Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
For years, I've been holding on to a brilliant idea to make "Dirty Dancing" a CBS drama. Every episode stars two different kids from different backgrounds, and together they beat the cultural odds by learning to push their hips into each other in front of their shocked parents, who after the Big Number change their minds, their hearts, their worlds.
The guru behind this would be a dance diplomat named Johnny Castle. Magically, he'd just appear every week in his tight black T-shirt, teaching the locals all the right moves. My dream was for Patrick Swayze to reprise his role from the 1987 original.
But in a saddening case of you-snooze-you-lose, Hollywood has beaten me to the punch and coughed up a hairball called "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," which actually casts Swayze, briefly, in Della Reese's old "Touched by an Angel" part, as the inspirational Johnny.
Bland though it is, "Havana Nights" could be the start of a globe-bettering franchise -- and across history, too: "Dirty Dancing: Monticello Mornings"; "Dirty Dancing: Gaza Strip Afternoons."
This "Havana" pilot, as it were, is about Katey Miller (Romola Garai), a young American girl who has a hard time adjusting to her senior year at a ritzy American school in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Her father has taken an executive job there for Ford. But Katey is feeling a little guilty about the whole arrangement. You know, lounging around the pool with her debutante classmates, being foul and racist to the Cuban hotel staff -- it all starts to get her down.
But soon something important happens. Katey gets lost and finds some locals -- including Javier Sanchez (Diego Luna), the skinny young waiter at her hotel -- gyrating and whipping each other around to the sound of slinky percussion. She has the Hollywood cultural conversion moment; the one where the heroine sees the indigenous people being "exotic" and realizes it might be she who's the other.
After Javier is fired, Katey enlists him to be her Latin-ballroom partner for the Big Dance Contest. The prize is five grand and a trip to America, which Javier will use to transport his family. Inevitably, the two fall in love to the beat of political change, angering her parents (Sela Ward, John Slattery) and offending his shady brother Carlos (Rene Lavan).
As you might expect, the movie is as square as a sock hop. Many fingerprints are on this not-that-predictable script, but the movie credits Victoria Arch and the independent filmmaker Boaz Yakin for giving the ancient story a progressive, multicultural makeover. The 1987 version was corny fun, but its makers seemed terrified to say what it was about: how Jewish Baby (Jennifer Grey) was too good for lascivious-seeming, gentile Johnny.
But, as anybody with a VCR knows, they danced and loved and had the time of their lives. "Havana Nights" is more explicit in why Katey and Javier can't be together. She's going to Radcliffe, and he's not white.
Garai, who was the lovelorn heroine in "I Capture the Castle" and Luna, of "Y Tu Mama Tambien," are much better actors than Grey and Swayze, but they're not particularly memorable in these roles. The material almost requires sexier, but less talented, people to bring out the movie's garbagey strains. Plus, the movie hurts for a Neanderthal as lovable as the dad Jerry Orbach played in the 1987 version. Times have really changed in 17 years, too. After the advent of Christina Aguilera, the dancing here just isn't that . . . dirty. (It's not as good either. I never thought I'd yearn for the melodramatic "Solid Gold" moves that Kenny Ortega whipped up for the original.) Try as the movie might to make the Cubans writhing at the club La Rosa Negra seem freakish and foreign, they just look alive, hot, and really thirsty, like extras in a randy soft-drink ad.
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