the corner

Every bit of news that comes out of Hollywood about song-and-dance films (we really can't call them musicals anymore) is bad news...



An unecessary remake of "Gypsy," starring the wildly age-inappropriate Barbra Streisand, who will be 70 in April, as Momma Rose (she'll probably be 72, if and when the film ever gets made)...



Willow Smith as "Annie," its score presumably to be fortified with an anachronistic hiphop sound...



Jim Carrey and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Damn Yankees," a project announced so long ago that it might actually be dead now...



Hugh Jackman's threats to remake "Carousel," which is both a musical and a period piece, two genres not exactly beloved among contemporary moviegoers...



A planned filming of "Miss Saigon," which seems a tad dated and inconsequential now...



And, the final nail in the coffin, Justin Beiber's fantasy of doing a reboot of "Grease" with Myley Cyrus.



On the horizon, of course, is the remake of "Footloose," which, if you go by its trailer, now looks like an action film.



Now comes the breathless announcement that Lionsgate has greenlit a remake of the late Emile Ardolino's "Dirty Dancing" (1987).



In her blog, Flickgrrl," for The Philadelphia Inquirer, my friend Carrie Rickey wrote, "'Dirty Dancing' is like 'The Godfather.' It's a classic and you don't mess with it or otherwise try to improve, rethink, or update it." And besides, asked Carrie, "How do you take Eleanor Bergstein's autobiographical story and transpose it to another period?"



The most obvious answer is, You do it anyway.



Clearly, the motivation for this latest Bad Idea is to film two physically attractive, personality-free young actors gyrating aggressively to the original movie's jukebox score (again, fortified with new beats) and ignore the little narrative curlicues that made the original somewhat original.



To elaborate on my response to Carrie's post, while “Dirty Dancing” is not a masterwork like “The Godfather,” it is definitely a populist classic – a film embraced by the average moviegoer, not necessarily the cinéphile.



What people forget - and what Carrie brings to light - is that the film was a shrewd period piece (set in 1962, I believe) and that it had a pervasive Jewishness (Kellerman's Lodge!) that gave it its backbone and color.



The original film was about more than just class differences. It wasn't that simple.



I’m sure these two elements will be discarded in the remake. Only the dancing will remain intact and I’ve a sick feeling that Baby and Johnny (so wonderfully immortalized by Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze, pictured) might even be gyrating to entirely different songs in the reboot.



One other thing: The new film won’t have the invaluable Jack Weston as Max Kellerman; Jerry Orbach as Baby's bigoted doctor father or Kelly Bishop as her sexy mother; the terrific Jane Brucker as her princess-sister Lisa, or Lonny Price as the unctuous Neil Kellerman, "the catch of the county" - all of them so crucial to the singular ethnicity of what everyone thinks of as just “a great dance movie.”