Word: derek
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Streisand skipped town this time; in fact, Hollywood stayed home, unless you count the faithful Bo Derek. There was less Fleetwood Mac, more Lee Greenwood. At the opening festivities on Thursday at the Lincoln Memorial, a lifelike Wayne Newton quoted Martin Luther King and sang Neil Diamond: "They're coming to America." The theme was inclusion: John Ashcroft was there, fresh from a bitter confirmation hearing in which opponents cast him as a racist character assassin; he greeted Colin Powell, who had sailed through his own hearing, and as singer Kim Weston began the black national anthem, Lift Every Voice...
...nice, honest moment occurs in the new, good movie Traffic when the U.S. drug czar, Michael Douglas, falters in the middle of a false and insincere speech, and you can see his conscience writing marginalia on his claptrap. [If Catherine Zeta-Jones changed her name to Rita and married Derek Jeter, would she be Rita Zeta-Jeter...
...influenced films (think "Romeo and Juliet" as directed by Baz Luhrmann). Julia Stiles ("Ten Things I Hate About You") plays Sara, an aspiring dancer who, after a family tragedy, transfers from her comfortable suburban school to a mostly minority school in the inner city. Once there, she encounters Derek (played by Sean Patrick Thomas, previously seen in "Cruel Intentions"), a black student at her new school, and the two butt heads over romance and race...
...delivers an involving speech about her conflicted feeling about interracial dating. And Fredro Starr (who also performs the movie's theme song, "Shining Through," with Jill Scott, on the soundtrack) is convincing in a Tupac Shakur-ish role as a thug-life-livin', low-riding gangsta who nearly pulls Derek into a life of crime...
...course the movie ends with everybody dancing, "Soul Train"-style, as the credits role. Hey, MTV Films was behind this picture - could it have ended any other way? And it's never adequately explained where Derek, who says he wants to be a veterinarian, learned all his hip-hop dance steps. Perhaps he's been training with DMX's dogs. But while a good number of teen romances of late have skimped on the quality (just check out the awful "Down to You," which starred Prinze and Stiles), "Save the Last Dance" is a movie that can be enjoyed without...