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Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004)

Submitted by Staff on Sat, 2024-03-05 12:00.


Dirty dancing lite or dirty dancing blight?

Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004)

Producer: Lawrence Bender, Director: Guy Ferland
Miramax

Reviewed by Popcorn and the Kernels - 3/6/05

In 1958, American teen Katey Miller (Romola Garai) moves to Havana, Cuba, with her parents.  Her dad (John Slattery) is a high-ranking employee of Chrysler; he and the missus (Sela Ward) expect Katey to hang out with people of their well-to-do American enclave.

Katey attends high school classes at the exclusive hotel Miramar and tries to fit in with her peers, but is bothered by their anti-intellectual superficiality and racist attitudes toward the locals.  She has taken some dance training in ballroom dance and has an interest in dance largely because her parents are former ballroom dancing phenoms.

An incident at the pool involving Javier Suarez (Diego Luna) creates a curiosity, which leads Katey to follow him from the hotel to where the "real people" live.  He's a local celebrity dancer with some smooth moves she's never seen; the music and dance is uniquely sensuous.  Like their counterparts in the rock and roll generation up north, young Havanans seek sexual revolution through music and dance.  Also, real revolution against the Batista regime.

Diego and Katey fall for each other, initially as she attempts to have him teach her those smooth moves.  Dancing with Javier helps her to come of age sexually, to "let go," to feel the excitement of release; she also comes to see the need to let go of her parent's strict separation policy from her supposed inferiors.

The climactic scene is a dance contest at the country club.  Javier and Katey enter without her parents' approval.  All hell breaks loose at one point with some of Javier's friends and relatives involved in a shooting and then the pigs busting some heads.  (The connection with the anti-Batista revolutionary fervor is always a stretch.)  The movie ends with the question, will Katey leave with the Americans and will she see him again?

###

So is this a ripoff of Dirty Dancing, or homage?

To me, it's certainly homage.  Light homage.  DD2 is a light movie.  Even with the same identical plot elements of the original, the characters are drawn with pad and pencil, not watercolors.  And that's just fine.  It lets the viewer appreciate the sound and the dance without worrying about how true the movie is to its roots.

I thought watching Romola Garai was worth the price of the ticket.  This young woman is tall and stunning; she conveys the growth from awkward, uptight teenage girl to joyous flowing, hot, boogying work of art with flying colors.  And the two are good together, too; the production notes reveal neither Garai and Luna had any professional dance training, so they were picking it up as they went along.  By the end of the movie, they move as one.

The fact Garai is so beautiful can be seen as an objection, if you want to compare the movie to DD1.  (Remember how the Jennifer Grey character was supposed to be a bit of an ugly duckling on top of being uncool.)  And I really don't, except only for comparing the music of the times between two different cultures—fascinating in its own right.

People are right to see the first movie as the classic, the five-star dance movie with girl becoming woman with a sensitive, skilled man from the wrong side of the social divide.  DD2 doesn't take away from that.  DD2 has some fundamental weaknesses as a movie, but that's not the point.  The point is the music, the dancing, and the movement of a beautiful couple, particularly a beautiful young woman coming of age.

Popcorn

from the Popcorn Gallery

Intergalactic Hyperchick-Kernels Starlight, Sunshine, and Moonbeam

 Commentary: Starlight 

Every last bit of energy I had was tested in just watching this tepid movie to the end; I can't possibly justify spending any additional time in reviewing it!

[Don't be holdin' back Starlight, tell us how you really feel. ;)  —Ed.]


 Commentary: Sunshine 

In trying to review Dirty Dancing Havana Nights six months ago, I wound up with five pages of half-finished sentences.  I was completely incapable of even a simple opener.

Today I find that I still can't do it.  Six months is not yet enough distance from this movie, though six months mercifully dulled my memory of it.  A least until Popcorn's summary here brought it back for me.

Popcorn asks whether DDHN is a ripoff, or homage to Dirty Dancing .....My first reaction to that is "OF COURSE this is a ripoff, right down to the title".  But in truth, I believe the original Dirty Dancers endorsed this "sequel."  Heaven knows why, given the obvious inherent risk: Comparisons are inevitable, and often brutal.

Another major problem with DDHN is that the actors failed to make me care what happens to them.  They weren't well-defined, the acting was weak, and they didn't seem overly impassioned by the political event which inspired the plot.  The whole movie seemed blatantly contrived around the dance theme.  The original, on the other hand, was a classic in which the dancing naturally flowed right out of, and into, a well-integrated storyline.

###

I'm not at all the same type of moviegoer as Popcorn.  Beauty, per se, doesn't save a movie for me, whether it's in scenery or human bodies.  I can get that from travelogues, ballets, magazines.  But from movies, I expect some connection between form and function, people and plot.  I don't like being lured or tricked into seeing a veiled excuse for showcasing dance skills.

I readily admit I'm a lot tougher on movies than the average bear.  In fairness, I might be kinder to this flick if it didn't try to be what it is not: The original Dirty Dancing.  When will Hollywood learn we don't like leftovers?  With so much great material out there, why are we recycling used ideas?  And doing it poorly, at that.  One kernel.


 Commentary: Moonbeam 

Dirty Dancing:  Havana Nights --

Ripoff or Homage?  If I hadn't seen the original Dirty Dancing, I wouldn't remember Dirty Dancing Havana Nights at all.  The movie, its plot, its actors, and even its music would have faded from my mind as quickly as "Salsa," another post-Dirty Dancing movie intending to capitalize on the sensuousness-of-dance theme.

I can comment on DDHN only in comparison to DD because that's really all I remember of it:  how similar it was to the original.  Popcorn's absorption with Romola Garai, and thus his "favorable" review of the movie sounds sexist, but in fairness I'll admit that my own fascination with Johnny Castle is what took me back to the big screen five times – and once even by myself, something I'd never done before, nor since.

And therein lies the difference.  My crush wasn't on Patrick Swayze, the actor.  It was Johnny, the vulnerable, loyal dance instructor.  Javier Suarez did not touch me at all.  In fact, none of the characters in DDHN was well developed.  They seemed to be one-dimensional, hard to identify with.

DD was a happy movie.  It ended with the hotel guests (of all ages) dancing in the aisles.  I too left the theatre singing and swaying to the rhythm of the last song.  I FELT GOOD when I left Dirty Dancing – each time!  Unfortunately, I don't remember at all how I felt after watching Dirty Dancing:  Havana Nights.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Dirty Dancing (the original) has been extremely flattered.  I only wonder why.

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