Everybody Dance Now
I just watched Thirteen Going On Thirty and while I’m not a fan of the “throw innocent people into totally alien situations that they don’t know how to deal with so we can laugh as they fumble around and make fools of themselves” genre, I think Jennifer Garner pulled off the part quite nicely. I always like actors better when they look like they really had fun with a role.
The one bit that really jumped out at me was the big magazine party sequence, which was a crashing bore until Jenna (Jennifer Garner) got the DJ to play Thriller, started doing the grooving zombie dance (which she remembered clearly because she’d been doing it in 1987 the day before), and slowly had a large crowd join her who all also remembered the dance and could do it in a beautiful unified group.
I have an irrational love of spontaneous large dance numbers that pop up for no clear reason in non-musical movies. I haven’t seen many (in fact, the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the prom in She’s All That), but if I have my way, I’ll work one into one of my own scripts someday. Seeing Song and dance pop up like that in “real world” settings (as opposed to musicals) gives us all hope that maybe one day, it could happen to us. Without a zoot suit demon and people spontaneously combusting, of course.