#planet b-boy

[dorwellexplorer]

A film by Benson Lee (Mondo Paradiso Productions) & Charlie Shin (Weeping Buddha Productions & Cartel Creative).

Thanks to lolo-lollipop for sharing this with me. It reminds me of an old beastie boy video.

[happa-haole]

Not gonna lie. Everytime I feel uninspired, watching this documentary always brings me back up.

[philamuseum]

Join us on Wednesday Night for a screening of "Planet B-Boy" (2008), a film that explores how South Korea became the epicenter of breakdancing. The screening is followed by a discussion and a live breakdancing performance. Find out more and get tickets here. Image: Film still from "Planet B-Boy"

[thedochierarchy-blog]

Planet B-Boy (Lee, 2007)

Jumping continents and crossing cultures, "Planet B-Boy" looks at the history of breakdancing and its vibrant resurgence in urban cultures around the world.

[all-movie]

Battle of the Year -- The AllMovie Review by Perry Seibert

A clichéd sports film masquerading as a clichéd dance film, Benson Lee’s Battle of the Year shows so little faith in its audience that it can’t even live up to the standards demanded by the characters themselves.

Josh Holloway stars as Jason Blake, a former B-boy and onetime champion basketball coach who let his life fall into an alcoholic haze after his wife and teen son died in a car accident. He runs into his old dance-crew partner Dante (Laz Alonso), who now runs a profitable company that sells gear related to hip-hop culture. Dante wants to sponsor a team at the international BOTY (Battle of the Year) dance competition in France, even though an American squad hasn’t conquered the annual event in 15 years.

Jason cherry-picks a potential dream team from the best of the American dance crews, and hires an eager young assistant (Josh Peck). He then takes 22 dancers to an abandoned prison, where they practice their moves 12 hours a day, learn to be a team, and anxiously await the weekly cutting of one member until Jason whittles them down to 13.

During one of the practices, Jason reminds them that they are training for their sport’s Super Bowl, prompting one of the hoofers to argue that he dances to express himself and that it’s an art. Coach sits them all down and says that Magic Johnson played basketball, which is a sport, but the way he played it made it an art. The conversation ends with them deciding that dance, like basketball, can be both.

While that’s one of the few scenes in the movie that avoids tired sports tropes, it also makes clear why Battle of the Year is such a letdown -- the cinematography and editing force you to look at the dances as sports and not art. Director Lee often pointlessly splits the frame into three different images, speeds up or slows down the dancers’ movements, and amps up the editing rhythms. Mixed together, these visual techniques never allow us to appreciate what these admittedly talented performers are actually doing. It’s a blur of flying and spinning bodies that robs the individual members of the crew of any personality as characters.

When the feuding, ambitious young men finally come together as a team and head off to France, their initial performance is well-handled. Lee slows down the cutting and allows the routine to transpire at a normal speed. It’s the first time you can appreciate how the dancers are moving through space, and the choreographers throw in a neat little trick involving blindfolds that underscores the film’s theme of building a team.

As welcome as the sequence is, it’s not enough to pull the movie out of the trite morass in which it deeply buries itself. Previous to this, Lee directed Planet B-Boy, a documentary about how hip-hop culture has swept through the world while becoming less popular in its origin country of America. He sprinkles clips from that film throughout this one, and it makes you wish he’d decided to focus on a team from another country rather than fall back on ossified urban- and sports-movie stereotypes.

Battle of the Year comes loaded with inspirational locker-room speeches -- there are three total -- but Lee needed to hear one himself while he was making the movie. Someone needed to inspire him to do better than recycle boilerplate plot points and his own prior work.

[meanarose]

Planet B-Boy (2007) - Hip Hop Documentary

  Think breakdancing died in the eighties? Think again. PLANET B-BOY is a feature-length, theatrical documentary that re-discovers one of the most incredible dance phenomena the world has ever seen. Originally known as "B-boying", breakdancing was an urban dance form that originated from the streets of New York City during the seventies. Along with Emceeing, Graffiti and DJing, B-boying served as one of the crucial elements in the birth of hip-hop culture in America. Through the help of movies like Flashdance, Breakin', and Beatstreet, breakdancing took the country by storm, and teenagers across America were spinning on their backs doing "windmills" and training their bodies to "pop and lock." Like most dance fads, however, breakdancing eventually faded into the annals of pop culture history. Three decades later, B-boying is back in full force and has evolved into an art form... Written by Benson Lee

[darksun6578]

PLANET B-BOY

[erthetoc]

Planet B-Boy! Gahhhh this put me in such a good mood when I first saw it. I love stories of people's big dreams being executed in such beautiful, thrilling ways.