Make Your Move (film)


Make Your Move is a 2014 independent romance drama film starring K-pop singer BoA and ballroom dancer Derek Hough. The film was directed by Duane Adler, who wrote the script for Save the Last Dance and Step Up. Hough took season twelve off of the show Dancing with the Stars to star in the film, which was shot in New York City and Toronto during the spring of 2011. Aside from the lead stars, singer Yunho from TVXQ has a cameo appearance. The film was choreographed by Tabitha and Napoleon D'umo, Yako Miyamoto, and Nick Gonzalez.
A preview of the film was shown at KCON 2012, a Korean entertainment convention, in Irvine, California. Songs from the movie's soundtrack were played at the convention as well including three by the groups Girls' Generation, F(x) and TVXQ.
The film was released in 2014. According to IMDb, it was released in Norway, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark in the summer. It was released in the United Arab Emirates, South Korea, and the United States in 2014.

Plot

Donny is an unemployed who dances on the streets of New Orleans without permit, but is often caught and jailed, his parole officer comes and tells him to start finding a real job. He moves back to New York to meet up with his foster brother Nick who owns a nightclub called "Static" to which he sees it as an opportunity to continue his passion for dancing, Nick does not warm up when he meets his former partner Kaz whom he despises, claiming that he plagiarized his night club for his own, Meanwhile Donny meets Kaz's younger sister Aya, the leader of the girl group "The Cobu girls" who only has three weeks to find a job before she gets sent back to Japan, despite the rivalry between their siblings, Aya and Donny fall in love.

Cast

Make Your Move has received mixed reviews from critics., the film holds a 38% approval rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, based on 16 reviews with an average rating of 4.76/10. Metacritic calculated a score of 40 out of 100 based on 9 reviews, which signifies mixed or average reviews.
Sara Stewart of the New York Post gave the film one out of four stars, saying "The dancing's fine here, but there's little else to distinguish Make Your Move, an entirely generic drama in which two characters actually say to one another, 'What if this doesn't work?' 'It has to.' It doesn't."
Inkoo Kang of the Los Angeles Times said "'s core dance styles are a wonderfully frenetic fusion of tap and hip-hop and a truly novel blend of Japanese taiko drumming and K-pop girl-group choreography. Whenever actor Derek Hough and BoA stop leaping and twirling, though, Make Your Move is an underwritten mess."
Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter said "Undemanding young audiences will hardly mind the one-note characterizations, formulaic storyline and banal dialogue even as they'll relate to the frequent nods to text messaging and YouTube videos gone viral... Hough's dancing is far more impressive than his acting, and BoA, despite her perky sexiness, is an even less compelling screen presence. But they certainly move well together, and that's pretty much all that matters here..."
Stephanie Merry of The Washington Post said "Although the bit of bedroom footwork was more laugh-inducing than anything, some of the dancing really is spectacular. Scenes from the competing clubs include impressive choreography and gravity-defying moves. If only the poorly delivered, trite dialogue and predictable plot aimed as high."

Soundtrack