Inside The Circle – A B-Boy Chronicle (2008/Cinema Libre DVD)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: C+     Extras: C+     Main Program: C+

 

 

The breakdancing world is more than alive and well, but you don’t always hear about the world of B-Boys, the male dancers from all over the world continuing the tradition deep into the latter part of the Hip Hop era.  It is also the one part of that world that has yet to peak.  Marcy Garriott’s Inside The Circle (2008) is a feature length look at the contests, trials and tribulations of the young men trying to make a name for themselves on and off the dance floor, indoor or outdoor.

 

Unfortunately, though it is nicely edited and shows us all the principals with leisure time, it does not go beyond that into anything that is in-depth in a way that would separate this from so many similar projects we have seen on DVD before or the kind we constantly see on cable TV.  She could have been clever about showing us the world as a way of giving us a greater cache into it, especially when the oldest troop (starting in 1973) is still around.  Josh, Omar and Romeo become the focus like a formula, though they are interesting enough to make this worth a look.  It is just that this could have been so much more and benefited the art of this dancing by being even more ambitious.

 

The 1.33 X 1 image is from several camcorder sources (analog/NTSC affiliated digital video) that is on the clean side for a change and well edited, while the Dolby Digital 2.0 sound is somewhat like stereo, but is usually location audio that has issues here and there as expected.  Extras include a trailer for this and other Cinema Libre releases, B-Boy City Highlights and featurette CROS1: Freestylin’ It.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo