I am not a big fan of Dirty Dancing. Sure, Jennifer Grey was one of my “just turned adolescent” fantasies thanks to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I don’t know if it was her “just rolled out of bed” perm, those eternally angry facial expressions that just scream sexiness, or that slick peach trench-coat of a sweater she wore, but it worked for me. Dirty Dancing, on the other hand, turned Jennifer Grey into an oblivious upper-middle class princess that looked closer to 9 than 19. Add that to the fact that this was a dancing movie, and I wasn’t much of a dancer. Ever.
I haven’t even seen Dirty Dancing straight through. I’ve probably seen the whole movie if we piece together all the times I interrupted myself during a date night viewing by making a move on the lovely young lady sitting next to me on the couch and promptly being slapped, or channel surfing only to coincidentally catch that last moment where Patrick Swayze tells Jerry Orbach that “nobody puts Baby in a corner” and proceeds to toss Jennifer Grey around the dance floor like a rag-doll.
So why am I here, wondering about a remake to a movie I have no attachment to except for a few couch-time memories? Simple: I have to know what counts as “dirty dancing” these days.
This dance was never very dirty for me. Considering the choreography that went into it, it’s hard to think of Dirty Dancing as dirty or sexy. Maybe I was too young to understand that in the 60s, everyone danced properly as a British schoolteacher loomed behind them, smacking them with a ruler if they didn’t dance properly. Maybe I watched the dance scene in Back to the Future too many times, and thought everyone danced with a little flair. Maybe I’m just a guy. I remember seeing the poster to Lambada in a video store a few years later, and thought that was a bit more risqué. Not that I actually ever saw that movie, but considering the last scene, I guess The Lambada is a bit dirtier, but barely.
So what song and dance is going to be the feature of a remake of Dirty Dancing? The last time I remember dancing sexily myself was when I was grinding on the dance floor to Jay Z’s “I Just Wanna Love U“. This is probably still the only time I shine on the dance floor, since the drop-grind is so obvious and so easy, in dance as well as more mating-type advances.
Of course, nostalgia brings me even further back to the days when chicks went crazy for Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me”. Unfortunately, that scene from MTV’s Say What?! Karaoke where the three girls dance and pour water all over each other and not singing at all wasn’t available on YouTube, but I still dream about it. That rendition was probably the best ever, no offense to Joe Elliott and company.
So what really counts for sexy dancing these days? Choreographed group dances from Glee and High School Musical? Who knows? Who cares, as a remake will most assuredly force us men to pretend to watch it for more couch-time with our lady-friends.