More like Cringey Dancing, amirite?
I mean, it was like one long, wincing, cringing case of secondhand embarrassment. In other words, I finally saw last week’s off-brand Dirty Dancing remake.
It wasn’t a hatewatch for me, not even after it got underway. I looked forward to it being bad in a fun way, a la Showgirls, or at least competent. I’m always on the side of wanting to like things, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. But this movie…
If I had to describe the experience, I guess it was most like going to see a local theater production of a familiar musical where everyone is certainly trying hard, and there might be a few moments that aren’t tedious, but it’s just not working overall and you spend your hours waiting for it to end, trying to grasp onto the things that aren’t actively terrible so you can find something nice to say at the end.
Uh… Sarah Hyland was cute? Good dancing. Yes. Very skilled dancing from, you know, most of the cast. Great try, everyone, great try!!!
To be clear, I’m not against all remakes or re-imaginings of classics. And, as far as classics go, the original Dirty Dancing is more of a guilty pleasure than an actual classic. Don’t get me wrong. I think I might have booked more rewatch time on Dirty Dancing as a young thing than on The Neverending Story, its much more innocent predecessor (I blame burgeoning hormones and Patrick Swayze’s near-constant state of shirtlessness).
It’s not a great work of art. It’s a crowd-pleaser. The original was such a hit that people would go back and see it over and over over. It’s fun to watch and leaves you smiling, even through some cheesy moments. And that’s due in no small part to the main couple. It’s pretty well known, and acknowledged by both, that Patrick Swayze (RIP, you kickass dancing god!) and Jennifer Grey did not get along. He was older, she was younger. He was a dancer from a long line of dancers, she (even though she descended from Broadway legend Joel Grey) wasn’t as experienced. He wanted to get down to work when she goofed off or broke character. A lot of their big moments on screen were actually blooper reel material that made it in via montage. Still, that tension made Baby Houseman and Johnny Castle interesting to watch and satisfying as a couple when they got past it. It’s a damned fun romance and the dancing is excellent. But even big fans have to acknowledge that it isn’t the most faithful 60s coming-of-age tale, what with the 80s oozing out of every frame.
Even as a fan, I recognize that Dirty Dancing is not likely to get sealed up by the Library of Congress next to Citizen Kane or even Star Wars. So I don’t get the hub-bub when people act like remaking it is a crime against all things film. I’m all for things being remade as long as they are doing something new, whether that’s imagining the plot in our time or making it MUSICAL. There’s room for a musical version of Dirty Dancing the same way there was room for a musical version of Hairspray (another 80s film on the 60s that has much more to say and should be treated with much more reverence, IMO). Just setting something in the 60s, with the bouffants, pastel dresses, and Motown beats begs to be musicalized!
In fact, they did back in the early 2000s. I haven’t seen it, but I hear people love it, like most jukebox musicals. So I see no reason not to make a TV production out of this. Seems simple enough! Take a jukebox musical, get a good cast, put on TV… profit! It’s like they found the missing step in the Underpants Gnome business plan!
And, you know, it could have turned out fine. It might have even breathed new life into the touring company. It might have turned Dirty Dancing into a stage sensation, make it a star, give it enough legs to finally take it to BROADWAY, baby, BROADWAY! But that isn’t what happened.
We’ve got a hero who, while he can dance and sing, suffers from what looks like a permanent case of Resting Villain Face and a heroine who can’t dance at all. I can’t find a difference between Baby at the start and Baby at the end, as far as executing even the simplest movements with something resembling grace. It doesn’t even look like she’s having fun, which is what made Little Miss Sunshine’s big dance number work, if I recall correctly.
I do give them credit for trying to flesh out Lisa and Margery Houseman a little. And I suppose turning Doctor Houseman into a sexually repressed workaholic was… a thing that could be done. And I suppose turning Kellerman’s into a summer-long talent show is a sneaky way to insert more songs. But none of that makes up for the weakest link.
I wondered, as her dancing seemed to get worse and not better, the more we saw of it, if they picked Abigail Breslin for her acting chops. But they swapped out Jennifer Grey’s barely-contained sass for this bland, wide-eyed innocence.
It was like she was only halfway present. And Abigail Breslin can do so much better. I’ve seen it!
It was all pretty painful to watch, but that’s nothing to the dancing. Oh, the dancing! If you want to know how bad it is: I could not find gifs of it anywhere. And this is the internet!
I kept wondering if they were saving it for the ending, if New Baby would pull out some bossbitch moves all sudden-like, but no. Poor Baby still danced like someone who barely knew the steps and wanted nothing more than to get it over with.
Besides that, being a big girl myself, I am the last person to fat-shame, but Abigail Breslin is a very curvy young lady. How did they manage to take someone like her, someone with a figure almost made for retro clothing, and put her in the dowdiest, most shapeless, most unflattering get-ups they could find?
For me, it was like my fantasy of my self-insert while watching Dirty Dancing vs. the reality. I think that’s why I feel so damned sorry for Abigail Breslin right now. She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know that this kind of thing is a terrible misstep. She might have believed it when people told her that her dancing was good enough. I hope she manages to get herself back into indie movies and redeem herself after this, maybe even joke about it down the line. I don’t think she deserves to be hounded out of the industry for trying to do something that just isn’t in her wheelhouse.
As for the rest, I know I’m probably supposed to be impressed the cast covered all the singing, but replacing Motown voices with the thin, auto-tuned pop voices of today was no improvement, to say the least. J. Quinton Johnson was impressive, though, and his “Don’t Think Twice” duet with Sarah Hyland’s Lisa was the only cringe-free moment of the finale. Once again, this movie is so disliked, I can’t even find an example of it to show you. And this is the internet!
Of course, it’s long past curtain time now and the cast is coming out. I need to find something else nice to say, damn it!
- Sarah Hyland was very fun to watch, possibly made better by how painful the rest of it was.
- Debra Messing tried and almost acquitted herself well and, if I remember from her days as Grace Adler, she’s had a few singing lessons. ;)
- Katey Sagal has a nice, sultry singing voice and was great casting for Vivien. Little known fact: she was a singer before she was an actress and was even one of Bette Midler’s Harlettes. I hope, if this outing was supposed to publicize her as a vocalist, that it hasn’t done too much harm to that end. Also, I love how she shuts down interviewers…
- Nicole Scherzinger is competent at both dancing and singing.
- Hey, Frederick Gaylord Crane is Neil! Good to see you!
- The chorus dancers were a welcome relief every time my eyes rolled away from watching the leads..
Anyway, yeah. That’s all I got. I suppose the lesson we can all take away from this is that, if you’re going to remake something that’s beloved, you better cast it well, rehearse it better, and know that the internet will never forgive you!
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