Dirty Dancing (Remake) (2017)
May 30, 2017 2:08 PM - Subscribe

Spending the summer at a Catskills resort with her family, Frances "Baby" Houseman falls in love with the camp's dance instructor, Johnny Castle, and nothing is ever the same for anyone in the Houseman family.

A TV movie remake of the original starring Abigail Breslin and some guy in the Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze roles.
posted by jacquilynne (6 comments total)
 
This got thoroughly lambasted on Twitter, and deservedly so. The performances are generally pretty terrible and the changes are odd -- especially the decision to have a whole bunch of the characters sing.

The only two characters with any chemistry are really Baby and Penny, and they tried to give both Lisa and Marjorie their own sub-plots in the movie. All of which made me think that they were trying to make this a movie that was more about women than about women's relationships with men which could have been interesting. There's a nugget of something in there, but the movie wasn't big enough to explore it.

Despite its terribleness, it almost makes me wish there was a series set in the Kellerman's world -- it feels like there's a lot you could do with all those repressed women and the class boundaries over the course of a season.
posted by jacquilynne at 2:18 PM on May 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


Surfed into the middle of this, recognized instantly but, wait, what? that's not... figured out what it must be, shook head, knew there would be either an alt ending or serious cgi for that lift. Clicked away.
posted by sammyo at 3:29 PM on May 30, 2017


They actually did do a lot with repressed women. The extras were mostly from here. It has ruined the community.

The Episcopal retreat where some of this was filmed is offering a limited-time Dirty Dancing package. Would you like a dirty dancing package? Complete with evening worship and archery? Prolly not but whatever.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 5:15 PM on May 30, 2017


Just the commercials for this gave me the creeps. Abigail
Breslin has a very young face, and the guy....does not. I googled around for his age but all I could find was People magazine articles that said he was 32, which I do not believe.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 7:41 PM on May 30, 2017 [1 favorite]


You know what? I liked it. It wasn't "good", but come on. It's Dirty Dancing. It's fluff. They weren't going to make it into a great work of art. It was an enjoyable crappy film.
posted by kevinbelt at 9:29 AM on June 1, 2017


I apologize if I gave you the impression I was dismissing the original, because I unabashedly love it. You're correct about it being stealthily political (my personal favorite: when Robby the waiter-villain tells Baby to read Ayn Rand), but I don't think that's enough to rise above fluffiness. It is, after all, a movie that features "Hungry Eyes" prominently, and whose most famous line is the decidedly fluffy "nobody puts Baby in a corner". That doesn't make it bad or anything. It's one of my favorite films, and not in a guilty pleasure kind of way. I'm just saying it's not exactly Rashomon.
posted by kevinbelt at 3:31 PM on June 2, 2017


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