Movies Don't Change, You Do: An Old Review and Critical Soul Searching

Movies don’t change, you do. You learn, you grow and you perceive differently. As you become more educated and knowledgeable, you are better able to recognize your own flawed thinking. This has never been more clear to me than in digging through some of my old reviews. In my 20’s I wrote for a wonderful, upstart website called Bikkit.com. (Don’t ask about the name, we never knew what it meant or where it came from). Bikkit no longer exists.

Bikkit and eventually GuesstheGross.com, another defunct website, a box office site, were my training ground as I began my journey into film criticism. Recently, I found an old laptop with some of my old reviews that I managed to save from the past and one that struck me as illustrative of the point of how we all change, grow and, hopefully get better, is something truly awful that I wrote about Dirty Dancing, now one of my all time favorite films.

I had completely forgotten that just a decade and a half before I wrote a glowing, loving essay about the intricate genius of Dirty Dancing, I’d written a snarky, nasty, dimwitted pan of the movie. It’s embarrassing to think of how shortsighted and poorly thought out my old review is. I really thought about deleting it and making sure my awful take never saw the light of day. Then I realized that this is yet another opportunity.

I have long felt that there is something to be learned and gained from looking at movies again after a long time away. On the podcast I co-host, with the brilliantly thoughtful Bob Zerull, The Everyone’s a Critic Movie Review Podcast, we have a segment on movies released 30 years ago that weekend. It’s a chance to assess movies three decades after they impacted on the world and what the movies’ legacies are today, especially compared to the movies released exactly 30 years later.

This segment helped me to learn that Amadeus wasn’t homework but rather one of the most intelligent and enriching movie experiences of my life. Through this segment I learned that Can’t Buy Me Love isn’t a fondly remembered innocent teen romance where the nerd gets the girl but a rather toxic movie about narcissistic men of all stripes who still get the girl, if only out of the duty of plot. Most importantly, and most relevant to this column, it was via this segment that I reassessed Dirty Dancing and came away with one of the most rewarding and exciting home viewing experiences in my career.

You can read that nearly 2000 word appreciation linked here. I’m quite proud of that review. I’m even more proud of it because it demonstrates that I can learn from my mistakes. I can grow as a writer, a thinker and a critic. I am proud of how I see the world now and I can look at my past, and my failure of both hot take and poor grammar, (WE DIDN’T HAVE AN EDITOR!), and know that the past doesn’t have to define my present.

Below is that actual review that I wrote in 2002. With all of its ugly snark and flaws. Read it, mock it and forget it. But remember what it signifies, not just for me, but for anyone, never stop learning, never stop growing and never stop trying to be better. Don’t harden yourself to experience, take time to challenge yourself and what you believe. You will find yourself richer for it....

Patrick Swayze is the single greatest bad actors on the planet. Each of his films have an ironic quality, an earnest stupidity. Swayze makes films like Point Break, Next Of Kin, Father Hood and Roadhouse and we are supposed to take them seriously!

In Roadhouse, Swayze plays Dalton straight as if it were a potential Oscar-worthy performance. Swayze brings those same qualities to the earnest 80's romance Dirty Dancing.

It's the mid 1960's, Kennedy is dead, the Beatles are getting weird and a young girl named Baby is spending what is likely to be her last summer in the Catskill Mountains. The tradition amongst her Jewish family for years was to go to a Catskill resort every summer, Dad plays cards, Mom takes dance lessons and Baby's sister chases the young waiters. This summer is different. Baby is unhappy and needs a change and it is then that she wanders into the resort servant’s quarters and meets Johnny.

Johnny’s a bad boy dance instructor/gigolo and she's a Jewish princess, their worlds collide and brilliant romantic drama ensues. Brilliant romantic drama…when you were 10 years old. Once you achieve an age of cognizance, the story begins to ooze cheesy clichés.

I will say that to this day I still have a crush on Jennifer Grey, and I'm talking pre-nose job Jennifer Grey. As for Swayze, well, he's Swayze. He is a total cheesball and I love that. The guy can't act but he doesn't know it. Thus, watching his movies is like watching an odd train wreck of hamminess and earnestness.

Dirty Dancing is camp, as defined by the great John Waters on an episode of the Simpsons as "The tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic". I love this movie.