Footloose

Posted by Matthew Milam (matthewmilam29@gmail.com) on August 11, 2007

You wanna know what essentially has killed movies in the last few years? A lack of faith.

Craig Zadan, who produced the 1984 hit that made Kevin Bacon a star, had to literally fight to make the movie happen. As he explained in a documentary on the Special Edition DVD, nobody at Paramount believed in the story and even felt Kevin Bacon didn’t have the acting chops. That sorta attitude I believe probably has killed a lot of possible movies that would have been very good, but because of the idea of playing it safe and taking no risks, they often die on the board room table.

When I look at a film like Footloose with these graduated-from-film-school eyes, I can easily pick it apart and call it a load of crap. But when I look at it in the context of my own life and some of the things I’ve always desired, such as writing a screenplay, I begin to take my film school snobbery and send it packing. I like the movie and I’ll be damned if I’m going to take that back.

The film’s plot is pretty simple to grasp. Big city kid comes into a small-town with his big-city ways and finds himself on the crap list of the towns more conservative residents. But there is one thing he is willing to fight, their law against having a dance.

The best thing about the film is that it has the willingness to take something that could be seen as utterly silly to the rest of the world and give it real life connections. We still do use the Bible as a means of dominant law. We still think of a small-town as being a moral center, and the city being a corrupted sess-pool. We also seek to find a way, if not through vocal expression, to physically express the way we feel.

Dancing of any sort, no matter how dry, is a good way to do that.

Kevin Bacon does a great job at playing the whole James Dean rebel without a cause character in Ren, the kid who wants to make a difference. The real people to watch however are John Lithgow as Rev. Moore and Christopher Penn (RIP) as his best friend Willard. I would have taken to Lori Singer’s character of Ariel, but she kept getting the crap beaten out of her (and twice!) too much for me to take her seriously. The music itself is legendary. Every song is perfect. It’s also one of the few soundtracks where you can honestly change from the title theme (“Footloose”) and change to something else (“Let’s Hear It For The Boy”) and not miss the former at all.

I purchased about a hundred of so copies of this soundtrack at one time. I did the same when the CD for it came out. I even flipped out when I found a cool remix for the main title theme once.

Getting excited over an 80’s movie may seem so tacky to those who are supposed to be true film fans. But at some point you gotta drop all the pretense and just enjoy something, no matter how dated it feels to everyone else. Movies are for individuals, not for just the film critics, or for the film snobs (like myself) who if the likes of Kerry Washington wanted to date us would automatically throw out all the Hitchcock for some Lucas in a heartbeat.

I like the movie at the end of the day because it’s fun and has faith its own bizarreness. Hell, it even makes dancing in a warehouse and not feeling stupid sound good. I wonder if that place is still around…

I could use a few nights of dancing like that.

Read more articles by Matthew Milam