![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lis and I just watched the movie THE TO-DO LIST, from last summer, and I noticed that it has a lot of the same things that I liked about DIRTY DANCING.
THE TO-DO LIST is set twenty years before when it was filmed; DIRTY DANCING, twenty-five years before. They are both written and directed by women whose main characters, Baby and Brandy, have a lot of similarities to them -- not enough to call either film semi-autobiographical, but Baby and Brandy's stories are both somewhat wish-fulfilment for the author/directors. Baby is a Jewish woman in 1963 who is at a Catskills summer resort and learns dirty dancing, Eleanor Bergstein is a Jewish woman who went to a Catskills summer resort in 1963, although she already had dirty dancing under her belt.
Brandy is a straight-A, all-AP-class woman in 1993, who works as a lifeguard in the summer of 1993; Maggie Carey is a woman who was straight-A, all-AP-class who worked as a lifeguard in the summer of 1993.
Both Brandy and Baby are normal-looking -- more or less average, but whose personalities push them into the "attractive" category. Their love interests are incredibly hot, jacked older guys who go around shirtless a lot, who they pursue, and get.
Both Brandy and Baby are virgins who are interested in exploring sex before they go off to college the next year; they both define themselves as feminists; they're both interested in becoming powerful professionally in their adult lives.
I really like both movies, for similar reasons. And I think they both are that way BECAUSE they're basically wish-fulfilment fantasies for their writer-directors.
THE TO-DO LIST is set twenty years before when it was filmed; DIRTY DANCING, twenty-five years before. They are both written and directed by women whose main characters, Baby and Brandy, have a lot of similarities to them -- not enough to call either film semi-autobiographical, but Baby and Brandy's stories are both somewhat wish-fulfilment for the author/directors. Baby is a Jewish woman in 1963 who is at a Catskills summer resort and learns dirty dancing, Eleanor Bergstein is a Jewish woman who went to a Catskills summer resort in 1963, although she already had dirty dancing under her belt.
Brandy is a straight-A, all-AP-class woman in 1993, who works as a lifeguard in the summer of 1993; Maggie Carey is a woman who was straight-A, all-AP-class who worked as a lifeguard in the summer of 1993.
Both Brandy and Baby are normal-looking -- more or less average, but whose personalities push them into the "attractive" category. Their love interests are incredibly hot, jacked older guys who go around shirtless a lot, who they pursue, and get.
Both Brandy and Baby are virgins who are interested in exploring sex before they go off to college the next year; they both define themselves as feminists; they're both interested in becoming powerful professionally in their adult lives.
I really like both movies, for similar reasons. And I think they both are that way BECAUSE they're basically wish-fulfilment fantasies for their writer-directors.