Filmmakers who remake classics confuse me. They adore the original
works so much that they feel an inescapable urge to do them better? What?!? I call that misplaced love.
It produces a lose-lose situation: If the remake is bad, then
they’ve shamed the original. If it’s good then they’ve made the original look pointless
and obsolete, or maybe just dated and foolish. If they truly respected these
films they’d leave their legacies alone instead of tinkering with them
endlessly like George Lucas and his obsessive compulsive tics called Star Wars.
And now here’s Footloose,
a remake of the 1984 Footloose, about
a town where dancing is illegal and the preacher’s daughter must be rescued
from herself by Kevin Bacon with spazzy hair and skinny ties. It was a popular
movie, and I remember it fondly.
The remake is a nearly shot-by-shot retelling, but with a modern
twist. The rebel teen from up north moves down to Elvis Country — Tony Soprano:
“Anywhere there are no Jews or Italians” — where he’s chided by Barney Fife and
the rest of Rick Perry America for playing his stereo too loud. This is Ren
(here played by Kenny Wormald) and he can dance, which he frequently does in
cowboy bars, drive-in theaters, cotton gins and abandoned factories. He needs a
dance studio, or maybe just a tetanus shot. He quickly falls for Ariel
(Julianne Hough), the preacher’s daughter who is facing a steep reduction of morals
by dating Chuck Cranston, the local meathead. That Chuck is clearly nearing 30
and dating a perky high school girl is of no interest to the plot, nor to
Deputy Doofus and his tactical team of stereo invaders.
Yes, this all sounds familiar, right? That’s because it’s the
same exact movie. Not just the same story, but the same movie: the dialogue is
often the same, as are the actual camera shots and scenes, the gags and all the
visual Footloose cues, like the
dancing feet in the opening credits. (For some odd reason, though, they
replaced the game of chicken with tractors with a school bus demolition derby.)
Remember that witless shot-by-shot remake of Psycho back in the ’90s? This is not quite that literal a remaking,
but it’s pretty close. Yes, the songs are sometimes poppier, but even those are
remakes from the original movie.
My favorite part about the 1984 film was the preacher, then
played by the brilliant John Lithgow, who glowed with that crazy evangelical
nuttiness. Rev. Moore was a troubling man, but his intentions were always noble.
And his fears toward the town and its irascible youth sometimes exposed other deep-seated
issues, like his resentment of women and their place in society. At God’s
dinner table, there was no setting for women because who else would cook
dinner. Lithgow played into this with a fiery zeal. Here in the remake we get
Dennis Quaid in the reverend role, and he doesn’t come across a third as
interesting, or as emotionally and spiritually wounded as the Lithgow version.
Quaid has reached that point in his career where the daringness has all receded
to bland banality.
Wormald is a commendable Ren, though. And the actor who plays
Williard (Miles Teller) is no replacement for the late Chris Penn, though he is
very funny. As for Hough, she does a noteworthy high school tramp
impersonation, except her character feels more one-dimensional than Lori Singer’s
version, which ached with loss and regret. I always felt that Singer’s Ariel
was hiding some serious sin, not just the ones she bellowed to her father in
those scenes in the church — “I’m not even a virgin!” Hough’s version is cutesy
and more tart, but it feels like it’s there for sex appeal and nothing more.
I’m beating up on Footloose
a little, and it deserves it simply because it remade a movie that some people
— myself included — found sweet and silly in all the right amounts. I’m more
frustrated at the idea of remakes, which is why I’m venting a little with Ren
2.0. Overall, I found Footloose to be
a spirited remake with some of the charm of the original and some that it’s
concocted from its own brew.
I do like how the film improved on some issues, like by including
more black students at Ren’s school — though the only dances they can do are booty-shaking
krumping. (I’ll admit, I don’t quite know if this is a crude stereotype,
though, it felt unnecessary.) I also appreciated how the film wasn’t toned
down: it is loaded with a shit-ton of swearing, features that odd “take-my-joint-to-make-you-feel-better”
scene, and still casts Ariel as the panty-dropping slutmonster that she must be
for the subplot with her good reverend father to work.
Footloose, you scamp,
you served your purpose, though I wish there was no need improve on the
original.
