The greatest movie ever made..!

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

I was impressed with "The Business of Fancydancing. " I thought it was very well made, with beautiful cinematography, excellent development of several believable key characters and a sensitive treatment of a tragic but important personal story with profound socal implications. The movie was complemented with a wonderful soundtrack and the juxtaposition of conflicting styles of music that helped to tell this paradoxical story. The ending was particularly poignant and extremely well done. Certain plot subtleties and finely nuanced multi-layered scences were evident during my second viewing. It offered moments of exquisite irony and heartfelt soul-searching. It was an intelligent treatment of the interaction of several layers of delicate personal issues. I was deeply moved by this film.

Those expecting another Smoke Signals should avoid this one. I was a big fan of Smoke Signals. Although the acting was fine, particularly from the star, Evan Adams and Michelle St. John, the film generally wanders around with a paper thin plot, leaving the actors without much to work with. While the movie has been heralded as innovative in allowing the actors to improvise, from my perspective it was disjointed and too heavily laden with flashbacks. The movie also ends abruptly, leaving the audience (here anyway) feeling cheated out of a story. It isn't bad enough to take anything away from Sherman Alexie's immense talent as a writer, but it shows that not all of his ideas translate well to film. Better luck next time.

I have been a fan of Sherman Alexie's for many years, and really wanted to see his directorial debut. FANCYDANCING did not fail to disappoint. The acting was powerful, the writing was strong and the images were beautiful and haunted me for days following my first viewing of the film. Specifically, the character of Mouse from the Spokane reservation of Polatkin's birth, with his beautiful and painful renditions of TEN LITTLE INDIANS and THE STARSPANGLED BANNER chilled me to the bone. Also, the subtle references to culture, literature and humor commonly found in Alexie's writing were done in a way unique to any film I have ever seen. I am so happy to be taking his class at the University of Washington in the Winter. Hope other people have a chance to view this beautiful and unforgettable film.

I saw this at the Portland International Film Festival on Feb. 10, 2002. Writer-director Alexie said they were still tinkering with it and might add in some scenes we did not see.The "plot" is fairly sketchy. Seymour Polatkin, a young and successful gay poet who left the Spokane Reservation to go to college and settle in Seattle, returns to the res for the funeral of a close friend, a violinist named "Mouse" who committed suicide. Also present are their childhood buddy Aristotle Joseph (the rather stereotypical "fierce Indian") and Agnes, a half-Indian, half-Jewish woman with whom Seymour had a passionate college affair before accepting his homosexuality, who has returned to the res to teach.Alexie regulars Cynthia Geary and Elaine Miles, familiar from "Northern Exposure" and Alexie's last film project, "Smoke Signals," are on hand in cameos.The movie is a sort of collage, with many flashbacks, scenes of various characters dancing in colorful costumes on a black stage, and cheap video footage the characters ostensibly shot of each other. The acting is mostly okay, though rarely inspired; the writing much the same. Camerawork is rather dull, though Alexie chooses lovely landscapes, moods, and colors for his shots.A narrative trick of questionable utility is "The Interviewer": a young black female journalist pinions several of the characters (particularly Seymour and Aristotle) with tough, condescending, and sometimes obvious questions in that same no-space of black stage. The writing for these scenes is decent, but I wasn't convinced of the need for them.Alexie readily admits to doing much improvisation and gutwork -- the film was shot in 14 days with 6 additional days of fill-in shooting -- and he likes to leave plenty of questions unanswered, from the Russian origins of his protagonist's name to the meaning of the dancing sequences, the reasons for Mouse's suicide, or a rather brutal scene where Ari beats up a stranded white motorist and insists Mouse join him. This is fine, and I had no problem with most of it; in fact, it was the more obvious imagery, such as Seymour slowly and dispiritedly doffing his dance outfit toward the end of the story when he leaves the res again, presumably forever, that I found irritating.Alexie said he was extremely annoyed by such films as "Finding Forrester," where a writer's talents (both the veteran's and the rookie's) are ballyhooed but never actually shown, so Seymour reads a number of his poems on the soundtrack over the visual action.In sum, this is a fair, promising independent feature that is hardly outstanding but takes some laudable risks and provides further welcome exposure to Native American culture, actors, and ideas.