Fucking Day: Love 'n Dancing

I'm going to describe a movie role to you, and I would like you to think of the one skill the lead actor cast in this role would be required to have. It's a dance movie. The title is Love n' Dancing. The lead actor plays a dance instructor who is legally deaf and dances by feeling the vibrations of the music. If you said the one skill this actor should have is persuasiveness so he can convince people to finance his movie and can therefore cast himself in the lead role despite his complete lack of dancing ability, congratulations! You've already seen Love n' Dancing, a film about an amazing dancer starring a man who somehow can't even sway correctly.

A lot of people think Tommy Wiseau took a pretty big swing making The Room, but I would argue Tom Malloy made an even bolder choice casting himself as a handsome, deaf dancer when he is not one of those things. Apparently, men named Tom like to make terrible movies.

I knew the romantic lead wrote and produced this movie the instant he came on camera. I suspected it when I noticed the heaping handful of Amy Smart's sideboob he was helping himself to on the cover of a PG-13 rom-com. Seeing him act was more of a confirmation.

Tom isn't the worst dancer in the world. I would guess there was some kind of six week dance class that he thought would be enough to teach him what he needed to know for this movie. It was not enough. A good dancer makes dancing look so easy. You look at them and think, I could probably do that! Tom makes dancing look like a struggle. He dances the same way a dog walker tries to explain why they've returned without any of your dogs. It's uncomfortable and tragic and made only worse when you realize this isn't their first time. So the editors do what they can in a way that can only be described as "like making a Bruce Willis movie out of the five minutes of footage you have of Bruce Willis refusing to get out of a bean bag chair."

Tom's rarely seen in close up while dancing. They mainly have a woman twirl around him and then cut to the audience, reacting to what a good dancer he is in the desperate hope that this will gaslight the movie's audience into thinking they've seen some good dancing. See if it works on you!

Every time he slowly dips a woman, I fear for her life, but it seems to be the one dance move he sort of has down, so there's a lot of dipping. Because their lead actor can't dance, they couldn't cast a bunch of other really good dancers in the film. That would make Tom's lack of ability more obvious. Instead, they cast a bunch of people that are okay dancers hoping that by comparison, from a distance, if you squint, Tom is a pretty good dancer, and also maybe a bigfoot?

The above couple are supposed to be two of the top swing dancers in the world. Are they pretty good, sure! Are they two of the best dancers in the world? I guess that depends on if it's a world full of coordinated people or not? Here's a clip from the real 2019 Swing Dancing Championships for comparison:

I purposely didn't even pick the most impressive part of this dance. This is the middle part between when they do all the lifts and flips. It looks 100 times sharper and more polished than any dance in Love n' Dancing, a movie about people who are supposed to be competing at this exact event.

The dancing isn't the only thing wrong with Love n' Dancing. For instance, this is how you're introduced to Tom Malloy's character, Jake. It's the very first shot of him in the movie. He's getting ready to dance in the West Coast Swing Dancing World Championships, and he's sitting in a room, alone, staring at a burning candle. That's how you show the pyromaniac is about to unleash his sexual urge to burn, not how you introduce the male lead of a romantic comedy.

That isn't the only time he does this in the movie. Staring blankly into a tiny flame is how he psyches himself up for every dance competition! He doesn't explain it or mention it to anyone because Tom Malloy apparently thinks the audience shares his bizarre psych up routine of gazing into a lit candle by yourself.

I'm pretty sure it's the same candle too! He's in a hotel, and hotels don't put candles in rooms because they're a fire hazard, so Jake packs his psych up candle in his suitcase just so he can stare at it before he dances. That shouldn't be the most upsetting thing in the movie, but I never got over it. I kept waiting for Jake to kill his love interest. I was completely creeped out by him for the rest of the film. Being mesmerized by fire is kind of a red flag.

The first candle-staring incident occurs in 2002 before the U.S. Open West Coast Swing Dancing championship, which Jake wins with his partner and former fiance, Corrine, even though he broke up with her for cheating on him shortly before they danced. Jake doesn't think they deserved to win because they don't have any chemistry. For some reason, he thinks connection is the most important part of dancing. I think dancing is the most important part of dancing, but I've never swayed incorrectly next to a woman who's twirling pretty good or stared into fire until I could hear it whisper, so what do I know?

Corrine sucks, and in case you don't realize it immediately the costume department gave her a large novelty belt buckle that says SWING on it. It's the perfect accessory for signaling that a person is not likable. Anyone who wears a belt buckle explaining their whole deal is clearly a villain. That SWING belt buckle has never entered a room without someone in it letting out a disappointed groan.

We cut to six years later. Jake is now doing motivational speaking. He goes to schools and talks about how his disability didn't prevent him from becoming a world champion dancer, even though he doesn't think he deserved to win that championship. Corrine is still his dancing partner for these events for some reason, even though we've all seen the belt and therefore know she is bad.

Jake meets Jessica, a teacher at one of the schools he's speaking at, and convinces her to sign up for dance lessons with her fiance in preparation for their wedding. You immediately know where this story is going, not because you've seen Jake groping Jessica on the cover but because Jessica is engaged to professional bad boyfriend, Billy Zane.

I have a new respect for Billy Zane after seeing this movie. He's so good, and Jake is so bad that it mostly becomes a movie about Jessica dumping her terrible boyfriend more than a romance movie about a guy who can sort of dance. When Jessica sits on his lap, and he shoves her forward to make sure his face is still visible to their party guests, I want to give him an Oscar in the category of best actor in a role that makes me hate him.

Of course, Billy Zane misses all of the dance classes because he's busy yelling into a Bluetooth about software, and Jessica realizes Jake is actually the guy for her. Jake thinks his connection with Jessica makes him worthy of a real national swing dancing title even though, again, they are not very good at dancing. Jessica has only been dancing for a month or so. Jake even says this in the movie. Like Corey Feldman said to every female cast member and production assistant on every film he ever made, Jake says their only chance for success is if their connection is so strong they can make the audience feel it. It is essential to the plot that you, the viewer, believe dance competitions are judged solely on how horny the judges think the dancing couple is for each other.

They perform a dance that looks like it was shot via drone footage. Because as we all know, dancing looks coolest when you experience it by flying over the performance in a helicopter. As for passion, I think he had more chemistry with his travel candle.

Love n' Dancing was the second film Tom Malloy wrote, produced, and starred in. He may have been the first guy to figure out that if you put all of your budget into getting a couple of B-list stars into a movie, you can sell it. As a bonus, he gets to cast himself opposite some fairly notable actors, so when he says, "I just got done shooting a movie with Billy Zane," people will be like, "Woah, I hate that guy!"

He even wrote a book called Bankroll: A New Approach To Financing Feature Films released shortly after this movie. It's possible this whole movie was made as a flex. He wanted to show off that he's so good at getting movie financing he can cast himself in the lead role of a dance movie even though he has the charisma of an arsonist, the dance ability of those animatronic Santa Claus decorations CVS sells at Christmas time, and the arson of an arsonist.

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