Dirty Dancing

[VaderBomb]

"That was the summer of 1963 - when everybody called me Baby, and it didn't occur to me to mind. That was before President Kennedy was shot, before the Beatles came, when I couldn't wait to join the Peace Corps, and I thought I'd never find a guy as great as my dad. That was the summer we went to Kellerman's."

My girlfriend and I take turns with our own personal movie picks on nights when we have the time to indulge in the cinema. My last pick for us was a much needed rewatch of John Cassavete's A Woman Under the Influence (which I had viewed for the first time in a solo session on my laptop a year prior). I finally bought the DVD on Criterion and had a chance to get her to sit down and experience one of my absolute favorites.

I had seen Cassavete's 1974 film once before and called it a 10/10 perfect masterpiece, easily in my top one-hundred. With a second viewing I realized that I had heavily underrated it and now I consider it to be one of the twenty finest films ever made. But there was another film viewing which followed it a few days later. Her pick... a film which I underrated even more.

Dirty Dancing is an unexpectedly great movie. A little sleeper of a movie which became a smash hit out of nowhere in 1987. I was sure from my memory of watching it back in High School that I'd rate it a 5/10 (2.5/5) and call it an enjoyable bad movie. I was wrong.

It's fast paced and seems to move along at breakneck speed with the help of impressive montage editing. Usually I go for the slower stuff (Tarkovsky, Tarr, Antonioni, Weerasethakul, etc.) but there's no room for breathing here. Dirty Dancing is like a drug experience if it ended after the peak. You get a buzz and continue to rise until the climax explodes.

The vibe is spectacular. Late 80s low-budget Hollywood movie magic at it's finest. There are a few exceptional shots within and most of them aren't within the more famous sequences. Dirty Dancing is also underrated as a slight comedy, with a couple solid laugh out loud moments. The soundtrack is incredible, with most of the songs perfectly encapsulating what the message of the song is and how it correlates it back to the film adding more depth than the visual montage suggests.

Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze are so easy to love. Grey's lead role as Frances "Baby" Houseman, like Gena Rowland's lead as Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence was a misunderstood and mistreated woman in a male dominated society who is just attempting to be happy within her world. Dirty Dancing succeeds in both the inspirational and empowering branches of feminism. Even though Swayze's Johnny Castle white-knights the women once or twice, he wouldn't be half the man that he was without them. It's like Penny said in near the beginning of the film, "Remember, he's the boss on the dance floor, if nowhere else."

Everything about the build to the climax is highly enjoyable but it's all about the end of the film where the "daddy knows best" patriarchal philosophy is destroyed and the final dance takes place. I'd be a lying man if I said that I didn't shed a few tears. It really is beautiful.

Dirty Dancing, man. It got me good.

8/10