Nov 24 2008
Review: Planet B-Boy
Making a documentary is tricky. It’s not as easy as making a narrative film where you introduce the characters and have them say and do exactly what you want to create a type of character that the audience will love or despise. You don’t have full reign over what events will happen. However, a good documentary will steal some aspects of a narrative film to use in the swaying of emotions. Planet B-Boy does this perfectly.
The film presents us with 5 different groups of B-Boys (break dancers) and their arduous trek from their home towns in their home countries to the final stage for the world championship. The five groups consist of America (Knucklehead Zoo), South Korea (Last For One), France (Phase T), Japan (Ichigeki), and the returning world champions from South Korea (Gamblerz). All having different styles, elements, and emotional attachments to the art form they perform, the combination in presenting these five groups in juxtapostion is amazingly crafted and at the end you feel your own muscles weak and tired after watching these artists spin their hearts out.
The film effortlessly proves the debate that break dancing is indeed an artform and not random, spur of the moment movements. Break dancing is the dancing form of Jackson Pollock: it may seem sporadic and misguided, but each paint drop, each stroke, each spin, each movement is perfectly calculated. 1 part gymnastics, 1 part cheer competition, and 98 parts hiphop.
The film guides the viewer on a visual ride through what is hiphop, how it came to be and moves us directly into b-boying as competition. With flashy graphics along the way that never cease to stray from the 4 elements or from the style of the art, the movie is paced beautifully and slides you along the story as we become attached to characters, their stories and even wow the hell out of us along the way with breath-taking, neck shattering moves.
I give this bad boy an “A”. And highly recommend this to anyone.
