Shall We Dance? (2004)
Directed by Peter Chelsom
A bored estate lawyer spots a beautiful woman in the window of a ballroom dance studio. He secretly starts taking dancing lessons to be near her, and then over time discovers how much he loves dancing. His wife, meanwhile, has hired a private detective to find out why he has started coming home late smelling of perfume.
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What critics compared Shall We Dance? to
Unless you are a big Richard Gere fan, Shall We Dance is only moderately entertaining.
This manifests in the first of several mesmerizing sequences of shirtless dance (this one to "Slap That Bass," from the Fred Astaire movie Shall We Dance ), in which Phoenix's sinewy body contorts in twisted rapture.
He is up late at night while his mother sleeps, watching a classic movie on television, “Shall We Dance,” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
It pulls heavily from The King of Comedy in its narrative and from Taxi Driver (1976) for its protagonist’s modus operandi, and it seeks out a lineage not of other superhero movies, but of the great works of cinema: Fleck watches the Fred Astaire vehicle Shall We Dance (1937) on TV and Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) in a cinema, and the marquee of a theater showing Blow Out is featured prominently.
La La Land wears them adoringly, and part of the pleasure of the film is in tracing moments and moods backwards: to the wistfulness of Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand’s French New Wave musicals, An American in Paris’ dreamy ballet, Rebel Without a Cause’s monument to the star-dusted Griffith Observatory, Fred and Ginger’s playful sparring in Shall We Dance.
As a work of Hollywood imperialism goes, it's certainly preferable to his remake of Shall We Dance?.
But he also made such agreeable films as Serendipity (2001) and Shall We Dance (2004), and such early charmers as Hear My Song (1991) and Funny Bones (1995).
The film, written by Dan Berendsen and directed by the overqualified Peter Chelsom (2004's " Shall We Dance "), offers exactly what one expects and doesn't go out of its way to be anything more than a trifle targeting the 6-to-14-year-old set.
So screenwriter Daniel Berendsen (the "Twitches" movies and "Sabrina the Teenage Witch") and director Peter Chelsom (2004's "Shall We Dance?") quickly put a great deal of literal and figurative distance between the film and the show.
Director Peter Chelsom, still paying penance for the cinematic atrocity that was Town and Country (the Hear My Song filmmaker’s path to redemption is littered with the likeable Serendipity and Shall We Dance? ), has a real flare for physical comedy and the sequences of slapstick tend to work.
Given Hannah's roots on a Disney channel show whose primary claim to fame is schooling young television viewers in the finer nuances of sitcom pratfalls and laugh tracks, as well as the illustrious record of director Peter Chelsom , he of Town & Country and Shall We Dance?