Movies with Velociraptor Hands: Dirty Dancing, Part 1

Heya Velocininjas and Velocininjettes! You might’ve noticed that I’ve been blogging a lot more regularly lately, and even managed to do a few posts that aren’t Short Post and a Song posts. 

That is partly because I recently finished editing my novel Viable for the final time and am taking a break before I start editing/rewriting my (very) rough draft of Rebel, the second book in the Renaissance Experiment trilogy. Normally I would waste all that time and writerly energy making stupid jokes on Twitter, but I’m taking a break from that to work on self-publishing Viable. In the meantime the blog gets to endure my attempts at comedy instead.

Also yeah, don’t think I’ve mentioned yet, but I’m going to be self-publishing Viable in the very near future. In fact it’s being formatted this very second (unless you’re reading this a long time from now). Navigating the self-publishing process has been fun and tedious and exciting and frustrating and fascinating. It’s definitely been both complicated and time-consuming, but overall it's still been much easier and more manageable than I initially assumed.

As part of my break from working on The Renaissance Experiment trilogy, I decided to rewatch the film Dirty Dancing. I had not seen Dirty Dancing since high school, but had seen it many, many times between the ages of ten and sixteen. 

I fucking loved that movie. I grew up doing various forms of dance and therefore tended to appreciate dance movies more than your average person. I was also completely in love with Patrick Swayze, which I don’t think requires any explanation.

In the intervening years between high school and now I’ve had many people tell me what terrible, terrible, very bad, godawful film Dirty Dancing is. The dialogue is garbage and no one acts like real people. There’s no story aside from Baby and Johnny dancing at this hotel one time, a girl getting an abortion, and Baby and Johnny dancing at a different hotel this other time.

In general folks whose opinions I trusted found this movie I’d grown up adoring to be a heap of overly cheesy bullshit.

So I rewatched the movie for the first time in thirteen years to see if the film held up. I took several notes while watching, hoping I’d be able to structure them into a blog post of some sort.

But alas I am a lazy fuck who doesn’t feel like doing that now, so instead I’m just going to just transcribe my notes as I wrote them. It’ll basically be like I’m live-tweeting the movie, only it won’t be live and this isn’t Twitter. I took kind of a lot of notes, so I’ll also split this up into a few different posts. So, again, another way that this won’t be like live-tweeting at all. It was a bad comparison, I apologize.

See you all next time for Part 2 in the epic saga of me watching Dirty Dancing for the first time since high school!