It is difficult to write a review on this movie when it is not the first time we have seen it. One of the neatest things about this film is that one of its goals is to trick the audience into believing a lie. The lie is very convincing, but like I said knowing the secret makes the movie slightly less impressive than it was the first time around.
Overall this movie was enjoyable to watch the second time, and significantly less scary than when we first saw it as 11- and 12-year-olds. It is recent enough that the cultural impact is quite obvious. Anyone in our generation will associate the line, "I see dead people" with this film.
Swing Time is the story of a dancer who misses his own wedding in the beginning of the movie and consequently has to raise $25,000 to re-earn the right to marry his fiance. Lucky then moves to New York to pursue his career as a dancer and a gambler to raise the money. The story is cute and entertaining and a bit comical, however, it is also somewhat predictable. There is a heavy emphasis on the dancing in the movie and while these scenes are impressive because of the actors' dancing skills they are also, at time, unnecessarily long.
As far as the production quality of the movie is concerned, we were very impressed. One scene in particular stands out to me: Lucky is performing a dancing skit dressed as a black Sambo figure. In the background, the walls also have large dancing shadow figures that, in the beginning, follow Lucky's movements, but later shock him by doing their own dance moves.
The movie has a great deal of original songs, and in watching the movie, we learned that one of these songs is "The Way You Look Tonight," which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song in 1936. We simply found it interesting to know this is the origin of this extremely famous and beautiful song that has since been performed by multiple artists and has appeared in many different movies and television shows.
