by Sophie Johnson
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Rottentomatoes.com, the holy grail of movie review Web sites, is all wrong about “Stomp the Yard.” The film has averaged a 26 percent approval rate, which classifies it as beyond rotten –– essentially, the film is supposed to be compost.

So I will have to be the first to tell you that this movie kicked ass. That’s an understatement. This movie was quite possibly the best movie I’ve seen all year. And yes, I’m counting “Little Miss Sunshine.”

Basically, here’s the premise: DJ (Columbus Short), who is a really great battle dancer, joins a fraternity to help them win the National Step-Dancing Competition. Simultaneously, he falls in love with April (Meghan Good) and strives to do anything it takes to win her heart. The rival fraternity, though, has won the competition year after year after year. DJ must overcome his selfishness in order to work with his fraternity brothers as a team so they can win the competition, and a sense of brotherly pride.

Perhaps this sounds a little like “Bring It On.” It is. But it’s better than “Bring It On” in three pivotal ways:

1. It deals with African-American issues on a real level. Refreshingly, those issues do not include racism, but instead tackle classism among African-Americans themselves, and the history of higher education among minorities.
2. The dancing is way better
3. The guys do not wear their shirts. They have muscles that I didn’t know could physically exist on a human being. They run, sweating, up a steep mountain. They glisten. It’s truly poetic.

There are way more dance-offs, too, which some, weak people may consider a flaw. Some people are too easily bored to recognize the true art of nearly two hours of half-naked musclely guys constantly having dance-offs.

I guess I don’t quite believe that there’s a universe where so many dance-offs could logically exist. Really, this is a profound tragedy. If I could spend my life watching dance-offs instead of going to Renaissance Literature classes, I’d be all over that shit.

Director Sylvain White should be proud. This is a cinematic treasure. I am totally buying this movie when it comes out on DVD.

My boyfriend, incidentally, loved it too. And now he’s taken up trying to do the winning dance move from the end, where DJ, like, slides backward into this one-handed handstand. It’s too hard for him, and yet he continues to try. I like to watch him continue to try while eating popcorn. As you can see, “Stomp the Yard” is really a gift that keeps on giving.