an absolute classic. works on so many levels.

Rating: 10/10 (12 October 2006)

i don't understand why so many people have to hate on this movie. it works as a pure fun summer movie, and at the same time addresses much deeper political and social issues. every time i watch it, i see something new.
here's part of the new york times article that eleanor bergstein, the writer and co-producer, said really helped the movie get serious publicity:
The New York Times 'DIRTY DANCING' ROCKS TO AN INNOCENT BEAT
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN August 16, 1987
KELLERMAN'S, THE FICTIVE Catskills hotel that provides the setting for the new film ''Dirty Dancing,'' is meant to be more than the sum of its parts, which are golf, gossip and gefilte fish. It stands as a metaphor for America in the summer of 1963 - orderly, prosperous, bursting with good intentions, a sort of Yiddish-inflected Camelot. So when Frances (Baby) Houseman, the doctor's daughter at the film's center, loses both her virginity and her political naivete to a street-smart dance teacher, the collision should shake the audience, too, out of a certain complacency.
These, at least, are the intentions of Eleanor Bergstein, the novelist (''Advancing Paul Newman'') who both wrote and co-produced ''Dirty Dancing''. It will be up to critics and the public to decide how well Ms. Bergstein and the director, Emile Ardolino, have managed to embody such serious ideas in a movie that also aspires to be a summer divertissement - one part ''Flashdance,'' one part ''Baby, It's You.''
To Ms. Bergstein, the two poles of the movie are consonant. Growing up in Brooklyn, she moved effortlessly from tutoring inner-city students in the afternoon to shimmying in ''dirty dancing'' contests at night. Similarly, she says, the rock-and-roll that subverts the dance floor etiquette at Kellerman's during the film anticipates a whole array of exciting and disquieting things to come later in the 1960's - the antiwar movement, the sexual revolution, the uprisings in cities and on campuses.
''I meant 'Dirty Dancing' to be a celebration of the time of your life when you could believe that a kind of earnest, liberal action could remake the world in your own image,'' Ms. Bergstein said in a recent interview in her Upper West Side apartment. ''The film couldn't have been set a few months earlier or later. The summer of 1963 was the first one after the Cuban missile crisis, which everyone had been following on television. The effect on kids was to make them very scared, and, for the first time, very suspicious of their elders: maybe things wouldn't work out all right.
''But the thing that kept the optimism going was John Kennedy himself - young and energetic and sexy. So maybe you could have it all. It was the summer of the Peace Corps and the summer of the 'I Have a Dream' speech. It was like the last summer of liberalism. Because two months after the movie is over, J.F.K. is assassinated. And two months after that the Beatles are on the 'Ed Sullivan Show.' And after that, it's radical action.''
''Dirty Dancing'' had its genesis years ago in a more domestic image that fascinated Ms. Bergstein - two daughters in the same family, one raised to be beautiful, the other brainy.
Gradually, the writer's notion of the sisters coalesced with her sense of how some people live through dance and popular music. These ideas, in turn, dovetailed with Ms. Bergstein's autobiographical recollections of Catskills summers, ''dirty dancing'' contests and 1960's activism, providing a narrative framework for the screenplay. And by co-producing her own film, Ms. Bergstein retained a rare degree of leverage over its final form.
Unlike some recent films,''Dirty Dancing'' treats the idealism of the 1960's as a genuine expression of faith, not a passing fad.
Baby Houseman plans to study the economics of the third world and to enter the Peace Corps. Neil Kellerman, the grandson of the hotel's owner, expects to join the Freedom Rides in the South. Almost everything about Kellerman's attests to the heyday of New York, Democratic Party liberalism. Ms. Bergstein based her characterization of Kellerman's on memories of childhood summers spent at Grossinger's. She evokes some of the more familiar elements of the Borscht Belt, but with the affection of one who had shared in them.
''I didn't want to make it ugly and vulgar,'' Ms. Bergstein said of Kellerman's. ''It was a world of grace and elegance and - yes - liberal values. I remember that when my family went to the Catskills, you had busboys who were going to take a semester off from college to go on the Freedom Rides. When the three civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi, there was a candlelight vigil.''
But as ''Dirty Dancing'' shows in some moments and suggests in others, places like Kellerman's (and, by extension, Kennedy-era America) could not sustain their placid, satisfied existence. When Baby Houseman (Jennifer Grey) follows a friendly bellboy to the staff quarters at Kellerman's, she wades into a blue-collar life of jacked-up cars, raunchy rock-and-roll, and sneers at the affluent, all of it personified by a dance instructor named Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze). She gradually gains some acceptance in this world by substituting for Johnny's pregnant dance partner in a mambo show at a nearby resort, after having lied to her father to get $250 for the partner's back-room abortion. Baby's father, Jake (Jerry Orbach), ultimately learns of the ruse, the abortion and his daughter's burgeoning romance with Castle; and the favored child, ''Daddy's girl,'' has to stand on her own. Baby becomes Frances.
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