Dirty dancing - 2017

Just terrible. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Awful. Even the dancing part was terrible! If I wanted to be nice I could save only two things: Baby’s sister and the scene when Penny was giving Baby a dance lesson. Nothing more. Johnny was so plain, he had nothing of Patrick Swaize’s charisma. I didn’t like his acting, his dancing, nothing really. Baby (Abigail Breslin) was not good either. Breslin looked like she was thinking “let’s say these lines and get it over with”, no commitment whatsoever, no soul at all. Her acting was plain and the dancing… well, did she dance at all? A few poses, that’s all. I can’t even say it was bad because she made a few moves during the dance lessons, (those were bad, but one could say she hadn’t learned yet) but nothing more. She basically didn’t dance at all, we always see her face or her moving from one pose to the other. Like moving a mannequin. Then there are Baby’s parents: the actor playing her dad at least tried, but what could he do here? Their story was boring, on the verge of divorce because they hadn’t had sex in a few months and mommy was feeling ignored :-/ It’s enough that he finds himself alone at dinner once and he runs to her to cry his heart out and make peace in the bedroom. 

There is no atmosphere at the hotel, Penny and Johnny don’t look the great friends they’re supposed to be, Johnny has no expressions at all and Baby has just one. I know, after the success of Twilight apparently expressions are not so important for actors or movies, still I’d appreciate to see/feel some kind of emotions, they are not out of fashion yet, not for me.

Some things were completely changed (see parents story) and other things were so copied they were even worse, like when Johnny tried to imitate Swaize’s moves. Of course a few lines were left intact, because there can be no Dirty Dancing without Johnny saying that nobody can put Baby in a corner; its most famous line, that in the original movie was touching, in Gilmore Girls was funny,  but here it was just painful. 

Honestly in the original movie one can’t say for sure what it’ll be of the characters, because we see him come back to dance with her and the movie ends. If one thinks about it, she’ll have to go home, who knows if they’ll ever see each other again, it’s not sure that they end up together, but who cared about it, we just watched them dancing together in front of everybody and that was the important thing. Here, they decided to let us know: the scene moves to an older Frances, who just watched what we watched, and then meets Johnny after a long time. She’s married to someone else and has a child. She wrote a book about that summer that changed her and he wrote the choreography, apparently. Still, absolutely no emotions, everything’s so plain. It’s not the idea per se, it’s just that it was awful to watch. I can’t believe movies like this are finished and distributed worldwide! What a waste of time and money and space. 

Did I forget anything? I hadn’t said that this was a musical with lots of songs, everybody sang something. Now, the singing was not bad, but it was boring. Not even the music could save this terrible movie.