total Recall, we'll be taking a look back at three movies that used their stars' nimble moves as the engine driving the plot. We can't possibly come anywhere near covering the genre as a whole -- actors have been dancing on the silver screen for about as long as there's been a silver screen -- so in the interest of brevity, we'll be focusing on a handful of the films that helped resuscitate dancing at a theater near you after 1981. (Why 1981? Because that was the year that Steve Guttenberg, Bruce Jenner, the Village People, and Nancy Walker drove a dagger through the film musical's heart with Can't Stop the Music. It's a film worthy of its own feature...but we digress.)

For all their crimes against dancing on film (and film in general), the makers of Can't Stop the Music were essentially right -- you can't stop the music, and in just three short years, a young actor by the name of Kevin Bacon went out and proved it by toplining a little movie called Footloose (56 percent). He didn't do it alone, of course -- he had a little help from a supporting cast that included Lori Singer, Dianne Wiest, and a wonderfully over the top John Lithgow, not to mention new music from Sammy Hagar, Deneice Williams, and '80s soundtrack king Kenny Loggins -- but it was Bacon's footwork and spiky '80s hair that kept kids flocking to their neighborhood megaplexes in 1984.

The plot was nothing more than the standard "rebel boy dances his way to the top" arc that pretty much every dance film follows -- something critics everywhere noticed as they turned up their noses at Footloose. Screenwriter Dean Pitchford (who also co-wrote the soundtrack) knew something the critics didn't, however: with MTV invading suburban homes, kids across America were hungry for music videos, and a movie that offered what was essentially a 107-minute video with short breaks for dialogue would do very, very well for itself. Pitchford wasn't able to follow up his Footloose success with further films -- 1989's Sing went largely unheard (har!) -- but as we'll soon see, other filmmakers would be only too happy to pick up where he left off.
 

 

Filmmakers such as director Emile Ardolino, who would, just a matter of months after Footloose finally faded from the national consciousness, take a script by Eleanor Bergstein and use it to create the cultural capstone known as Dirty Dancing.

It's a little hard to explain if you weren't there when it happened, but just trust us -- Dirty Dancing was H-U-G-E huge in 1987. The story arc is the same as ever, of course; the screenplay is supposed to be based on Bergstein's childhood, but that doesn't change the fact that you know exactly what's going to happen at every 15-minute increment from the time the opening credits scroll. Ardolino's genius lay in combining a '60s-fetishizing soundtrack with Patrick Swayze's lithe sex appeal. (This is not intended to be an insult to Jennifer Grey -- but come on. The number of guys who willingly see these movies is small, to say the least.)

Critics were less than impressed with Dirty Dancing, giving it a 67 percent on the Tomatometer (Rob Humanick scoffed, "An animated rendering of its characters is virtually the only thing preventing the formulaic Dirty Dancing from being another one of Disney's crappy romances"), but the movie hit its crucial demographic like a comet, spawning a live show, two soundtrack albums, a short-lived television spinoff, and even a very belated, tangentially related sequel. (What, you thought we forgot about Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights?)
 

 

It may have been a little too successful, in fact; the dance mini-revival sparked by Footloose lay dormant for awhile after Dirty Dancing came and went.  The type of feel-good pop music that dominated the dance movies of the '80s was decidedly out of vogue during the first half of the '90s -- just try and imagine a dance flick powered by a soundtrack including new music from Nirvana and Pavement -- and mainstream filmmakers hadn't yet hipped themselves to the market muscle behind modern R&B. That all changed as the '90s waned, however; by 2001, dance movies were becoming a semi-regular fixture at theaters, and even Columbia University-bound Julia Stiles wanted in on the action.

We're talking, of course, about Save the Last Dance, the Stiles/Sean Patrick Thomas-led drama that, while inarguably far from a distinguished film, is fairly emblematic of recent dance movies in general. It's a new century, but the basic plot remains unchanged: There are tracks, our young lovers are from opposite sides, and only the power of dance shall convince the world that their feelings must prevail. The crucial difference here is the soundtrack -- it's utterly bereft of Kenny Loggins or Eric Carmen, who have been replaced by Snoop Dogg, Pink, and Ice Cube.

Critics, of course, remained unmoved -- Tim Cogshell dismissed Dance as "a tepid movie with a few decent dance sequences and a lot of frustrating sexual tension," placing him squarely in line with the scribes who left the film with a 49 percent Tomatometer -- but audiences, as ever, didn't care, sending Save the Last Dance to nearly $100 million in theatrical receipts.
 

 

The moral of the story, when you get right down to it, is that people like to watch other people dancing on the big screen, no matter how many stuffed shirts tell them they shouldn't. It's a lesson Briana Evigan would do well to remember this weekend as the inevitably negative reviews come rolling in -- if, that is, the just-as-inevitably healthy bottom line doesn't help soothe the sting first. Our advice for Briana? Unplug the phone, kick back on the couch, and unwind in front of a dance film marathon that includes Saturday Night Fever (97 percent), Flashdance (31 percent), and, of course, You Got Served (17 percent).