Spring 2015 #11: Dirty Dancing (1987) - Emile Ardolino

So this movie ended up on my Moviecation list not because it’s on the IMDb Top 250 (it’s not), or because it’s on the AFI Top 100 (it’s not), or because it’s a Best Picture Winner (it’s not). Dirty Dancing is just kind of one of those movies you need to see for general pop culture purposes, and I got tired of seeing it on Netflix or having it come up in conversation and having to say I hadn’t seen it.

I mean what the HELL does this mean? I’m not kidding, my actual interpretation of this line was that some snooty teenage girl at a school dance got shut down by the protagonist, and left in a corner to sulk. She then crossed her arms, pouted her lips, and whined, “Nobody puts baby in a corner!” as she perpetuated the infantilization of teenage girls. 

Turns out, Baby Houseman is our protagonist, and a badass one at that, played by Jennifer Grey (of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off fame). She is vacationing with her parents and older sister at a resort in the Catskill Mountains in the summer of 1963.

Where she meets our love interest, Johnny Castle, played by the incomparable Patrick Swayze. Johnny is the rough and tough man from the streets who luckily found a job working as a dance instructor at the resort. The weird combination of raw sexual energy and hardened-exterior make him a problematic fave in the first half of the film, when he cares for his dance partner who is dealing with personal crisis.

These are Baby’s first words to Johnny.

Baby sees the trouble Johnny’s partner is in, and offers to replace her in an upcoming dance performance at a nearby resort. Johnny dislikes the idea at first, but I think you can imagine what happens.

Not to mention we get a training montage!

Thank you Kenny Ortega! Speaking of Kenny, the movie actually does have a weird High School Musical 2 vibe to it, but I guess a lot of movies involve a group of musically talented teenagers enjoyed their summer working for the fabulously wealthy? Although in this case Baby would be the Sharpay because she is a guest.

This was my favorite scene for some reason, when Baby and Johnny lip-sync and dance to “Love Is Strange.” A LOT of the songs prominently feature the word “Baby” in them, which I kind of loved. Anyway this scene felt so natural and fun, and Ardolino definitely encouraged improvisation between the two leads and often left the cameras rolling when they were interacting.

But look how emotionally deep the film also is! Baby’s relationship with Johnny is complex because she’s rich and her dad forbids her from seeing him. There’s a lot of “I love you but I come from a world where I’m supposed to look down on you” kind of stuff and it’s interesting and engaging and heartbreaking. Imagine Titanic but with High School Musical 2′s plot.

Oh right so here’s the totally-famous lift from the final scene, aka the performance to the Oscar winning song “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.” So amazing, so classic.

I do want to get into a little analysis I’ve been working up now that I’m out of gifs, and it has to do with the infantilization stuff. In Baby’s opening monologue, she explains how the man she loved most in the world was her dad. Throughout the course of the movie, Baby lies, betrays, and disobeys her dad for probably the first time in her life. But she does it all as a means to get closer to this other man, a man who can’t guarantee her financial stability but can promise her a life of excitement and… dirty dancing. 

And I’m kind of left wondering, how am I supposed to feel about this girl who basically runs and jumps from the protection of one patriarchal figure to another? It reminded me of The Little Mermaid a lot, in that maybe the protagonist navigates these complicated patriarchal systems under the guise of a longing for independence? Her name is BABY for Pete’s sake! And Johnny definitely symbolizes a kind of sexual freedom that is kept from her under her father. Anyway the screenplay is actually semi-autobiographical for the writer, Eleanor Bergstein, who did vacation in the Catskills, perform in dirty dancing competitions, and go by the name Baby. So is this all speculation?

Not to mention this is Emile Ardolino’s first time directing a feature film, but he did win Best Documentary in 1983 for He Makes Me Feel Like Dancin’, which I think explains a lot of the style of the film.

Day 3: January 5th, 2014: Singin’ In The Rain (1952) - Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen

I quickly realized that this film was the shortest on my winter movie bucket list, at 1 hour 43 minutes, so I jumped at that opportunity. I also knew Singin’ In The Rain was culturally significant, as AFI named it the best movie musical of all time, meaning I was excited to say the least.

The film tells the story of Hollywood’s transition from silent into talking films (so it’s a color version of The Artist?). It follows Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), a famous movie star who his studio romantically links to Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) even though she is the definition of a Hollywood diva. The worst part is that as the studio tries to transition one of the pair’s newest films into a talkie, they begin to realize that Lina can neither talk (properly) nor act at all. Which brings in Debbie Reynolds' character, Kathy Selden, a showgirl that Don finds himself falling in love with. The studio decides to use her voice to dub over Lina’s, and craziness ensues. Magical musical movie ending, love everywhere, instant classic.

Gene Kelly. I don’t know whether to be more impressed with his dancing, singing, or good looks. He radiates charm and class, and as this was (embarrassingly enough) my first ever Gene Kelly film, I couldn’t take my eyes off him (okay there were other reasons). After the success of Kelly’s 1951 film, An American In Paris, he made his second collaboration with director and choreographer Stanley Donen, Singin’ In The Rain. The MGM musical is a movie musical in the classic 1930s to 1950s sense, where the studios experimented with blurring the lines between diegetic and non-diegetic musical sequences. But while I thought most of the musical numbers would begin like this:

Most of them actually began without any purpose at all. All of the songs are written by MGM producer Arthur Freed and his collaborator Nancy Herb Brown, but they are taken from previous MGM musicals from the 1930s. Which makes sense, because most of them hardly fit into the plot. 

For example, the above gif shows a sequence from the song Moses Supposes (also featured in Silver Linings Playbook), which literally takes place as Kelly’s character is taking a diction lesson, and his friend walks in and they start mocking the voice coach by singing the tongue twisters and dancing. Whereas with modern musicals we aren’t actually expected to believe that Anne Hathaway is singing about her troubles in an abandoned attic room after prostituting herself for the first time, these characters legitimately break into song and dance just because they feel compelled to. But the weirdest part is that most of the songs seem to serve no purpose at all.

The gif above is from one of the last musical numbers, Broadway Melody Ballet, which is an imagined musical number from the film Don Lockwood is trying to convert from a silent film into a talkie musical. That woman in the back, she isn’t even in the actual movie, she appears only in this one number! It’s random as hell and I can’t help but love it.

Debbie Reynolds is also excellent as Kathy Selden, the hard-to-get / I-don’t-fall-for-movie-stars type.

Jean Hagen also makes a great villain as Lina Lamont, Don Lockwood’s crazy costar. She ended up being the only actor in the film nominated for an Oscar, but it also got nominated for Best Original Music Score. 

Only a 1950s musical could have a musical number as random as “Good Morning.” The characters realize they stayed up until 1AM so instead of saying goodnight, they say good morning… and then they sing it. But it’s frivolous and fun and as Gene Kelly embodies in the following gif, haters gonna hate.

I’d like close by pointing out that Gene Kelly’s wikipedia page says that his last ever project before dying in 1996 was doing the choreography for the 1997 animated masterpiece, Cats Don’t Dance.