"Sing like no one is listening, love like you'll never be hurt,
dance like no one is watching, live like it's heaven on Earth."
Hello everyone!
And also, it helps if the two leads are at least likeable!
With the Countdown to Christmas already in progress, I'm currently still forbidden from watching any Christmas movies, which should change after November 15th.
After all, nobody does ANYTHING Christmas-y at our house before my sister's birthday.
It's a given!
Although what she'll say when she sees the latest purchase our parents made and I left on her bed ...
Anyway, I'll stop babbling about unimportant things and move on to the actual blog post! Love at First Dance, here we go.
I believe this movie aired in the June Weddings section that Hallmark has been showing for the last few years, but I'm not entirely sure. I'd have to double check.
In any event, this is hopefully going to be a fun review of a really cool movie!
Becca Tobin (Glee) and Niall Matter (Finding Father Christmas) star as Hope and Erik, respectively, and it's basically their movie. But we need to get to the 'them' part before it can happen!
Hope used to be a budding choreographer who wanted nothing more than to succeed and have one of her shows stages on Broadway, but after too many rejections, she decided to recalibrate her profession and find something a little more rewarding that wouldn't push her down so much. It was the reason why she became a dance teacher, though perhaps not the main one.
It was just one of the reasons.
The other being that she had been just on the cusp of marrying when she pulled the plug because her ex-fiancé just wasn't great, and she didn't want to settle for 'just good'.
So, new job and new lease on life later, spreading her wings as a potential buyer for the studio she works at, she's excited to go support her best friend during the opening night of the other girl's Broadway production.
This is also where she runs into Erik, mentioned above.
See, Erik knows the producer and is really good friends with the guy, but he and Hope get off on exactly the wrong foot, which comes to bite him later: engaged to his long-time girlfriend Adriana, they take over the financial company their fathers built and begin preparing for what's slated to be the wedding of the summer, if not the decade at least.
There's a problem, however: Erik can't dance to save his life.
Which is where Hope comes in, as Adriana and Erik want to hire her to choreograph their wedding dance, something she specializes in. Agreeing to bury the hatchet, especially since dance-savvy Adriana won't really be in rehearsals much while she deals with the company, Hope and Erik embark on a journey which will hopefully end with him becoming an okay-ish dancer.
But Erik is worried in general: the wedding is starting to mushroom into something he really doesn't want, not that either of the mothers involved or the wedding planner is even listening to him, and Adriana doesn't seem to mind either way as anything related to the company takes precedence to everything else.
Meanwhile, her fiancé is left struggling with all the wedding planning and coordination, and learning how to dance, for which Hope cooks up some extra exercises to get him comfortable (this include but are not limited to attending a wedding with her and dancing in a pond in Central Park).
Erik confides in Hope that he's really not one hundred percent on board with this anymore, and also why he has stage fright: during a cotillion way back when, he accidentally toppled himself and his dance partner off the stage - and broke the girl's nose.
I know, it's not the end of the world, but when you're part of society's elite ...
Hope tries to be as supportive as she can be, lending a helping hand to ensure the wedding will go off without a hitch, while also sharing a little bit of herself with Erik, and her dreams of being a choreographer.
Erik, sensing her potential, encourages her to submit a choreography for a London-based show, and - to the surprise of no viewer, I'm sure - Hope nails it and gets the job.
But wait a second!
This means she won't be there for Erik and Adriana's wedding, and after all the bolstering she's done for the couple, Erik especially, her absence is keenly felt when Adriana finally shows up for the final rehearsals of the wedding dance.
Really though, Erik, having spoken to his father and cooking up a different way for himself to remain in the family business but do something he actually enjoys and loves, like Adriana obviously does, sits his fiancé down and they have a gentle heart-to-heart about their expectations and the reality of what they're trying to achieve.
Being reasonable, responsible adults who can carry a conversation, they agree that a wedding just doesn't feel right, and that they work much better as friends and work colleagues.
This done, Erik flies off to London where he surprises Hope (busily choreographing, of course, and not having bought that studio), stating that his company now boasts a Creative Arts Division and he'll be the one at the helm of it, but equally he wants his personal life to have meaning, too.
Basically, he wants Hope.
And he wants to dance with her on stage, the dance she choreographed and which he can do pretty flawlessly when he's doing it with the right partner (as proven earlier during a band test for the wedding reception). They agree to try a relationship which will have to be a bit long-distance to start off, as Hope's London contract is six months and Erik will be doing a lot of flying around anyway, but they promise to make it work.
The end!
This was a straight-forward, pretty realistic movie in terms of a fast paced relationship between two people who just fall out of love, not because of anything bad happening, but because life gets in the way. And I thoroughly enjoyed the rationality as it was all discussed and laid out and nobody threw a dramatic hissy fit. Becca was enchanting as the choreographer and dancer and Niall brought all the charm one could ask for, along with two left feet.
I'm hoping this movie gets a sequel, and that it might be as good as the one for The Perfect Bride. It'd be something to watch their story continue to unfold!
But in the meantime, I highly recommend this if you're heartily sick of all the I LOVE YOU BUT YOU DON'T LOVE ME NOW I DON'T LOVE YOU ANYMORE BUT YOU LOVE ME AND YOUR MOTHER IS A WITCH type of thing.
xx
*images and video not mine
Love love the movie and the cast.
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