Control Nathan Rabin #87: C Me Dance (2009)
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’ve just begun a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.
I’ve gotten a fair number of pledges for Christian movies. When I see a godly choice it makes me smile because I’ve experienced a fair amount of Christian entertainment and pretty much enjoyed every goddamn minute of it, albeit not, perhaps, in the manner the filmmakers intended.
There’s something about the utter lack of self-awareness and self-consciousness of Christian movies, wedded to heavy-handed sermonizing and a melodramatic worldview that by definition sees life as a big tug of war between God and Satan, that renders these Christly abominations irresistible to my secular Jewish self.
I’ve had the 2009 stinker C Me Dance in my sights ever since I encountered it in a list of movies that have received the dreaded zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes while researching potential entries for my Zeroes column.
Having experienced the joy and magic of C Me Dance firsthand I fully understand how no film critic in their right mind could praise the movie non-ironically. Yet I am also amazed that secular reviewers would treat this as an actual motion picture that should be subjected to critical scrutiny and not failed proselytizing in what can very generously be deemed cinematic form.
Because the purpose of Christian movies is to bring people to Christ. If they succeed as entertainment or art, that’s wonderful, but also pretty much unachievable, but the main goal is forever to preach, not challenge, confront or provoke.
Imagine Bratz: The Movie powered by earnest Jesus magic rather than materialism and you have a sense of the bizarre tone of this wonderful contribution to the art of filmmaking.
C Me Dance opens in 1992, with its protagonist’s mother weeping uncontrollably and yelling “Leave us alone!” and “Why are you doing this?” from behind the wheel of a speeding car while what appears to be a TRUCK DRIVEN BY SATAN HIMSELF, or at least filled with his evil spirit, doggedly pursues them. Satan’s truck blows up mommy but good but Cheri, her baby girl, survives to tangle with the Anti-Christ herself.
Cheri grows up a dancer, and a Christian, and a daddy’s girl. Unfortunately, a trip to the doctor reveals something may be amiss. But because C Me Dance is a very stupid movie, and a wonderfully clumsy one, this is followed immediately by a “girls laughing and smiling nonsensically as they frolic through a mall" montage set to a glisteningly slick country-pop song that initially appears to be about romance but actually (and this is an amazing twist) is about Jesus!
The dizzy mall adventure is followed immediately by the bummer news that Cheri DEFINITELY has Leukemia and is going to die imminently. That’s the bad news. There is no good news.
Cheri is NOT happy. When loving father Vince, played by writer-director and cut-rate Christian entertainment mogul Greg Robbins, asks her to pray together, she sneers, “You wanna pray? Pray for what, dad? Pray that I don’t have Leukemia? Or that God heals me and takes it away? Even better? Let’s pretend mom didn’t DIE when I was a baby. Here’s a good one. Let’s pretend I’m not DEAD by Christmas!”
Her crisis of faith only lasts a few minutes, however. Overwhelmed by the tragedy of losing his beloved daughter to Leukemia after losing his wife to truck driven by Satan he bargains with the Lord, asking Him (and you better believe it’s a HIM) if he could maybe do something nice for Cheri in the very limited amount of time she has left to make up for dying at 16.
God is an eminently reasonable deity so he hooks Cheri up with the ultimate super-power: just by touching someone, she can instantly, powerfully and permanently give them a love of Christ and soul-deep belief in Him, His teachings and His sacrifice.
She tells one of her ditzy school chums that God has a plan for her, to which her pal sassily retorts, “Yeah, right! I must have had my phone off when THAT call came in” but after Cheri touches her she sees the light and the way. Hallelujah! She’s got the Jesus magic in her hands, her feet and deep down in her bones!
Later, Cheri is walking down the street when a gang of teenagers decide to physically assault her en masse for no discernible reason. Daddy senses evil (which is such a huge, if comically inept force here that it deserves top billing) and rushes to help his daughter but she instantly converts everybody she touches. Her healing touch is all it takes to transform them from A Clockwork Orange violent anarchists to nice, Jesus-loving boys and girls.
Cheri’s Jesus Magic is so potent that she does not even have to lay hands to have a godly effect not just on people individually but on society as a whole.
We learn that since Cheri got the consolation prize of being able to Jesusify everyone in her path murders and rapes have gone down 89 percent in just two weeks. Furthermore, the heathens in Hollywood decided to indefinitely shelve the next three movies slated for release on the grounds that “they may harm family values.”
I’m guessing Robbins has some ideas about what kind of movies should fill the void once ungodly motion pictures are forcefully rejected by society as the devil’s handiwork.
The owner of a chain of adult bookstores closes them, reasoning, “Pornography is a vile sin” and vowing to help the families of those harmed by pornography.
Cheri’s amazing Jesus power has the ability to transform society but in using her Jesus magic to bring people to the Lord, she made a powerful enemy: the Devil. Yes, that’s right: THE Devil. Former angel, angry guy, red suit, smells like brimstone. Put Trump into office.
The devil begins appearing to Cheri in black trench coats, glowering and hissing threats, sometimes with haunted house-level red eyes and demon make-up, always comically unthreatening and unintentionally comic and pathetic.
Artist rendering of the Devil (artist: Felipe Sobreiro)
C Me Dance clumsily delivers the message that despite his reputation as mankind and God’s greatest and wiliest nemesis, Satan is actually a weak, sad little loser with no real power whose ass God could kick from here to the bowels of hell, and does, every fucking day.
Even Cheri, a typical teenage girl except for her Jesus magic, is able to thoroughly kick the devil’s ass. It’s not even close.
C Me Dance doesn’t just depict the Devil as a wimpy loser it is hella easy to defeat and outwit and the Prince of Darkness and his minions as cut-rate The Matrix cos-players with Twiztid “spooky” colored contacts: it literally writes the Wachowski’s trans allegory into the script as the kind of evil, secular entertainment the devil wants you to enjoy instead of the works of Uplifting Entertainment, Robbin’s production company.
As part of a big speech that is suppose to move us to tears or at least affect us in some conceivable way beyond mocking laughter, Cheri admits that a few years earlier she went and saw an unnamed movie she wasn’t supposed to and she got scared by all of the black trench coats in it. Satan consequently used that memory against her to masquerade as the thing she fears most: the garb of the heroic characters in a fun science-fiction popcorn movie.
C Me Dance was sold, ineptly and unsuccessfully, as a Christian dance movie about a passionate dancer who uses her art to win souls for Jesus. That’s a bait and switch. The dance numbers in C Me Dance are filmed in such darkness and silhouette that Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón or Mitt Romney could be doubling for the lead actress and it wouldn’t be apparent.
For a dance movie, C Me Dance loses interest in dancing pretty quickly, along with its protagonist.
Why bother practicing when Jesus has inexplicably made you the most powerful wizard in the history of the universe, able to easily defeat the devil AND save your friends, neighbors, classmates AND country? Even Hollywood?
For a movie about a terminally ill teenage girl who is about to die C Me Dance has perversely low stakes. Cheri will be fine no matter what, which is curious, since she’s got days to live and also the devil, that shitty loser, is doing everything he can to stop her, and brother, it ain’t much!
I was genuinely surprised when Cheri dies on Christmas morning, just after opening a package to reveal a license plate C Me Dance, and joins her mother in a final dance in heaven, where Satan-trucks AND Satan and fatal illnesses can no longer hurt her.
I very much enjoyed laughing at C Me Dance. It really lives up to its bottomless potential for hilarious, tone-deaf, perversely non-self-aware camp comedy. I had one hell of a time laughing long and hard and consistently at a movie that’s even crazier and more unhinged than even a project with its bonkers premise has any right to be.
Choose a film for this column, get sweet merch and help ensure a future for the Happy Place by pledging over at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
AND of course I would love it if you would buy my book over at https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Accordion-Al-Obsessively-Co-Author/dp/1658788478/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=weird+accordion&qid=1580693427&sr=8-1#customerReviews