"Save the Last Dance"

The movie has to take that stand on interracial relations because it realizes that the races borrowing from and imitating each other lies at the heart of the pop culture that binds the characters together, at least in teenage culture. When Chenille does a quick makeover on Sara before they go to a hip-hop club, tying Sara's Gap top around her head like a mini-turban and bedecking the girl with her own hoop earrings, it's a joke at first -- a white girl who looks like she's seen one too many Lauryn Hill videos. But Sara looks good, and you realize that she's simply imitating the premier pop look of the moment, the way girls before her tried to look like Chrissie Hynde or Joni Mitchell or Lesley Gore.

It's even funnier when Sara takes to the dance floor -- not as funny the "Soul Train" rump twister Cameron Diaz performs to "Baby Got Back" in "Charlie's Angels," but then, few things are -- and tries to adapt her ballet moves to hip-hop dance. But there's nothing mean-spirited in the way the movie pokes fun at her or in the laughter of the black kids in the preview audience I saw it with. The movie is smart enough to show the way black and white kids bait each other and to know that much of it is just kids getting in each other's faces, like when Derek taunts Sara after her first visit to the club that she's never heard hip-hop before. Of course, he's playing on a silly racial stereotype, treating her as if she's a hick ofay -- is there any white kid in America who hasn't heard hip-hop by now? -- but that's part of the joshing challenge that leads to the scenes of him showing her his dance moves. And some of the best laughs in the movie come from Stiles trying to turn her white girl 'tude to hip-hop 'tude and cracking up at how silly she seems, even to herself.

"Save the Last Dance" doesn't have the same freshness or energy that made "Bring It On" such a nice surprise last summer, but it's alive to its young characters, to the hip-hop laid end to end on the soundtrack. (I particularly dug Chaka Demus & Pliers doing "Murder She Wrote" and K-Ci and Jo-Jo's "Crazy.") And it lets its young lovers work things out on the dance floor.

It's not a good movie; in a lot of ways, it's just terrible. You can't recommend "Save the Last Dance" to people who carefully pick and choose what they go to see, or who want every movie to provide guaranteed enrichment. It's a picture that's less about going to a movie than about going to the movies.

If you miss "Save the Last Dance," you won't be missing anything more than a few scenes of fleeting pleasure in a movie that, by Memorial Day, will likely be nearly forgotten even by those who see it. But I worry about losing the affection for transitory movie-ish pleasures, even if those pleasures don't amount to more than a funny scene, some clever dialogue or, here, the sight of two kids discovering themselves and each other as long as there's a record left to play.

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