Your Dirty Dancing Can Kiss My Footloose’s Ass

Thanks to VCR’s people in the eighties for the first time were able to watch their favorite movies over and over again from the comfort of their own homes. I happen to be among the first generation to grow up with this feature and there is one movie that I specifically remember being ridiculously popular with girls my age. I remember my sister, her friends and all of my friend’s sisters and their friends watching this movie on a seemingly endless loop. Dirty Dancing was essentially crack to women born between 1978 and 1985. During my sisters multiyear viewing of Dirty Dancing I do not think that I ever actually sat down and watched the whole thing all the way threw so a few months ago I went back to actually and objectively try to see what all the fuss was about. I did not like Dirty Dancing, I did not like it at all, I would in fact argue that the far stronger dance movie of the eighties is Footloose, another movie that I watched for the first time maybe a year ago.

At their cores both of these films are coming of age stories. Baby (Jennifer Grey) is a smart, idealistic, thoughtful young woman who believes in justice and equality but doesn’t understand the ins and outs of social order and class. When she sees injustice, she is they type of girl who rushes in head first to fight the system, ironically the only great injustice taking place at the upper class Jewish vacation resort is that the entertainment staff is told not to fuck any of daughters of the guests. Baby will not stand for such inequality; she won’t stand for it for one second. Ultimately this movie is about a rich girl who needs to screw Patrick Swayze in order to achieve social justice.

I argue that Footloose’s Ren (Kevin Bacon) is the far more relatable and sympathetic of the two protagonists. Ren is basically a normal guy whose life gets flipped upside down after his father leaves the family forcing him and his mother to move from Chicago to the middle of small town America to live with his aunt’s family while mom tries to find work. Ren, like most teenagers is not especially smart or talented, he wants to get by at his new school without getting tortured and hopefully make a few friends in the process.  Dancing is an outlet for Ren and when he learns that the ultraconservative totalitarian local government has stolen the freedom to dance from its people he finds a cause that is truly meaningful to him and worth fighting for.  

Considering the audience (6-12 year old girls) a disturbingly large amount of Dirty Dancing is devoted to a girl getting an abortion, in fact the entire plot and all of the conflict within the movie revolves around this abortion in one way or another. Baby first learns to dance with Johnny (Patrick Swayze) because the “knocked up” girl needs to get the abortion and then when the abortion goes wrong Baby enlists the help of her father to fix the botched procedure, setting up the main conflict for the rest of the film.

Footloose also features the sexual indiscretions of a teenage girl, Ariel (Lori Singer) the love interest sleeps around but her behavior is used to deepen our understanding of the character and the world in which she inhabits. The reason that dancing is banned in this town is because there was a car accident after a dance in which several of the towns best students died, one of the students in the wreck was Ariel’s brother. The town overreacted to the tragedy by banning dancing while Ariel deals with her grief by screwing losers and generally acting out.

Baby’s father is actually the only reasonable character in all of Dirty Dancing but everyone else is to fucking dumb to see it. After fixing the botched abortion the Father asks “who is responsible for this girl?” to which Johnny replies “I am”, this (very reasonably) leads him to believe that Johnny screwed this girl and got her the ally abortion. When he discovers that Baby is sleeping with this guy too he is understandably upset and no one bothers to tell him that Johnny was not the father of the fetus until the scumbag real father lets it slip at the end.  

In Footloose John Lithgow plays the preacher father of Ariel who spearheaded the anti-dancing legislation. What I especially like about this character is that he is far more nuanced than the filmmakers could have made him. The reverend is a father who lost a son and reacted strongly at the time but is now beginning to see the flaws in his oppressive belief structure.  He is a reasonable man who is trying to do the right thing for his family and his town rather than a zealot stereotype.   

The final dance routine in Dirty Dancing is OK and the famous final move is set up well but the problem I have with the seen is a problem that I have with the whole movie, it is set in the early sixties and yet eighties song keep popping up intermixed with the R&B classics. The world in which they inhabit does not make sense. Like in Back to the Future when Michael J Fox plays Johnny Be Good people love it but when he breaks into a Van Halen they freak out. They are playing music from twenty five years in the future and no one notices the strange new rhythms.

The final dance seen in Footloose however is absolutely transcendent. Throughout the film, high school kids are fighting for their right to dance and it has finally happened, one would think that a lifetime without dance would not a great dancer make but you would be wrong!!! These kids are so overjoyed with that fact that they can finally dance that they actually turn into the world’s greatest dancers and it is awesome. Plus the Kenny Loggins song absolutely rules, seriously is there anything that gets you jumping more at a wedding than Footloose?

The thing that is especially heartbreaking about Dirty Dancing is what will inevitably happen after the movie ends. Ultimately the same class structures that Baby rebels against by sleeping with Swayze will keep them apart. She is still going to college and he will end up working a blue collar job after a few more years of dance instruction. Baby has actuality used Johnny just like all of the other rich ladies had and is going to throw him out just the same, they might write for a bit but she will end up with one of the guys from Harvard and he will end up the play thing of some rich widow or with the blond who got the abortion.

In the end Dirty Dancing is arrogant enough to assert that the power of dance can bring all races, religions, ages and classes together while the kids in Footloose just want to dance. 

Tim Burton: Will Someone Please Punch him in his Shitty Face

How many filmmakers have had as creatively prolific a first decade of their careers as Tim Burton? Scorsese sprinted out of the gate, Spielberg was can't miss, Coppola brought it and Christopher Nolan is right in the heart of something special but I would stack Tim Burton's work between 1984 and 1994 against anyone's over the course of a decade. Then in 1995 something happened, his work went from unique visions to little steaming piles of shit, seemingly overnight. His Gothic style has remained consistent throughout but somehow the originality (which is what made him great) has gotten completely lost inside the mainstream Hollywood tangled mess of remakes and reimaginings.  

The Golden years:

Tim Burton has always been the ultimate art school nerd who hit the big time, the quiet kid in the back of the class who achieved success beyond his wildest dreams while still not betraying his outcast roots.  His first six films were in order; Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns and Ed Wood. With the possible exception of Batman 2 they are all 4 star movies. 

Pee Wee did not have his traditional Gothic look that would become Burton's calling card over the subsequent years but it has to be one of the most creative and strangest movies ever made, the story of a man looking for his bike is so simple that it becomes twisted and awesome. Beetlejuice is so funny and original that I jerk off to the idea of how happy it made me as a kid and it still totally stands up. Batman is not as good as the Nolan movies but hell, he was inventing the Superhero genera and can absolutely be forgiven for a few structural problems. Edward Scissorhands made me cry, yes as a 10 year old in the theater but also last year as a 30 year old in my living room. E.S. might be the greatest suburban outcast anything ever made (with the possible exception of Catcher in the Rye). Bat 2 looks nice. And while any normal Hollywood hack would want to make a movie about the greatest filmmaker off all time, Tim decided to make one about the worst, brilliant. What is especially ironic about Ed Wood is that after making it he became one of the worst filmmakers himself, an argument could be made that the rest of his career is some type of fucked up postmodern homage to Ed Wood the man, but I don't feel like giving Tim that much credit. 

The Shitty Years:

Whether or not Burton spent the rest of his career trying to make a movie that is as shitty as Plan 9 From Outer Space is up to debate what is not debatable is the fact that the next movie that he made was trying to pay homage to the misguided subject of his previous film. Mars Attacks! is the big budget Hollywood alien invasion movie that Ed Wood theoretically would have dreamed to have made, the problem with this idea is that you can not go out and organically make something that is wonderfully horrible. The thing that makes truly horrible movies great is the fact that bad filmmakers think that they are great (see Troll 2), Making something that is intentionally shitty is just shitty.

Sleepy Hollow seems like the perfect Tim Burton movie, Gothic Setting, Check, Johnny Depp as sort of an outcast, Check, Witches and demons and shit, check. I can actually picture the coked out meeting between film executives talking about what a great idea this is while using words like synergy. At this point in his careen the look and feel that all Tim Burton movies have starts to restrict rather than bring it out his unique vision. Sleepy Hollow feels more like a movie by someone else trying to copy and exaggerate the Tim Burton style more than it does like a Tim Burton Movie. 

Planet of the Apes might be one of the worst pieces of shit ever conceived by a human. I fucking love the Planet of the Apes movies, not just the Charlton Heston original, no, I even dig deep into the catalog, we are talking the Ricardo Montalban leading Escape and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. This new piece of crap has nothing going for it, people can talk, there is a strange and marginally offensive line from a black actor calling a white actor a "House Human" and the mind blowing ending was just really really stupid (Ape Abraham Lincoln Memorial, wow). Thank god for the new Planet movie which I do think is one of the best movies of the year, take a lesson Tim. 

Big Fish was basically sentimental crap, not the worst movie ever made but certainly not good either, lets call it a safe movie. Corpses Bride is not as good as Nightmare Before Christmas and it just rips that movie off (side not, Burton did not direct N.B.C., he executive produced it). Sweeney Tod again is OK but safe, nothing original or really likable about it. 

Now for the creme de la creme, Charley and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland. These movies are so shitty that they may have actually ripped the fabric of time and space creating 2 dimensions the other of which does not have versions of these movies that are so bad. Both of these "films" somehow road the coattails of better movies to become commercially popular themselves while still renaming quite horrible. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has Johnny Depp playing wacky semi parody of a music legend (sound familiar) only this time it is Micheal Jackson rather than Keith Richards. The character choice is mostly just strange and awkward, not fun and original like with Pirates. Alice had the good fortune to be in 3D at the height of the 3D craze, right after Avatar. Alice never even actually goes to Wonderland in a movie called Alice in Wonderland! You will actually be dumber for watching this film.

What Happened:

I have a few theories as to what happened to Tim beyond the ironic intentionally shitty conspiracy theory. I feel that once success is achieved by a lot of creative people they surround them selves with yes men and they fall in love with the smell of their own farts. Creative people need to be told when their shit stinks and when they are not told this, bad things happen (see the star wars prequels or matrix squeals). It is also possible that Helena Bonham Carte is in fact a witch, they met on Planet of the Apes and his progression downwards has simply continued and gotten worce. None of this would bother me so much if it was not for the fact that Tim Burton maintains his art school outcast image, he just seems like even more of a mainstream sellout while trying to maintain his outcast image. Will someone please punch this guy in his shitty face.

Tom Cruise; What a Lovely Dick/MI;GP Review

A lot has been made of Tom Cruises fall from grace, I do not have the exact numbers but I would imagine that from 1986 (Top Gun) till 1996 (Jerry Maguire) he was probably the biggest Movie Star in the world. Sure there were other big stars at that time like Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford and Tom Hanks but I feel like if you had a blockbuster script that needed a larger than life male lead he was the first guy to get a phone call. At some point in the late 90's early 00's Cruise's association with the cult of Scientology started to leak into the public conciseness and things started to fall apart for the one time super star. We don't much like Aliens in our religion in this country and after the infamous episode of Oprah it was pretty much over for the little giant.

You might not like the guy personally, lord knows he seems like a total lunatic to me but as an actor Tom Cruise has one distinct talent that he does not get nearly enough credit for; he is remarkably good at playing characters who are dickheads. When one takes a look back at his filmography and looks at every movie that he is actually pretty good in, he is playing a dick of one type or another. There are actually 3 distinct phases that evolve to a natural conclusion whithin his career.

Phase 1: Nice Boys Who Learn to Become Dicks 1983-1986
In both Risky Business and the Color of Money Cruise starts off as an innocence who when attempting to explore the harsh realities of life outside of his small town/suburban existence fails to navigate the world correctly. Fortunately a supper hot prostitute and a burned out gambling addict teach him the value of growing a pair. By the end of his metamorphosis he becomes both a master pimp and professional gambler. A bad ass of sorts is born.

Phase 2: Dicks Who Learn to Love 1986-1996
This was without question Cruise's most commercially successful phase, Top Gun, Rainman and Jerry Maguire are all the stories of men who start off as arrogant pieces of crap but learn with the help of a Good Woman/Retarded Brother/Child that there is more to life than being a piece of shit. People love a redemption story and no one did to better than Cruise.

Phase 3: Screw it, Full on Dickhead 1994-Present
Phase 3 is by fare Tom's least popular phase but it also includes roles that he could realistically be nominated for awards for. In movies like Interview with the Vampire, Collateral, Magnolia and Tropic Thunder he plays unredeemably nasty people but does it almost without question wonderfully. These are men without souls who really kind of like not having a soul, and it is fun for the audience as well.

Phase 4: ????
Believe it or not this blog actually started as a review for the new Mission Impossible movie but I became distracted when I realized that the emotional center of the movie might actually be a robot. Ghost Protocol is one of the cooler action movies that I have seen in a while created by a master craftsman (Brad Bird), the problem with MI:GP is absolutely Cruise. The action is amazing, the side characters are cool and funny but Cruise is essentially the lifeless husk of an action star in the middle of it all. When he is not playing a dickhead Tom has no emotional range, he kicks ass sure but the viewer is not emotionally engaged by the ass that he is kicking because he doesn't seem like there is that much at stake. If Ethan Hunt was a jerk this might have been one of the greatest action movies ever made.

We are left with one very important question; What's next? Will he have a Phase 2 like redemption? Somehow I doubt it. Could Tom with the help of Scientology actually morph into some type of giant living penis? If so, would he be eligible for best actor or would the fine people at the academy have to create a whole new category for it.