If only there were some sort of audition process when casting a movie.
Oh wait ... There is?
Feel the Noise has most of the elements needed to make a decent B movie: a rags-to-riches formulaic storyline, clashing cultural differences eventually melding together, good music and good-looking leads (which, let's face it, made the similar film Step Up bearable). The sheer lack of acting ability, however, becomes apparent very quickly.
When Rob (Omarion Grandberry), an aspiring rap artist from Harlem, is arrested for stealing a few hubcaps to pay for the entry fee in a rap competition, his mother sends him to Puerto Rico to live with the father he never knew. There, with the guidance of his stepbrother Javi (Victor Rasuk), Rob encounters reggaetón, a musical mélange of reggae, hip-hop and Puerto Rican rhythms. The brothers manage to work through their dissimilar tastes in music, and they cut a track that brings in elements of both Rob's hip-hop and Javi's reggaetón.
Along the way, Rob meets C.C. (newcomer Zulay Henao), a backup dancer who dreams of studying dance in New York City. Henao is quite reminiscent of a young and much less talented Jennifer Lopez. (J. Lo., in a self-promoting turn, is a producer and actually has a brief cameo in the film.)
After C.C. introduces Rob and Javi to a talent scout, they travel to New York City where they find their artistic integrity challenged.
The film's one saving grace is its director, Alejandro Chomski. Chomski uses color and film quality to capture the locations and emotions of the characters -- New York appears grainy and dark, while Puerto Rico is full of pastel colors and shots of clear, blue water. His cinematic choices perfectly reflect the tone he wishes to convey.
Unfortunately, a director can only do so much.
At no point in the film do we feel any chemistry whatsoever between Rob and C.C. They fumble their way through the dialogue (made more difficult by Rob's complete refusal to learn Spanish), and most of the kisses are painfully awkward.
The actors rely on stock characters: the misunderstood but talented boy from the hood who is displaced after a scrape with the law, a beautiful girl who finds her face gets in the way of her being taken seriously, the father who desperately wants to reach out to his son but has been absent for too long. We have seen it all too many times, and moreover, we have seen it done much better.
Where other movies like this can succeed is in music and choreography. The real reggaetón we hear is truly wonderful and deserves to have a film made about it. When Omarion adds his rapping, it quickly loses most of its Puerto Rican flavor. The film also makes the common mistake of playing Javi and Rob's song so often that we dread hearing it by the end of the film.
The choreography is consistently lackluster. Rob falls for C.C. as soon as he sees her dance, which, again, is unbelievable because the extent of her dance ability is to be able to grind against Volteo, the overweight reggaetón rapper who turns out to be much more compelling to watch than C.C.
If you are looking for an easy-to-watch movie full of good music and steamy dance scenes, do yourself a favor and rent Dirty Dancing.
Read More
The best albums of 2014
By Noah Zeidman | December 4, 2014Across genres, it has been a pretty great year in music.
Top 10 movies of 2014
December 4, 2014This has been an excellent year for film, offering everything from gripping blockbusters to innovative personal films.
Iggy Azalea is “Reclassified”
December 4, 2014It has become common practice among music artists to repackage their albums in an effort to simultaneously boost single sales and dish out new content by slightly renaming the album or slapping “Deluxe” onto the title.
