Lift Me Up (2015) User Reviews

Communicating grief

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 16 February 2017]

Lift Me Up tells the story of young Sarah Frangenberg who has just lost her mother in a car accident. Mom was the glue that held that family together as she and her Marine Corps sergeant stepdad Todd Cohoon don't really get along all that well. Both are grieving, neither seems to communicate the grief to the other.

She's concentrating on her goal of a dance career, but seems lost and not putting her all into her work. In addition she's targeted by some of the school's upper crust mean girls for reasons I can't quite figure out.

Shane Harper is in this and for the life of me I can't figure out how they didn't use him in any of the dancing for that is what he does.

A good performance is that of Chris Browning as Sarah's real dad whom she goes to live with, but finds out soon enough they're not a good fit.

Average teen drama, nothing special but for the dance.

Trying to like this

[toni200062 · 5/10 · 3 August 2022]

SPOILER ALERT

I'm really trying to like this movie. Waiting for it to get better. The script is bad, dancing, doesn't even look plausible that she dances like her mom, if hermom was a dancer, a drill sergeant-like dad & mean girls, predictable, formulaic & wooden acting. Waiting to see how it ends. I'll come back & update my review. Not so bad that i wont watch till the end, but director or someone missed the mark on this, so far, 53 min in.

Another 10 minutes awful. The intent is appreciated but overacting is just bad.

The angry moments of the character was over the top, but the more vulnerable moments better.

1 hr 28 min in, then it was ok.

Stephen, the friend was the most believable character.

Last 15 minutes tender moments. Dancing @ end was believable.

But a big chunk of the movie, not so much.

Not good

[sheilajewell · 3/10 · 17 August 2022]

All kinds of stereotypes and cliché nonsense if it wasn't for the flat out ridiculous. Slow and boring. I wanted to give up but wanted to see how they pulled it together.

Waste of time

[elinel9 · 3/10 · 1 February 2017]

Just a serious waste of time. Kind of disrespectful with a bad try to make it 'funny'. Have a fight about throwing away all of the stuff of the dead mother and then follow it up with some funny music and a try to be funny. Hit a girl because she's bullied and then straight afterwords some teenage drama rant of a girl, who clearly can't act, about her best friends. I seriously just don't understand this movie and the whole point they try to make. It's like a mix between cyberbully (or some other drama) and mean girls (the 2nd one, supposed to be funny) or some other high school chick flick. Bad movie. Bad acting. Bad advertisement for Kit Kat.

Only the main character, Sarah Frangenberg, made it sort of watchable. She did good and was one of the only realistic characters.

I love this film

[matthewjaaa · 10/10 · 20 August 2017]

This film is so inspirational, because firstly, I'm not sure if someone found the message of the film, but I think the message of this film is that whenever life gets you down, you can still get up off of the ground and fight back with whatever you have left. Secondly, I think that there should be more movies like this, because they can inspire you to do what you want to do in life, for example this movie is all about dancing and so if you want to become a dancer or even a ballerina, you can do that even if someone is watching you and laughing at you, you just need to ignore what others think and just continue what you are doing.

I saw this on Netflix! lol, it looked like a good premise...

[juanmuscle · 10/10 · 18 October 2018]

And no, I'm not going to sit here and nit pick on IMDB about the bits that I didn't like and rather use the time to speak on what it did that I thought was pretty cool, firstly, it was an interesting premise, would of made a nice novella with a lot of plot and lot of dialogue and all that, it is hard again to wrap up everything that actually in real life needs its own healthy very thorough timeline but here we have to do with limited time, again, it is very difficult to, that is there are very few writers that can take a long timeline and make it flow seamlessly in a script medium, but here they it felt like perhaps a month went by and everything was wrapped up rather nicely I think, mostly because you get a sense that things are not really wrapped up but its headed in the right direction whatever that means, lol. But it was interesting, very nice, I thought he was going to buy her a car as a sort of letting go of his whole driving anxiety problem, but I guess that might be in the future he is not quite there yet. lol, this was interesting, I loved how they brought the tall Clark Kent looking young guy's table set back into another scene later on, it was cool.

Beautiful Father-Daughter Story

[bigsis_je · 10/10 · 30 April 2023]

This was a beautiful, mesmerizing father-daughter story. It was not exclusively sad, which I was thankful for. The writers (or whoever's job it is) incorporated a good amount of subtle humor - enough to strengthen it from purely a tear-jerker to a story of relationships and healing. The father-daughter element was a perfect story idea. They communicated that the best family relationships are not always biological. It's more about who commits to taking care of you in the ups and downs than who contributed to your birth. Call me a sucker for a good daddy story, but I'll take it. It's so touching to watch good men grow into good fathers; the world needs more of them.