Dirty Dancing
Directed by Emile Ardolino

Leaning you way over backwards and rubbing against you just right, Artisan Entertainment’s two-platter Ultimate Edition release of Dirty Dancing (12303, $20) is a joyful, tingling experience.  A movie is finite, it runs just so long—in Dirty Dancing’s case, 105 minutes.  You can watch it again, and perhaps get more out of it by noticing things you didn’t the first time, but you reach its limitations quickly enough.  DVDs expand those limitations by offering extra features.  The most satisfying, of course, are deleted scenes and that sort of footage, but that, too, is terribly finite.  The best thing a DVD can do to prolong a satisfaction with its programming is to work on your imagination, for that is infinite.  What is achieved on the Ultimate Edition of Dirty Dancing is a comprehensive and gloriously heartwarming presentation of the movie’s own creation.  It isn’t just that the screenwriter and producer, Eleanor Bergstein, patterned much of the script after her own experiences so that the movie’s story is her story, it is that the production itself followed a classic underdog narrative, in which a group of extremely talented people collaborated out of the love for their crafts on something that didn’t have a chance of being anything more than maybe demo reel material, but they did their jobs so well that it upturned marketing conventions and became not only an enormous hit, but a truly beloved classic.  It is the DVD’s telling of the stories of all those different artists and how they worked together that fuels your imagination in such an open-ended manner.  It shows you that the possibilities of music, dance, love and the movies are endless, and it leaves you in a dream state, contemplating the beauty not only of the film’s artistry, but of the human talent and desire that enabled it.

Artisan’s standard version wasn’t a bad looking DVD for its day.  Ultimate Edition, however, is a substantial improvement.  The picture is presented in letterboxed format only, with an aspect ratio of about 1.85:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback.  Colors on the older version are over-saturated, while the image on the new version is sharper and has what are clearly more accurate hues, subdued only enough to avoid the distortion the older version succumbs to.  Fleshtones are also truer. 

The audio track is vastly improved.  The new presentation has both a 5.1-channel Dolby Digital track with EX-encoding and a DTS track with ES-encoding, but even the standard stereo track is significantly weightier and better detailed than its counterpart on the older DVD.  The enhanced audio presentation definitely pulls you deeper into the movie.  Not only is the music more involving, but even the atmospheric effects are more encompassing and do a better job of putting you into the film’s environment.  The 1987 production comes with optional English and Spanish subtitling, and trivia subtitling that is reasonably comprehensive (“Max Cantor, ‘Robbie Gould,’ died of a heroin overdose in 1991 at the age of 32.”).

Set in the very early Sixties, Jennifer Grey stars as a guest with her parents in a resort hotel who learns that the staff likes to unwind after hours by moving rather uninhibitedly to the latest pop songs, and Patrick Swayze is the most accomplished dancer, who ends up training her to be his partner.  The music and the dancing are absolutely wonderful, but they’re also just the dessert.  There is a deftly plotted drama involving the romances of the other staff members and the heroine’s maturing relationship with her own family.  No matter which way the film turns, its tone is always fresh, earnest and involving.

Bergstein delivers a wonderful commentary track, talking all about making the film and how it reflects her own life and being.  She speaks extensively about many of the members of the cast and crew, so that by the time you reach the interviews and retrospectives on the second platter, you are already personally familiar with the key players.  She talks about all the funky locations they visited and compromises in comfort they had to endure to complete the film on its less-than-optimistic budget, and she shares the heartening tale of how the movie defied industry experts and sashayed out of the boxoffice.  As a producer, she was closely involved with all aspects of the movie’s creation and discusses such interesting and little-known matters as the need to maintain a certain ratio of indoor to outdoor scenes.  She oversaw the foreign language releases of the film, and was shocked to discover some of the discrepancies that went on with its subtitling.  Bergstein also just has a natural way about her, a desire to share what she knows about the world, “I think teaching is a very erotic thing.”

On a second commentary track, other members of the crew go into greater detail about their specific participation, explaining their thought processes and how what each person did fit into the whole.  Costume Designer Hilary Rosenfeld pops up with a surprising and wonderfully concise history of fashion in the United States over the past four decades, in order to explain the context of the clothing she chose for the characters.  The details each speaker shares is highly rewarding, not just to help one understand the creation of the film, but to understand how its components, such as the clothing, the resort architecture and the dancing, function in the real world.

The film’s director, Emile Ardolino, who won an Oscar for a documentary about dance and who directed several other wonderful films, including the outstanding Gypsy remake, before dying all too young in 1993, is the subject of a 13-minute tribute on the second platter.  If any DVD proves that movies are a collaborative art, this one does.  The story is clearly Bergstein’s, and as the producer, she oversaw the realization of her vision at every step.  The dances were brilliantly choreographed—and varied—by Kenny Ortega, and Swayze and Grey were perfect, not only for their own parts, but for how they represented sexual satisfaction as a couple.  But the level head who guided all these talents, and drew the best and the most appropriate efforts from each one, was Ardolino.  The piece describes his personality and his working methods, and places all the other interviews and commentaries on the DVD in their proper perspective.  It was his job to dance with all the other filmmakers, simultaneously.

You wouldn’t think that Bergstein had more to say after her commentary, but there is a good 19-minute interview where she covers odds and ends about the film’s creation and talks more about her interactions with the other cast and crewmembers.  Grey speaks for 11 minutes, but it seems like it is a lot longer than that because you get totally pulled in while she is speaking and lose all track of time.  She describes her career, shares stories about the learning process she underwent during the shoot, and recalls the taxing emotional ups and downs she had to endure after the job was over, when some very stupid people told her the movie was no good.  Miranda Garrison speaks for 13 minutes, describing her job as assistant choreographer and how she got roped into playing a major part when it became clear that she had the best talents for the job.  The best interview segment, however, is the 15-minute piece with Ortega, who also describes, but on a larger scale than Garrison, how the dances were sculpted and staged, and what the thinking was along the way.  By the time Garrison and Ortega are done, you have a thorough understanding of what the challenge to staging the dances involved (it had to be organized, but it had to look like it wasn’t organized) and how those challenges were met.  There is also a terrific ‘hidden’ promotional documentary from 1987 that runs 7 minutes and contains some great behind-the-scenes footage and interviews.  Go left at the Ortega prompt to access it.

Also featured is a great 3-minute clip of Grey’s audition, three music videos, a 2-minute plug for the film’s music on another ‘hidden’ menu option included with the music videos, a trailer and a trailer for the film’s forthcoming sequel.

Finally, the entire 1988 live program, Dirty Dancing in Concert, has also been included, not only for its entertainment value, which is modest, but to reinforce the memory of what a phenomena Dirty Dancing was when it did its fast heel split into the popular culture.  The full screen picture is fairly soft.  Colors are bright, but a little hazy in spots.  The stereophonic sound is adequate, and there are no chapters or captioning.  The 87-minute program, which was staged in Los Angeles, features artists who contributed to the soundtrack of the feature film, including Bill Medley, Eric Carmen, Merry Clayton, and The Contours.  As they perform their numbers, dancers from the film do their thing on other parts of the stage.  It’s tacky, but it extends the pleasure of the film’s music and moves, and you can have a good time chuckling at Carmen, who looks like a happy housewife in evening clothes, except for the hair on his chest.

The Review Vault
The Best of 2003

- by Douglas Pratt

 

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