Writer-director Randall Miller incorporates sizable chunks of footage from his 1990 short of the same name, in the form of flashbacks to 1962, recollected by John Goodman in the present day as he lies dying in the back of an ambulance, victim of a car wreck en route to a standing forty-year-old date at the titular dance school. The audience for these recollections is Robert Carlyle, a passer-by in a bread truck, who will keep the man's appointment at the school, still in business all these decades later, but now run by Marilyn Hotchkiss's carbon-copy daughter, Marianne (Mary Steenburgen, speaking fruity English as if she learned how from the likes of Norma Shearer, Greer Garson, Katharine and Audrey Hepburn). Carlyle will keep coming back to the school on his own, gradually coming out of his shell as a withdrawn widower. Glueing these two intercut plotlines together produces a sticky mess, a sappy mess. And the filmmaker never elevates himself above the station of an apprentice, no more in the new footage than in the old. Under the circumstances, the unending parade of professionals on screen -- Marisa Tomei, Donnie Wahlberg, Sonia Braga, David Paymer, Sean Astin, Adam Arkin, Ernie Hudson, Camryn Manheim, Danny DeVito -- seems almost an hallucination. To top off this effect, the boy in the 1990 short naturally looks nothing like John Goodman, but is readily recognizable as the unrelated young man who works alongside Carlyle at the bakery. You can't believe your eyes. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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