Havannah Nights and Hidalgo
Mar. 13th, 2004 01:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmeNot necessarily in that order.
This was my week for movies, and it's not over, since I'll be seeing another one tomorrow night. However, I can't review that one yet (it's "Taking Lives" which has Angelina Jolie in it, so it can't be all bad ^_-. I'm going to see it with Prospero's Daughter).
Anyhow, I went to see Hidalgo on Tuesday along with my friend NA, whom I hadn't seen in a bit. It was lovely to see her again, and it also seemed to be the night for meeting every single person in creation whom I hadn't seen in a million years. I may expound upon that in a later post. However, this post is about movies. Oh, there are major major spoilers ahead.
Hidalgo was a fun romp through the Arabian desert, and I was quite pleased at the result. Mostly, I was quite pleased that I was thinking throughout the movie "I'm watching Aragorn pretending to be a cowboy," which means Vigo Mortensen can act. Not that I hadn't guessed from LoTR, but it was nice to see it confirmed, even in a movie that will not be remembered for its greatness.
Hidalgo is not a great movie. There was not enough footage of the horse, not enough time devoted to the girl (who was quite pretty), and some very annoying pseudo-Native American stuff at the very end which really bugged the hell out of me. Not because I don't like Native American culture, but because it felt gratuitous (and really out of place in the Arabian desert). Yes, I know, the main character was supposedly half Sioux, but the whole supernatural thing comes right out of the blue and then is never ever mentioned again. So, yes, gratuitous and annoying.
Another annoying thing: all the Arabs somehow mysteriously speak English, even in the nineteenth century. *rolls eyes* Give me a break.
But otherwise, the movie was a lot of fun, and the horses were gorgeous and the scenery was breathtaking. Even the plot was pretty good, for what it was. There was a lot of testosterone, but I knew there would be going into the movie, and thus I wasn't disappointed.
Dirty Dancing: Havannah Nights, on the other hand, is the worst piece of misogynistic crap I have had the misfortune to see in a long time.
The original Dirty Dancing, which I saw for the first time in September of last year, was a quiet, almost introspective movie about a young girl discovering her sexuality and becoming empowered by claiming ownership of her own body.
What the new movie was about was, well, the carefully orchestrated sexual awakening of a girl by men. From the very first dance in Havannah Nights, Katie, the protagonist, is being pushed, pulled and chivvied along by the men in her life. She first dances with her father, who right away approves of her dancing, having once danced with her mother.
Katie is never given a moment by herself, is never allowed to have her own dreams, anything private. She is constantly under male scrutiny, and she never makes a conscious decision to break away and be free, the way Baby does in the original Dirty Dancing. Baby practices her dancing alone in the woods, for herself and no one else. She makes her decisions alone. She experiences her emotions and voices them without having anyone prompt her. Katie, on the other hand, is constantly watched by her boyfriend, by other men, is supposedly so out of touch with her emotions that she needs to be told by the men in her life that she's "afraid." Baby needs no one to tell her how she feels.
Baby's dream of going into the Peace Corps never once comes into question during the movie. She knows it's a summer fling, as does Johnny. Katie, almost on a whim, drops her dream of going to college in order to stay in Cuba with Javier.
The sex scene comes almost at the very end of the movie, as though it's the logical conclusion of Katie's progression, which, again, it shouldn't be. Sex in this genre should happen at the halfway or two-thirds point of the movie (roughly) so that the young woman can be fully conscious of the power she wields by the end of the movie. But sex is not the end, it's the means to the end.
Baby sleeps with Johnny, but the climax comes during the big dance finale at the end, when he lifts her high over his head, high over the crowd, and not during the sex scene.
To make matters even worse, this movie felt that a young girl's sexual awakening and taking control of her own body was not sufficient material to make an interesting movie anymore, so they decided to try to put some political back story in it. I'm sorry, but while I am a history buff, Fidel Castro's revolution has no place in a movie with Dirty Dancing in the title.
I don't want to know about how Javier's father was a free thinker executed for his ideas, nor how his brother went into hiding, nor how this pregnant girl landed on their doorstep and claimed the baby was Javier's brother's and how Javier went to work to support the family, blah blah blah. Too much back story when it. isn't. about. Javier! The movie was supposed to be about Katie!
There are some other things that threatened even my great powers of suspension of disbelief. The ability of the white girl to wander around the streets of Havannah in the fifties after dark in a sexy dress with spaghetti straps without being raped (especially after it was established that she was being leered and wolf-whistled at in broad daylight while wearing a school uniform), and without her parents calling in the army, for one.
To top it off, they pulled a complete coitus interruptus on the big dance finale. Instead of the big climax, in which we see girl and guy twirl and gyrate their way to closure, the older brother decides to make an assassination attempt during the dance competition! We get only the briefest glimpse of the dancing, and then guns go off and the whole thing is botched.
And then the Revolution happens (New Year's Eve), and girl and guy have sex, and then the white family has to go back to America but girl and guy promise never to forget each other and know in their hearts that this isn't the end. *gag*
The moral of this movie? It's fine for women to be liberated as long as it's properly supervised by men.
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joane wrote well about Havannah Nights in this entry. We watched it together with rowen26 and subjected the poor guy to our ranting for over an hour, then went to her place and watched the original and then Center Stage in order to scour the offending Havannah Nights from our brains.
This was my week for movies, and it's not over, since I'll be seeing another one tomorrow night. However, I can't review that one yet (it's "Taking Lives" which has Angelina Jolie in it, so it can't be all bad ^_-. I'm going to see it with Prospero's Daughter).
Anyhow, I went to see Hidalgo on Tuesday along with my friend NA, whom I hadn't seen in a bit. It was lovely to see her again, and it also seemed to be the night for meeting every single person in creation whom I hadn't seen in a million years. I may expound upon that in a later post. However, this post is about movies. Oh, there are major major spoilers ahead.
Hidalgo was a fun romp through the Arabian desert, and I was quite pleased at the result. Mostly, I was quite pleased that I was thinking throughout the movie "I'm watching Aragorn pretending to be a cowboy," which means Vigo Mortensen can act. Not that I hadn't guessed from LoTR, but it was nice to see it confirmed, even in a movie that will not be remembered for its greatness.
Hidalgo is not a great movie. There was not enough footage of the horse, not enough time devoted to the girl (who was quite pretty), and some very annoying pseudo-Native American stuff at the very end which really bugged the hell out of me. Not because I don't like Native American culture, but because it felt gratuitous (and really out of place in the Arabian desert). Yes, I know, the main character was supposedly half Sioux, but the whole supernatural thing comes right out of the blue and then is never ever mentioned again. So, yes, gratuitous and annoying.
Another annoying thing: all the Arabs somehow mysteriously speak English, even in the nineteenth century. *rolls eyes* Give me a break.
But otherwise, the movie was a lot of fun, and the horses were gorgeous and the scenery was breathtaking. Even the plot was pretty good, for what it was. There was a lot of testosterone, but I knew there would be going into the movie, and thus I wasn't disappointed.
Dirty Dancing: Havannah Nights, on the other hand, is the worst piece of misogynistic crap I have had the misfortune to see in a long time.
The original Dirty Dancing, which I saw for the first time in September of last year, was a quiet, almost introspective movie about a young girl discovering her sexuality and becoming empowered by claiming ownership of her own body.
What the new movie was about was, well, the carefully orchestrated sexual awakening of a girl by men. From the very first dance in Havannah Nights, Katie, the protagonist, is being pushed, pulled and chivvied along by the men in her life. She first dances with her father, who right away approves of her dancing, having once danced with her mother.
Katie is never given a moment by herself, is never allowed to have her own dreams, anything private. She is constantly under male scrutiny, and she never makes a conscious decision to break away and be free, the way Baby does in the original Dirty Dancing. Baby practices her dancing alone in the woods, for herself and no one else. She makes her decisions alone. She experiences her emotions and voices them without having anyone prompt her. Katie, on the other hand, is constantly watched by her boyfriend, by other men, is supposedly so out of touch with her emotions that she needs to be told by the men in her life that she's "afraid." Baby needs no one to tell her how she feels.
Baby's dream of going into the Peace Corps never once comes into question during the movie. She knows it's a summer fling, as does Johnny. Katie, almost on a whim, drops her dream of going to college in order to stay in Cuba with Javier.
The sex scene comes almost at the very end of the movie, as though it's the logical conclusion of Katie's progression, which, again, it shouldn't be. Sex in this genre should happen at the halfway or two-thirds point of the movie (roughly) so that the young woman can be fully conscious of the power she wields by the end of the movie. But sex is not the end, it's the means to the end.
Baby sleeps with Johnny, but the climax comes during the big dance finale at the end, when he lifts her high over his head, high over the crowd, and not during the sex scene.
To make matters even worse, this movie felt that a young girl's sexual awakening and taking control of her own body was not sufficient material to make an interesting movie anymore, so they decided to try to put some political back story in it. I'm sorry, but while I am a history buff, Fidel Castro's revolution has no place in a movie with Dirty Dancing in the title.
I don't want to know about how Javier's father was a free thinker executed for his ideas, nor how his brother went into hiding, nor how this pregnant girl landed on their doorstep and claimed the baby was Javier's brother's and how Javier went to work to support the family, blah blah blah. Too much back story when it. isn't. about. Javier! The movie was supposed to be about Katie!
There are some other things that threatened even my great powers of suspension of disbelief. The ability of the white girl to wander around the streets of Havannah in the fifties after dark in a sexy dress with spaghetti straps without being raped (especially after it was established that she was being leered and wolf-whistled at in broad daylight while wearing a school uniform), and without her parents calling in the army, for one.
To top it off, they pulled a complete coitus interruptus on the big dance finale. Instead of the big climax, in which we see girl and guy twirl and gyrate their way to closure, the older brother decides to make an assassination attempt during the dance competition! We get only the briefest glimpse of the dancing, and then guns go off and the whole thing is botched.
And then the Revolution happens (New Year's Eve), and girl and guy have sex, and then the white family has to go back to America but girl and guy promise never to forget each other and know in their hearts that this isn't the end. *gag*
The moral of this movie? It's fine for women to be liberated as long as it's properly supervised by men.
joane wrote well about Havannah Nights in this entry. We watched it together with rowen26 and subjected the poor guy to our ranting for over an hour, then went to her place and watched the original and then Center Stage in order to scour the offending Havannah Nights from our brains.