Fame or Famine

My colleague over at B5Media’s “Dancewatcher” is much more friendly about the failings of Dancewar than I have been – she even pledges to try to be positive. Still, “… the whole competition between teams thing still isn’t doing it for me. And about half of the singers (mostly the girls) hit sour notes fairly often and it just spoils the experience for me.”
Ain’t that the truth. She’s also got some good info on the new shows “Girlicious” and “Best Dance Crew”, so check the blog out…

Comments Off

Mea culpa, mea culpa. I failed in my responsibility to review Dancewar on Monday. For no good reason, either – it was $1..75 Margarita night at the local Tumbleweeds, and I decided to go there and watch my friends make little ice-castles in their drinks.
Based on the ever-entertaining review of Kristin Sample over at TV Squad, I had a much more enjoyable evening. The best thing she had to say was:
“One piece, however, was pretty good (and define “pretty good” as “my ears didn’t bleed during the song and I didn’t feel slightly ashamed for the performers”). Carrie Ann’s team …read more

Comments Off

Yes, like many others, I will be tuning into ABC tonight to check out “Dancing with the Stars” I mean, DanceWar. However, like my fellow reviewer over at TV Squad, I was pretty disappointed with this particular show. It sounded interesting, at first, but we’re not really seeing the two leads (Carrie-Ann and Bruno) actually mold the teams – so far, they blather incoherently about the performance hoops that are jumped through, and then got to go back to the schoolyard and pick teams. I don’t know about you, but I hated that kind of “picking out” at the school …read more

Comments Off

After watching the first number, I had a feeling that I’d end watching this and feel as though there were two hours of my life that I’d never get back again…the dancing was bland, uninspired,and frankly, boring. Even the more impressive dance moves tended to be half-hearted or uncertain, such as the vertical split/twirl.
I don’t know if it was just me, but sounded to me like Carrie Ann was kind of prepping by making excuses for the entire group – “singing live on tv is really hard!” Well, yes, it is, of course, but the fact that they brought it …read more

Comments Off

The general consensus seems to be that DanceWar is a bust. Swan Lake Samba Girl put it this way
“…I’ve never in my life seen more people with less dance training seeking to become “stars.” They sang their hearts out and wiggled their butts and seemed in all honesty to have no clue that ass wiggling did not constitute dance…and so looked like monkeys.”
I don’t know that I’d go that far – again, this is a show not about dancers but about what kind of team Bruno and Carrie can craft. But I actually came to the review via Natalia of …read more

1 Comment

Kristin Sample, in her review of Dance War (like me, she noticed that these two-hour premieres are hard on us commentators – repetitive stress injury, anyone?) has an interesting thought about the dynamic between Carrie Ann and Bruno Tonioli:
 I wish that Bruno and Carrie Ann were real rivals and actually despised each other. That would be awesome. On Spike TV’s The Ultimate Fighter: Team Hughes vs. Team Serra, you could tell that Matt Hughes and Matt Serra really disliked each other. Maybe ABC will just replace Bruno and Carrie Ann with Matt Hughes and Matt Serra (no, that would be …read more

Comments Off

Last night as I watched Dancewar, I began to be bothered by the term. Maybe I’d feel better if we weren’t actually at war right now, but somehow using the term to talk about a dance competition feels disrespectful to the people who are, as I write this, fighting a war. Whether you agree with it or disagree, it’s happening, and those are our people – our friends, our family – who are dying, and killing, and coming back maimed in body and spirit.
This is a minor point; I’m not saying that we shouldn’t watch the show, or that they …read more

Comments Off