{"id":150106,"date":"2015-02-01T21:05:29","date_gmt":"2015-02-02T04:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shockya.com\/news\/?p=150106"},"modified":"2015-01-27T19:10:59","modified_gmt":"2015-01-28T02:10:59","slug":"ballet-422-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shockya.com\/news\/2015\/02\/01\/ballet-422-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Ballet 422 Movie Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>BALLET 422<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Magnolia Pictures<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on Rotten Tomatoes.<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Grade:\u00a0 B+<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Director:\u00a0 Jody Lee Lipes<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Screenwriter:\u00a0 Jody Lee Lipes<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Cast:\u00a0 Sterling Hyltin, Justin Peck, Amar Ramasar<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Screened at:\u00a0 Journalists\u2019 link, NYC, 1\/27\/15<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Opens:\u00a0 February 6, 2015<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When I was in charge of a program to get outside speakers and celebs into my high school, I brought in a small group from the New York City Ballet.\u00a0 They performed in the auditorium to recorded music.\u00a0 Some of the seventeen-year-olds in the audience were laughing at them for the usual macho reason, so the more egregious of them were invited up to the stage to the applause of those remaining in their seats.\u00a0 One dancer stood in front of the leader of the wise-guys, got up on tip-toes, delivered a few steps, and challenged the senior simply to stand on his toes for three minutes.\u00a0 He couldn\u2019t do it, and that failure won the dancers over to the young scholars in the gallery.<\/p>\n<p>Jody Lee Lipes, who directs the sparkling documentary \u201cBallet 422\u201d does something similar, though obviously more costly than what went on in my high school.\u00a0 He hones in on members of the New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center where a member of the corps de ballet (read: the chorus, the folks not good enough to be soloists) serves as choreographer.\u00a0 One Justin Peck is given two months to write and deliver a modern ballet, which sounds stressful enough, except that he has behind him a dedicated group of dancers, musicians, costume designers, make-up artists and lighting technicians in one of the most striking buildings for culture in America on New York\u2019s W. 65th Street.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of paying $120 for a decent seat (if you sit near the back of the orchestra you might as well watch the dancers on television), you can watch not only segments of the Ballet 422 (so-called because it is the 422nd time that the New York City Ballet is commissioned to perform an original work) but an extensive treatment of the long and sometimes physical painful process of rehearsals.\u00a0 But before we get to the rehearsal floor, we watch the twenty-five year old choreographer planning the steps in a notebook as though he were Coach Marvin Lewis mapping strategy for the Cincinnati Bengals.\u00a0 He chooses Bohuslav Martinu\u2019s \u201cSinfonietta La Jolla,\u201d a contemporary piece that is not too highly dissonant.\u00a0 This is about the only point that director Lipes shows a collaborative art form to be centered on a single designer.<\/p>\n<p>To the amateur eye (such as mine) the rehearsals all seem just fine, yet Peck finds fault now and then, in fact quite regularly, though when he corrects dancers like Sterling Hyltin and Amar Ramasar (the latter obviously of East Indian background), he is no John Simon but rather lets them now that he thinks they\u2019re otherwise great.<\/p>\n<p>As we watch the rehearsal with notations \u201ctwo months to go before premiere,\u201d \u201cone month to go,\u201d \u201cone week to go,\u201d at least some of us in the audience might expect to champ at the bit waiting to see samples of the real performance.\u00a0 In fact the weak point of the movie is that we see so little of the premiere, though granted, the film\u2019s aim is to see the rehearsal process.\u00a0 The lighting is so stunning inside the David H. Koch Theater that the sound-and-light aspect of the performance threatens to be its highlight.\u00a0 Through all, Justin Peck, suited up behind his round glasses, sits in the audience, joining the cast to the applause of the full house, then promptly heading backstage for his relatively menial role as a dancer himself in the corps de ballet.<\/p>\n<p>Kudos to director Lipes for shunning that deadly convention that makes documentaries off limits to most moviegoers.\u00a0 There are no talking heads, no interviews, nobody looking at the camera to teach us in the audience what might seem obvious from the action.\u00a0 Instead, all conversation is organic, dancer to dancer, choreographer to musician.\u00a0 As a 75-minutes Ballet 101 lesson, this film should not be missed.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Rated PG.\u00a0 75 minutes.\u00a0 \u00a9 Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Story \u2013 B<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Acting \u2013 A-<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Technical \u2013 A-<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Overall \u2013 B+<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BALLET 422 Magnolia Pictures Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. Data-based on Rotten Tomatoes. Grade:\u00a0 B+ Director:\u00a0 Jody Lee Lipes Screenwriter:\u00a0 Jody Lee Lipes Cast:\u00a0 Sterling Hyltin, Justin Peck, Amar Ramasar Screened at:\u00a0 Journalists\u2019 link, NYC, 1\/27\/15 Opens:\u00a0 February 6, 2015 When I was in charge of a program to get outside speakers and celebs [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"","apple_news_api_id":"","apple_news_api_modified_at":"","apple_news_api_revision":"","apple_news_api_share_url":"","apple_news_cover_media_provider":"image","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_cover_video_id":0,"apple_news_cover_video_url":"","apple_news_cover_embedwebvideo_url":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,4],"tags":[36064,36065,36066],"class_list":["post-150106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-reviews","tag-ballet-422","tag-justin-peck","tag-new-york-city-ballet"],"apple_news_notices":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Ballet 422 Movie Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"BALLET 422 Magnolia Pictures Reviewed for Shockya by Harvey Karten. 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