Pain Don't Hurt

I feel it's important to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of Patrick Swayze, who at age 57, succumbed to his ongoing battle with pancreatic cancer yesterday evening. To most people, he was Johnny Castle, the hardened dance instructor and love interest from Dirty Dancing, or Sam the clay-covered spectre from Ghost. To others he was the inadvertently comic tough guy from Road House or Red Dawn, and in later life, he may have been a joke to some.

Patrick Swayze was a wonderfully talented dancer who managed to parlay his skill into a decades-long career as a film and television actor, with roles that will be remembered long after his death.

Like most girls, I will remember him as Johnny the most. I loved his performance in Donnie Darko, and will always cherish To Wong Foo: Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar.

I'll end this on a half-joking note. I think Swayze had a sense of humor about himself, and I promise that my intentions are good, so I will wistfully say...

Patrick Swayze: He's like the wind.

The End Times are upon us.

Early this morning, I heard the worst movie news in some time: Lionsgate is remaking its 1987 classic Dirty Dancing. Disgraceful, isn't it? New readers, you may want to revisit my earlier written praise of this awesome movie, so as to get a full appreciation of my feelings toward this news. I read the news this morning on The Tracking Board, and heard it confirmed on Ralph Garman's "showbiz beat" on the KROQ Kevin & Bean show. Rumor has it that the story will be updated to modern day, but I have yet to find that out conclusively.

There are a million problems with this. I hope that it is actually going to be set in the '60s, like the original. Not only would the cultural appreciation for Mad Men and its ilk make the story a little more marketable, but the central conflict between Baby and Johnny would actually make sense! I'm not so naïve that I think an upper-middle-class young woman fooling around with a summer resort dance instructor at least a few years her senior wouldn't still piss off her father in modern times. But we're talking about dirty dancing.

How many Save the Last Dance and Step Up iterations have to go by before filmmakers realize that a girl learning how to sway her hips, while potentially indicative of sexual awakening, is not quite the society-shaking protestacular that it might have been at Kellerman's in the early '60s.

I do wonder if this may be a remake of the stage musical based on the original, à la The Producers (failure) and Hairspray (success). Interestingly, both of those movies were set in the '60s too, but Hairspray had that awesome John Waters '80s vibe. This may be the most successful way to remake the movie. A modern take might incorporate krumping or something really awkward, and a straight retelling of the original movie would be a cheesy Psycho job.

This whole thing makes me feel very unsettled! In high school, when Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights came out, my friends and I came up with a few other potential sequels. The most popular remains Dirty Dancing 3: Tienanmen Square. Log line: He was a student revolutionary. She drove a tank. Through the art of traditional Chinese folk dance...can they find love?

i am three thousand percent sure!

I suppose I can understand people being baffled by my love for America's Next Top Model, Dirty Dancing, or even Philip Seymour Hoffman. Even some of my closest friends still raise an eyebrow when I wax nostalgic about the sense of security that comes from being engaged in conversation with Professor M. But nothing gets criticized more than my awed respect for The Maury Povich Show. Almost every weekday, if I'm free at noon or 2pm, I turn on Maury.

Types of Maury episodes typically break down into the following categories: paternity testing, unruly teen girls, lie-detector tests, abusive husbands, makeovers, obese toddlers, and sensational events caught on tape. The first three categories form a sort of Venn diagram, and air more frequently than the others. Rarely, there will be an exceptional episode about people with debilitating deformities or strange phobias, but these are few and far between.

A lot of people think of Maury as base entertainment cashing in on the problems of society's trodden-upon -- perhaps going to so far as to liken it to a modern day race-unspecific minstrel show. I can't entirely disprove this, but I'd like to argue that most forms of mainstream entertainment which are popular with the same demographics as Maury's audience are the same way. A lot can be asked about the ethics of a show which parades the sorrows and tribulations of its guests for profit, but the women who bring their fatherless children and cheating husbands onto the show are deeply yearning for answers.

On a basic level, Maury is providing services to people which are too expensive for almost everyone in the population. A trip to NYC to answer the questions that have been plaguing them is very desirable to a lot of people (as evidenced by the show's continued success), at the cost of being exposed on television in moments of vulnerability.

I watch the Maury show for a couple of reasons: it entertains me, and it makes me feel better by giving me the perspective to understand that other people have worse problems than I do. I also tend to think that Maury highlights how chronic some of society's problems are, like infidelity, unprotected sex and the resulting unplanned pregnancies, deadbeat dads, abusive husbands, rebellious teens, obesity, &c.

As a result of the reach Maury has over so many Americans, however, I believe that he has a social responsibility. On a small scale, he helps the individuals on his show, but does nothing to address the problems his show gives light to. This is my one concern, and I am baffled as to why Maury doesn't stress the use of condoms or other forms of birth control on his show. I have never once heard him mention that people wouldn't be going through such trauma if they just took better care of themselves. And I don't know how much a trip to prison and a tongue-lashing by D West is going to help a teenage prostitute in the long run. So though I enjoy The Maury Povich show, I do think it is past time for his audience to recognize the trends they watch on TV every day.

i carried a watermelon

In 1987, two very important things happened, for which the year will be earmarked in the pages of history. In July, I was born. But a few short months earlier, another bundle of creative energy, joy, and inspiration was brought into this world. Yes, I am referring to none other than cinematic tour de force, Dirty Dancing. Some people seem to like this movie in a tounge-in-cheek, "get me drunk and I'll sit and laugh at it with my gal pals" sort of way, but to them I turn a wry smile and think with fondness about what they're missing out on.

Next Tuesday and Wednesday, Dirty Dancing will be rereleased into theaters in honor of its 20th anniversary. Though I can't know for sure yet, I'm worried that end of semester business will prevent me from seeing one of my all-time favorite films on the big screen at last. Enough with the pessimism, though... Let's just bask in the cool knowledge that enough people understand the importance of this picture to bring it back for audiences old and new.

I can't remember how old I was when I first watched what must certainly be Vestron Pictures' magnum opus, but I remember finding out that there were "controversial themes" in the storyline which I had been too young to pick up on. I have some vague memories of watching my mother iron while nobody put baby in the corner on TNT, but I just cannot pinpoint the moment at which I could declare that I was truly a fan. Sometime in early high school, I think it was TBS that hosted a 12-hour marathon of Dirty Dancing. That's right - the same movie six times in a row. Now who would actually sit through something like that? Well, me, of course!

I cannot claim that this picture is a guilty pleasure of mine because I have loved it since before I knew what a guilty pleasure was. I can't tell if it falls into the category of cheezy dance movie that I love or cheezy romance that I love, but I figure it must be enough of both that it cycles out of the cheezy category altogether. I understand that the dancing is not that great, the actors are not really super-hot, and the performances are...alright. But somehow this neither diminishes my enjoyment of the movie nor forces me to love it in a so-bad-it's-good sort of way. I think that the mediocrity of some aspects of the film is perfectly balanced by the highlights of the characters involved and the lowlights of the situations they're placed in. Kellerman's is a completely boring place for the rich and complacent, and the location it was filmed in lacks even the natural beauty of a resort like Mohonk which must have inspired it. Finding a little bit of inspiration or romance in an otherwise unremarkable locale is tried and true, and this is where Dirty Dancing hits the spot.

Because to me, it's not about dance or love or even rebellion, really. It's about a teenage girl on the precipice of adulthood - too smart for her family, too naiive for independence, and too insecure in general. She wants to be free to learn about herself and change the world, but the reality is that she's too scared to let go of her support system.

"Me? I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of what I saw, I'm scared of what I did, of who I am, and most of all - I'm scared of walking out of this room and never feeling the rest of my whole life the way I feel when I'm with you." Baby says this to Johnny and I don't really think it's because she knows they're soulmates or anything. I'm sure there was a time in my preteen years when I believed that, but I've come to view her attachment to Johnny as a transference of security from her father to her lover. I'm not judging her motivations or saying they're too Electra-complex to be valid, but it just seems a likely explanation for how alone she feels when he is gone.

Baby represents intelligent, inexperienced, white-collar teenage girls everywhere, and I think her character marks an interesting change in American society. Her character grew up a child of the optimistic, economically-booming 1950s - the era of the teenager. By the time she had come into her own and was ready to attend Mount Holyoke, she must have absorbed enough of early second-wave feminism to believe that there was a cause in the world with her name on it. Poverty, hunger, and war are too big too start out with, so Johnny acts as a good stepping-stone for her. But the movie didn't come out in the '60s; it was released over two decades after it's set. I believe that the implications of a young woman looking to balance her sense and sensibility (notably not a new topic, Austen-ites) would have been quite resonant in a time when women's roles in the workforce were in a period of difficult adjustment.

I identify with Frances "Baby" Houseman, perhaps because I recognize so many of her flaws. She wants so badly to do something meaningful, even if she's fooling herself into thinking her actions are more important than they are. The good-hearted father coming to terms with his daughter's blossoming sexuality, the first love, the search for excitement - these are all old tropes. But Baby gets something that almost none of us get. She gets those "celluloid moments" that I mentioned in an earlier post. She gets lifted up by a strapping young man in a lake with summer rain falling on her face. She gets to wear a flouncy pink dress and dance with a group of street-wise hotel employees who all know the steps. This is something that many of us envy, and I don't think there's anything about that to feel guilty for.



~Kat

P.S. I refuse to respond to any comments regarding the sequel, as I am barely willing to acknowledge its existence. However, if anyone's seen the musical based on the movie, I'd love to hear what you thought about it!