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90Smart and funny, touching and unabashedly sensual... the sweet sleeper of a hot season. [21 Aug 1987]
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Dirty Dancing is "Flashdance" with a triple-digit IQ.
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80Above all, you've got Jennifer Grey, as a rich girl summering in the Catskills and falling for her working-class dance instructor, played by Patrick Swayze. The chemistry between them is red-hot, and they're wonderful dancers.
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80The dancing itself, especially the dirty dancing, choreographed by Kenny Ortega, looks very contemporary, or, at least, as contemporary as "Saturday Night Fever," but it has a drive and a pulse that give the filim real excitement. [21 Aug 1987, p.C3]
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80Flirts throughout with cliches, and some of the more melodramatic plot devices creak at the joints. Still, the potency of this pop romantic can't be denied. [24 Aug 1987]
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80It's a wonderfully corny story, performed exuberantly by Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze. When these two get together, you practically have to get out the fire extinguishers.
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75A shapely film, considered and concise. And if its rhetorical slickness eventually covers up its emotional core, that slickness has a pleasure all its own. [21 August 1987]
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75The script is full of off-the-wall lines that take you by surprise but are perfect. [21 Aug 1987]
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A poignant and racy movie. The dancing is pretty great, too.
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70If the ending of Eleanor Bergstein's script is too neat and inspirational, the rough energy of the film's song and dance does carry one along, past the whispered doubts of better judgment. [14 Sept 1987]
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70Good production values, some nice dance sequences and a likable performance by Grey make the film more than watchable, especially for those acquainted with the Jewish tribal mating rituals that go on in the Catskill Mountain resorts.
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70A warm-heared picture with some hot dancing, some B movie class consciousness, lots of nostalgia and lots of cliches. [3 Sept 1987, p.17(E)]
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70Before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein's script and Emile Ardolino's direction.
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63Motivations are murky, the dialogue is flat. But the movie never lets too much plot get between the dance numbers. [21 Aug 1987]
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60One problem with the film is that it does nothing to endear the Catskill social setting to an audience; the inhabitants seem to be competing for awards in obnoxiousness.
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50Details of the 1963 period are weakly handled, though, and the ending is as false as it is sentimental. [21 Aug 1987]
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50But 'neath its candy-coated shell lies several solid grains of truth -- not to mention some fab choreography, a solid-gold title, and a couple of pristine examples (in Swayze and Grey) of what is meant by the term "career-making performance."
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50Unfortunately, the idea for Dirty Dancing exceeds the execution...and the story resolves itself all too conveniently in that final scene.
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50Starts smart and ends dumb. [24 Aug 1987, p.79]
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25The filmmakers rely so heavily on cliches, on stock characters in old situations, that it's as if they never really had any confidence in their performers.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 25
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Mixed: 1 out of 25
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Negative: 4 out of 25
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SeamooseK0It sucks. I did not enjoy this movie. I might've liked it, if i could find any redeeming features. worst. movie. ever.
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Maria10
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Lyssm10