Chronicling the true story of Iranian artist Afshin Ghaffarian, Desert Dancer is defined by its highs and lows. The stuff you’d expect from a movie called Desert Dancer—that is, dancing…in the desert—is delivered in full by first-time director Richard Raymond, and it’s really good. Though they don’t all take place on sand dunes, the film’s dance scenes are things of beauty, sweeping, wordless tributes to the human body in motion that express the characters’ emotional state better than any words could. Problem is, the rest of the film in between the dance scenes is chock-full of words: hokey, uninspired dialogue, Hollywood clichés, and a superfluous love story sabotage a film that should have been about art’s power to make change, but instead winds up being a formulaic ensemble drama.

Nevertheless, the dancing is great, and a lot of that is due to the context by which it’s framed: for dancing, these people could be killed. Reece Ritchie plays Ghaffarian, a student at the University of Tehran who starts an underground dance troupe with a handful of brave, plucky activist friends, played by Bamshad Abedi-Amin, Tom Cullen, and Marama Corlett. Joining the group later is Elaheh (Freida Pinto), a talented interpretive dancer who quickly emerges as the star player. The troupe must stay underground because dancing is forbidden by the Iranian government, and dancing in public could get you arrested, or worse, murdered by fundamentalist goons on the streets.

Excluding Elaheh, the dancers are all beginners, learning all their moves from YouTube (before Elaheh takes the reins, that is) and practicing in an abandoned warehouse. As their act begins to come together, Ghaffarian convinces the group that they should perform in public. Problem is, the Iranian regime and its followers are ubiquitous as hell, so they’ll have to find somewhere secluded. They decide on putting on their modern dance masterpiece in the desert, inviting a small group of select, progressive young folks to be their audience. If word gets out about the show, it could spell their doom, but the feeling of freedom, to them, would be worth every drop of blood.

On a grand scale, Ghaffarian’s story of putting his life on the line to create art is poignant and inspirational. It’s a stirring reminder of art’s true vitality. But the film loses focus constantly, throwing in protracted subplots that sap the gravity out of the story. The most egregious of these detours is Ghaffarian’s romance with Elaheh, who happens to be a heroin addict as well as a gifted dancer. Watching him nurse her back to health adds little to the overarching story, and in hindsight, after seeing how the film ends, this chapter feels completely unnecessary. Pinto and Ritchie’s performances are good, though, so it’s not a total loss.

There are some strange decisions made throughout the film that make it feel somewhat impure. The threat of death doesn’t feel as menacing as you’d think it would, and when violence is shown, Raymond seems to hold back. The characters also speak to each other exclusively in English, which feels odd, especially when they’re discussing things like policies of the Iranian government. This was clearly a film made for Westerners, and as a result it feels less earnest at times. When the characters stop speaking with their mouths and start speaking with their bodies is when things click.

What’ll stick in your mind the most after watching Desert Dancer are the gorgeous dance sequences, each of which is memorable. When Elaheh auditions to be in the dance company, she busts out into an interpretive routine full of undulating motions and delicate swoops of the arm. The music is minimal, accentuating the haunting quality of the performance. The climactic dance in the desert, a three-way routine between Ritchie, Pinto, and Cullen, is a breathtaking display of physical storytelling, as is Ritchie’s solo performance in the film’s final act, which takes place on a theater stage in Paris.

Desert Dancer‘s finale is where it really comes together, Ghaffarian spilling his heart out about the horrific oppression he and his friends have been subjected to back in Iran. What makes it so good (aside from how outstanding Ritchie is), is that the movie finally gets straight to the point: Ghaffarian lived in a world where he wasn’t allowed to be himself, not allowed to be human, a reality he refuses to accept. It’s his ambition and relentless drive to express his true feelings that make his story so extraordinary, and though Raymond takes the long road to get there, he eventually gets it across.

A multi-layered character portrait set in 1985 San Francisco in the early days of the AIDS panic, Test follows Frankie (Scott Marlowe), a young dancer torn between his sexual cravings and fear of contracting a mysterious, deadly disease. Director Chris Mason Johnson’s sensuous, cinematic film sidesteps queer cinema tropes, telling an earnest story of desire and terror full of gorgeous modern dance numbers steamy one night stands.

We spoke to Chris in San Francisco about conveying the fear of the early AIDS epidemic, the examining the human body in film, shooting in San Francisco, the camera as a moving body, his favorite dance films, and more.

The film’s been doing very well on the festival circuit.
Chris: It’s been to Berlin, Athens, Taipei, Buenos Aires…it’s everywhere. Festivals are an amazing thing for independent filmmakers. You travel everywhere for a year, they treat you like a rock star, and it’s amazing.

The period in time your film covers is a somewhat distant memory here in the states, but I imagine there’s an even bigger disconnect in other countries.
Chris: They do have a disconnect, and I got a bit of that in Berlin. I love the Germans–they have a very intellectually oriented and earnest national character–but I don’t think they had the same weird, backlash, scapegoating moment in the early AIDS epidemic that we did here, where it was just horrible and homophobic.

It was a scary time, and your film is about fear. It’s not about getting sick; it’s about the fear of getting sick.
Chris: Exactly. It’s a story about people who don’t get sick, and most AIDS films tend to be, for obvious reasons, deathbed narratives, which have a long fictional history. It sort of falls into that fictional trope, and I wanted to do something different. The film is about the fear of getting sick, and that was the experience for a lot of people in those years. For everyone who lived through that time, whether you were positive or negative, there was this period of fear where you didn’t know. It was this huge existential reality that I didn’t think had been represented.

What was your experience like back int he ’80s?
Chris: Fear! [laughs] I was a teenager, a little younger than the guys in the movie, but I was petrified. Mortified. When you’re in the middle of something like that, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out. The analogy must be the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s. In hindsight, it’s like, “Why didn’t they get out? Why didn’t they know?” But when you’re in the middle of something, there’s the fog of war. You don’t know how big it’s going to be or how long it’s going to last, but specifically, in those early years people didn’t know if you could get AIDS from sweat, from food…even after the first scientific information started coming out, there was ambiguity for years. It was perfect breeding ground for fear and paranoia.

Talk about creating that sense of paranoia cinematically. There’s that very telling scene where one dancer is anxious about another being too sweaty.
Chris: I didn’t want to make a dialogue driven film. I really like cinema of images. I wanted to tell this internal portrait and stay focused on my lead character: his face, how he moves through space, what he’s going through. But to answer your question, that sweat scene in the studio is one of my favorites in the movie. It’s a scene in which the choreography is interwoven with the drama very directly.

The human body plays a big role in the film; you photograph it in so many ways and examine your characters’ bodies in various contexts.
Chris: When the story is the disease and not the fear of getting sick, it’s understandable how the body gets looked at as the site of disease, because you don’t really want to think about erotics and sensuality when you’re thinking about infection and disease. I wanted to create this different territory where that’s exactly what’s intersecting: the eroticized body and the paranoia. The choreographer Sidra Bell and I worked really hard on the choreography to get these kind of morbid, creepy gestures in there that are still very erotic. The body is the site of disease, but it’s also the site of sex and sensuality. These guys are young, beautiful, and frightened.

I’m not a filmmaker, but if I was, I think it would be a dream come true to shoot a dance film. Dance is so inherently cinematic; it must be a blast to film.
Chris: I wanted to strike a balance between being able to see the body and see the whole space like in Pina and old Fred Astaire movies, and a more dynamic style where there’s editing so that if feels volatile and modern. It was about getting on stage with our dolly and moving around and through the dancers. This is where my dance background really helped, because I knew the choreography. I knew the phrases of movement. In a dialogue scene, you have to match the over-the-shoulders and the wides and where they’re moving in space, but something like this is a little more of a jigsaw puzzle.

Your skill set is useful, because you understand both body movement and camera movement very well.
Chris: I think dance and filmmaking really complement each other, and there’s a long history of dancers and choreographers who become filmmakers: Maya Deren, Herbert Ross, Rob Marshall, Bob Fosse. When you’re a dancer and/or choreographer, you’re thinking about how movement connects in space, and film is really that as well. You have the body moving, but the camera is another body moving, and you have the movement in between cuts and that connect cuts.

As Walter Murch–a great San Francisco filmmaker–points out in his book In the Blink of an Eye, how the eye moves is also how we “cut” in real life. You know when there’s a POV shot in a movie and the camera turns to see something and it feels fake? If you’re looking here, and you want to look over there, you blink. That’s a cut. You don’t pan; you cut, internally. The argument is that the ontology of cinema is very much like consciousness itself. As a dancer or choreographer, you’re already aware of that, and it fits well with cinema.

Your actors had to be dancers first. It wouldn’t work the other way around.
Chris: I wanted real dance in the movie so that dancers would like it, and that means I had to have real dancers in it. You can’t have actors who dance. People can sing a song or carry a tune, but very few can sing opera. This is opera. I found Scott [Marlowe] in San Francisco and worked with him for six months. He’s really talented, and he’s going to continue acting. Scott has a great sensibility, and that was what I was looking for. His face is great on camera. It reminds me a little of Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor.

What’s the reaction to the film been now that it’s hit so many festivals?
Chris: It’s been great. I came out of a more commercial project that didn’t get off the ground, one of those stories one hears often, and I turned around and did something personal and small that I knew I could make. I didn’t have super high expectations. I was also dealing with some survivor’s guilt; I was there at the time and I didn’t get sick. Was my story worth telling? To have people respond well to it has been really, really rewarding and validating. The responses from audience members after screenings, the emails I get…that’s the good thing. That’s the rewarding thing. You want the film to get good reviews, but if you let your ego get bound up in that, it’s a tricky thing.

You were living in New York in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, if I’m not mistaken.
Chris: Yeah, that’s correct.

Why is the film set in San Francisco?
Chris: Because I was living here when I wrote it and also because I got a grant from the San Francisco Film Society. I really love this city, and it’s underused in film. There are only a few cities that are dance cities that are comparable to New York, and San Francisco definitely has a great dance scene. Plus, San Francisco and New York have parallel AIDS histories.

Did you shoot the whole thing here?
Chris: Yeah, shot the whole thing here.

That’s good to hear, because nobody shoots here!
Chris: I know, and I don’t know why! I guess it’s money and logistics. That’s changing a little, isn’t it?

I hope so. It’s such a cinematic city.
Chris: It was a bit of a challenge shooting here because the film is a period piece, and we didn’t have any budget, and there are cars! The strategy I developed really early on was to point the camera up, because I couldn’t show any cars. We got four cars for one scene and put them in the parking lot at the Cowell Theater, and that was, like, our big day. [laughs] I’m looking forward to doing a movie here that’s not period. You see people do San Francisco, and they’re in Toronto and they only do a couple of actual shots of the city. You don’t get the detail of cities in film.

Frankie’s bed is underneath bay windows, so you know you’re in San Francisco!
Chris: Yeah! We found that building. It was empty, and we did six or seven sets there. It was amazing.

It was like a little studio.
Chris: Yeah, and it was dirt cheap. It was a godsend. I understand why people like shooting in studios.

What are some of your favorite dance films?
Chris: The Red Shoes is amazing. Cabaret and Hair are awesome dance movies. Saturday Night Fever is great. I love the way social dance is used in movies. In Roman Polanski’s Frantic, with Harrison Ford, there’s this short social dance scene. I’d like to see more imaginative social dance scenes. The Lindy Hop is coming back, I hear. The gold standard for Lindy Hop scenes is an old movie called Hellzapoppin’. Find it on Youtube–you’re going to freak out. It’s all these amazing African American Lindy Hop dancers that the studio brought in for this one number, and they do things that you won’t believe.

For your viewing pleasure, here’s the Hellzapoppin’ scene Mr. Johnson’s raving about below. Test will be screening at the Presidio Theater on June 6th, 7th, and 8th, at Rialto Cinemas Elmwood on June 7th, and at Rialto Cinemas Sebastapol on June 8th. The film will also be available on iTunes, Amazon, and other on demand services on June 6th.

Nick Frost, best known as Simon Pegg’s tubby partner in crime in the “Cornetto Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), casts his own shadow in Cuban Fury, an amiable dance-infused rom-com that dazzles and charms despite missing a step or two. The film is far from forgettable though, as Frost has the balls to execute virtually every on-screen dance move himself, sometimes to breathtaking results. He carries the torch of romantic leading man well as Bruce Garrett, a faded teenage salsa prodigy who reignites his passion for dance in hopes of sweeping his dream girl (Rashida Jones) off her feet.

Directed by James Griffiths, the zero-to-hero tale begins with a young Bruce, in his prime as a salsa champion, pushed out of the world of dance by his peers after a bullying altercation. He hangs up his dancing shoes and extinguishes his burning passion for salsa himself, screaming to his mentor Ron Parfitt (Ian McShane) that “Salsa is for pussies!” Jump to twenty five years later, and Bruce, now an industrial engineer, is still playing doormat to bullies, particularly his crass, relentlessly narcissistic co-worker Drew (Chris O’Dowd).

He’s shed all of the confidence he once exuded on the dance floor, now a fat, pushover pencil-pusher whose all but given up on romantic endeavors. Enter his new boss Julia (Jones), a pretty American who loves dancing salsa (what a coincidence!) and catches the eye of both Bruce and his skinny nemesis Drew. Bruce, a shell of his former flashy-shirt-wearing self, tracks down aging hard-ass Ron to help him reclaim his former glory and get his husky hips gyrating again.

Frost has always been likable as a goofy dunderhead, but he shows range here as the mild-mannered Bruce. He’s an utterly convincing romantic lead and sweet chemistry with Jones. He lets his co-stars shine as the comedic standouts, with O’Dowd firing on all cylinders, being as vulgar and despicable as possible as delusional ladies-man Drew. Stealing the show handily however is Kayvan Novak, who plays the fiery Bejan, one of Bruce’s muscly dance buddies. The effervescent Novak could have easily been written off as a rote gay stereotype, but he manages to conjure some genuine tenderness in his scenes with Frost (a hilarious head-to-toe makeover scene comes to mind). McShane’s talents aren’t squandered, but they’re not even close to being fully utilized.

The film’s biggest issue is that one of the three sides of the love triangle is woefully weak. We’re meant to fear that Julia could possibly end up with Drew, but O’Dowd is too obnoxious and off-putting to ever come across as a threat. Julia clearly has warm affection for Bruce and clearly has zero attraction to Drew. There’s absolutely nothing about her character that suggests a Julia-Drew romance is ever even remotely in the cards. Nothing. This lack of any real threat dampens any sense of urgency in Bruce’s pursuit, though Griffiths tries really hard to sell us on it.

The real joy of the film are the dance sequences, all of which don’t hide the fact that Frost is actually pulling the moves off himself. They don’t highlight this fact either, however, as Griffiths’ camera cuts too much to allow us to take in the full routines. Frost doesn’t move like a pro exactly, but damned if he doesn’t come closer than anyone would have thought. Helping him look good is the bright costuming by Rosa Dias, which adorns the big man with sequins, shiny shoes, and form-fitting silk shirts. The choreography by Richard Marcel is spectacular and pushes Frost to the limit, and a slapstick car-park dance-off between Bruce and Drew, which garners big laughs, is surprisingly thrilling and well thought-out. Despite the romantic element’s failure to launch, Cuban Fury is solid entertainment, will put smiles on faces, and announces Frost as a viable leading man.

Cuban Fury trailer

A true story of physical tragedy and spiritual triumph, dance doc Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq chronicles the rise, fall, and rebirth of Le Clercq (known by friends as Tanny), one of the most legendary figures in dance. Under the tutelage of the great American choreographer (and eventual lover) ClercGeorge Balanchine, Tanny became the shining star of New York Ballet. The dream shattered in 1956 however, when Tanny was stricken by polio on a European tour and never danced–or walked–again.

Afternoon of a Faun celebrates Tanny’s unique physical gifts and profiles her phenomenal career in-depth, it more importantly gives the feeling that we know her. Her values, her priorities, her mental limits and her romantic desires. She was a survivor, but she had to fight tooth and nail to emerge intact on the other side of disaster.

A Paris born, New York raised child, Tanny began dancing at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, where she first met the balletmaster at the age of 15. Enamored with Tanny despite a cavernous age gap (he was 40 when they met), Balanchine began casting her as the lead in every production, leading to her illustrious run in the Big Apple.

Director Nancy Buirski uses antiqued, blurred archival footage of Tanny’s performances to showcase the immaculate work that forged her success. She was a thoroughbred in every respect, a specimen with her long, chiseled legs and a frame that was larger than the average ballerina (at that time). Other dancers paled in comparison, and she made her male partners glow as she twirled around them and leaped into and out of their arms. One of her main partners, Jacques d’Amboise, is interviewed for the film, and provides invaluable insight, including the fact that Tanny refused to take the Salk vaccine, which led to her contraction of polio.

Like Balanchine, choreographer Jerome Robbins fell deeply for Tanny, though his affection wasn’t returned in full. Tanny expressed deep feelings for Robbins in a heartbreaking exchange letters (read in the film by voice actors), but she ended up marrying Balanchine, becoming his 4th wife. Robbins’ devotion to Tanny never faded, and he choreographed Afternoon of a Faun, a hauntingly beautiful dance, in her honor.

The portion of the film that covers  Tanny’s fight with polio is superbly crafted. Though no footage of her post-diagnosis exists, Buirski is resourceful and uses every bit of information at her disposal–the Robbins letters, accounts from Tanny’s friends, and photos–to assemble a vivid picture of Tanny’s struggle and state of mind. For one of the most gifted dancers in the world to lose the use of her legs is obviously a bitter irony, but Buirski’s storytelling makes the tragedy as poignant and personal as if you were sitting next to Tanny as she ailed in her iron lung.

Though relegated to a wheelchair for the rest of her life, Tanny’s passion for dance endured and she returned to New York and began instructing young dancers. That she persevered and found a way to contribute to the world of ballet in the wake of horrific tragedy is as awe-inspiring as her brilliant work on the stage, and her accomplishments in the wheelchair and on foot speak to an immense inner strength worthy of such an adoring film.

Afternoon of a Faun trailer

The now widely known Canadian electronic powerhouse, known to the general public as deadmau5, has released his sixth record entitled >album title goes here<. The album is a wildly different approach to the world of electronic/trance music than what listeners have heard on the previous albums. The only question one may ask is this: is this a good or bad thing? deadmau5 has been ridiculed in years past for making music that sounds no different from the next, meaning that all of his songs that he produces sounds alike. Now, I must agree that is kind of a common theme in the music business in general, so it isn’t really a surprising that people have accused deadmau5 of this. Especially when you consider the genre of music that is fairly notorious for the music sounding alike. However, >album title goes here< varies so greatly from previous deadmau5 albums that it is hard to believe at times you are even listening to a deadmau5 album!

I am going to say something that is going to contradict myself right now…and I want everyone that reads this to know that I am doing so and that I realize it. While I was listening to >album title goes here<, the first song, “Superliminal” sounded like pure deadmau5 goodness and I was very much anticipating the next tracks. To my utter surprise I had recognized the beats to the very next song! How was that possible since it was my first time experiencing the album? I soon realized that the song “Channel 42” had recycled the opening beats and fade-in intro from one of my favorite deadmau5 songs from 4×4=12, “A City In Florida.”

Like I said before, it is not uncommon that musicians often stick to what works and this is clearly what happened here with the song “Channel 42.” I am sure that there are other songs from other albums by deadmau5 that are closely related to one another too, but this is the one I found to stand out to me. And I realize this can open up a Pandora’s box of criticisms of other artists, which is not what I am trying to accomplish with this statement, but just pointing out an observation that I made while listening.

The variety of musicians that leant their vocals and other musical talents to >album title goes here< is so broad that it ranges from; emo pop icons, to a Cuban/Latino hip pop group, to a British Grammy Award winning songstress, to a house DJ to a dude who happened to add his vocals to one of deadmau5’s tracks, “The Veldt”. The artists that I am speaking of are Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance in “Professional Grifers”, Cypress Hill in “Failbait”, Imogen Heap in “Telemiscommunications”, Wolgang Gartner in “Channel 42”, and Chris James in “The Veldt”. Quite frankly, I haven’t heard that kind of diversity on an album that at the same time holds true to the original genre, electronic/house music.

I feel like it is ridiculously hard to review an album of this nature. There isn’t much you can add to reviews that have been written in the past about electronic music due to the similarities between them. Bumping bass? Check. Synths? Check. Random bits of sampling? Check. The formula is pretty basic when you break it all down, but I think the most important aspect of electric/house music is this; does it make me want to dance like an overwhelming fool? In the terms of this >album title goes here< not so much. There are certainly times when the album lags and changes from traditional electronic music. Now, the question is if this is a bad thing or not and quite frankly that is a matter of opinion. Maybe deadmau5 has stumbled upon a new kind of electronic music. Only time can tell on that thought.

I feel like the musicians are expected to make music that sounds the same but at the same time completely different and fresh. >album title goes here< is an album that makes this idea a reality by having the first half of the album sound like “old” deadmau5 tracks and the second half of the album is the completely different “new” sounding deadmau5 tracks. Basically, the album is split down the middle in my mind. Old versus new. I have to say, I stand on the old side for the most part. Quite frankly, it is hard for me to decide whether I liked the album or disliked the album. Indifferent would be more appropriate.