I had a most bizarre experience on Sunday. I started out by seeing "Save the Last Dance" then ran into some friends who encouraged me to stay for "Finding Forrester." Little did I know that they are actually the same movie. "Save the Last Dance" is about a self-absorbed white chick from Delaware who is suddenly transported to inner-city Chicago to live with her father.

She attends the local high school where all the kids are black. Soon she's befriended by two of them, a brother and sister pair who teach her basic survival, and how to dance. Romance blossoms, with predictable troubles but not so predictable outcomes.

I loved "Save the Last Dance." There were some trite moments, and obvious contrivances in the plot, but the energy of the film made up for all those things. There was also an unabashedness about the film that made many other things forgivable.

Then there's "Finding Forrester," a literary "Save the Last Dance" where all the roles are reversed. Here a young black kid named earns an academic scholarship to a fancy private school full of white kids who all know the rules--education is a matter of listening to and regurgitating everything the great white men say.

Jamal befriends William Forrester--a reclusive literary giant who lives in the Bronx, and it's with Forrester's help that Jamal finds acceptance in the closed minds of white academe who see him only as a basketballer.

Jamal is also befriended by a white girl at the school, played with cloying simplicity by Anna Paquin. But the film doesn't allow them to be more than friends, and the namby-pampy treatment of their friendship typifies the superficiality of film.

I found Finding Forrester to be patronizing and pompous. Instead of being a story about a talented young man, it seemed to reinforce the stereotypes that this black kid didn't stand a chance until the benevolence of the great white author rained upon him. Ugh.

As I mentioned at the outset, the synchronicity of the two films was odd. Yet "Save the Last Dance," corny and contrived as it might be, seemed to uplift teenagers and race relations, while "Finding Forrester" felt like a manifesto of colonialism.




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