Stomp The Yard
Jan 12, 2007: The Final Year of Cinema week 2
A reason I love film as much as I do is because of the way it can transport me into a world that not only I don’t live in, but that I never even thought possible. Most of the time when people talk this way they’re talking about movies with elves or draculas or lazer swords, and yes those are great too, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about movies about worlds where there are itinerant nightclub bouncers who make neurosurgeon-level salaries dealing with rowdy drunks, or movies where there’s a once-per-year expo of male exotic dancers where thousands of women flock to make it rain on hunks taking their pants off to Jodeci. These are movies about a particular kind of subculture that I never could have imagined. These are worlds that are physically possible but seem profoundly unlikely and yet incredibly fascinating. Stomp The Yard is such a movie.
I can tell you what the plot beats of Stomp The Yard are (and I will) but that’s not what the movie is about. The film follows DJ (Columbus Short), a young man with a chip on his shoulder from when his brother Duron (Chris Brown) was killed during a brawl following an underground dance competition. DJ moves from LA to Atlanta to attend the fictitious HBCU Truth University where his dance skills are noticed by rival fraternities with an eye towards winning the frat step competition, the haughty and snobby Mu Gamma Xis (aka The Wolves) led by the villainous Grant (Darrin Dewitt Henson) and the highly elite and well connected Theta Nu Thetas (aka The Pythons) led by the charming-but-out-of-touch Sylvester (Brian White). All the while he’s also trying to win the heart of a girl named April (Meagan Good) who is nominally dating Grant but largely not impressed by him. All of that is unimportant though. What Stomp The Yard is about is dancing as the ultimate form of masculinity and I am here for it.
The non-dance scenes of Stomp The Yard (or indeed any dance movie) exist to give the audience a moment to catch our breath and eagerly anticipate the next dance scene rather than just being overwhelmed by the spectacle. The non-dance scenes of Stomp The Yard (or indeed any sports/competition movie) also serve to give us just enough glue to make us care about the protagonist and the general stakes of the competition. They’re also about as rote and stiffly written as your average Lifetime original movie. Anyone who has so much as glanced at the premise of this movie and has seen any other movie with teens, an underdog, and some kind of competition can probably recite exactly how the story plays out. Every point of conflict in this film exists because it’s expected, not because of any actual dramatic tension. These scenes play out like a Catholic teen fresh from confession reciting “Hail Mary” prayers: saying the words because they know they need to say them for arbitrary reasons, not because they’re heartfelt.
DJ the bad boy thinks he’s too street for fraternities because we need to see the street kid buckle against authority, but because the plot demands that he join one he looks at a photo of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr with an Alpha Phi Alpha next to his name he immediately changes his mind. Sylvester the prudish leader of the Pythons initially bristles against DJ bringing hip hop dance into his treasured stepping because we need to have someone needlessly hold onto tradition before succumbing to the new ideas a la Strictly Ballroom (1992) or Bring It On (2000)1 but quickly sees the reasons DJ has for bringing fresh style to the artform. April ultimately rejects snooty rich kid Grant for the poor and passionate DJ because only he really gets her a la Titanic (1997) or Reality Bites (1994), and of course her rich dad tries to buy DJ off to have him stop dating his daughter only for him to take a principled stand against it a la It Happened One Night (1934) or Coming To America (1988). I know that I’m a dork who watches a lot of movies and likes identifying patterns in them, but I defy anyone who has seen a single film to be surprised by a single plot beat of Stomp The Yard.
However, I want to make something crystal clear: I do not really care about that. Stomp The Yard still rules.
Stomp The Yard rules for two reasons. First is that it is aesthetically astonishing. Everyone and everything looks gorgeous. Every student of Truth University is dressed in pure distilled mid-2000s fashion (I do not remember the last time I saw this many pair of Tims in two hours) and they all look fabulous doing it. I left the American southeast 12 years ago and largely don’t miss it, but the way Atlanta is shot in this film makes me yearn for a quality meat-and-three and a scorching humid afternoon listening to the cicadas sing. All the dancing boys are marvelously hunky and most importantly every dance sequence is shot so lovingly that each individual sequence feels like a climactic showstopping number. If you’re the kind of person who loves fancy footwork on film, be it Swing Time (1936) or Saturday Night Fever (1977) or Happy Feet (2006) this is for you. This movie is pure spectacle.
More importantly though is how the film portrays the world and stakes of Black collegiate step dancing, or even competitive dance culture in general. The film opens with the most intense and bananas dance competition put to film. A giant crowd screaming and cheering as b-boy dance teams face off in a UFC style octagon ring as they breakdance to Nü Metal. The event is MCd by a shirtless man wearing a Larry-from-the-Three-Stooges style wig. Spectators are revving sports motorcycles for no discernable reason. There’s a guy in a bunny suit. The camera is flying around the space so frantically it makes The Matrix (1999) look like a Mike Leigh movie. Crucially, the entire affair — despite the fact that it’s a team dance contest— is shot in a way that makes it feel as life-and-death serious as any action sequence in any Fast and Furious movie.2 and each subsequent dance sequence keeps that energy up.
Black collegiate step dance contests are a real thing, the first STOMP3 contest was held in 1992 and has been going strong since. You can watch it on YouTube. But what the real STOMP show lacks is stakes and machismo. Every dance sequence is not just masterfully shot and choreographed, it is serious and intense business in a way that I don’t think I’ve ever seen any dancing —real or fictional— shown to be before or since. Dancing just is never normally this intense, and the act of making it this intense works very much to this movie’s advantage. I do not care how cliche the official plot beats are and how clearly I saw DJ’s victory coming, I still hooted and hollered my lungs out when it came.
Rating: ★★★★☆. A fine film to watch with friends, possibly while a little high, and ideally the kind who will react like the Vince McMahon meme to some quality spectacle.
Economics: Stomp The Yard opened at #1 at the box office on Jan 12, 2007 ahead of A Night At The Museum. It ultimately grossed $75 million at the box office plus an estimated $34 million in DVD sales on a $13 million budget.
Harold Number4: 0.02
Hunkiest Scene: Every dude in this movie looks gorgeous and is in the best shape of their goddamn life, so why the hell not cap off a scene of the Pythons doing a training montage with all of them taking their shirts off on top of Stone Mountain?
Other 2007 movies seen since last week that didn’t quite make for a full review: Code Name: The Cleaner, a Cedric The Entertainer vehicle where Cedric sadly failed to entertain. There is no bad movie too short, but still padding out a 90 minute movie with 10 minutes of blooper reel tells you what kind of quality level we’re dealing with. ★☆☆☆☆
Next week: The films of the 2007 Sundance Film Festival
a good deal of this movie could adequately be described as Bring It On for boys
to be fair, it is life-and-death serious. After this sequence DJ’s brother gets shot over a dispute as to who won
standing for STep Out chaMPionship, possibly the sweatiest acronym to have been created in human history
An invention of my friend Paul Babinski, a “harold” is a measure of age appropriateness in cinematic couples. 1 harold is defined as the difference in age between Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude (1971)