I finally watched this movie last night, on DVD.
Wonderful, exquisite, absolutely absorbing.
There's no real plot to this Robert Altman film, but rather, it's more a beautifully-shot documentary, with the emphasis on the dance and the dancers.
Watch out, though: it's one hour 52 minutes long, so if you have a short attention span, you might want to make a two-part event of it.
The Joffrey Ballet was the foundation Altman built his movie on, and most of the dancers in it are real Joffrey dancers.
There's tons of great dance footage, wonderful music, wondrous lighting, superb staging.
Neve Campbell produced and starred in the film.
She was a very fine ballet dancer as a teenager in Canada, but quit after getting injured one time too many.
She said that getting in shape for this movie, in which she did a serious amount of her own dancing, was the hardest she's worked physically since those days back in Montreal.
Five to seven hours a day of working out, for six months, was what it took to bring her to movie-making capability.
It shows. She looks magnificent and cut, quite different from the pretty, but definitely not buff girl in the roles she normally plays.
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