Stuff I Think They Will -and hope they don’t- Change in the Footloose Remake (Kids Today)

(WARNING: My choices in these days when i am actually busy are between writing clean, well-edited blogs never, and writing blogs with the occasional typo sometimes. I chose the latter. Apologies in advance.)

In addition to making 17 Again, I heard that Zac Efron is going to star in a Footloose remake. I can only assume this is a remake of the movie and an adaptation of the broadway musical (that is an adaptation of the movie).  I welcome 17 Again again because that thing can only be improved by new input in my opinion, but wish they’d leave Footloose alone, or at least get a star with a more spikey, less bowley haircut (and the inevitable dimpley, saccarine love interest that is bound to accompany said bowley star/haircut).  But since I am not in charge, all i can do is hope that it doesn’t do too much violence to the tone of the original.  Because what gets lost in remakes of these older, rougher-around-the-edges 80’s movies in the 2000’s, is authenticity.  And Efron and the director of high school musical (and now Footloose 2010) are nothing if not authenticity vacuums.  Here’s what I think will happen in the new version that I hope does not:

1.) It will look at first like a shot-for-shot remake, but it won’t feel that way, and once we get to the introduction of the Ren character, that will fall by the wayside in favor of making the biggest deal ever over the first shot Zac Efron. If we were in the 90’s, I’d predict a tilt up his entire body, but today? I don’t know.  Maybe a mirror spot and a gauzy filter (scoff if you like, but to me, Zac Efron has always been his generation’s Lillian Gish) as he gets off of an powder blue motorcycle? That’s going too far into the realm my paranoid fantasies for this film but the real thing’ll be closer to that than you think.  Like, the motorcycle might be black.

2.)  I notice a lot of straightedge protagonists in current teen movies: even when their friends are drinkers they are not.  The reason for this trend, I assume, is that American children can’t be trusted to choose thier own paths through a field of options of varying degrees of moral peril. So unlike the 1984 film, where the teens drink and fornicate, as their parents are afraid they will, and turn out ok anyway, in the remake they’ll love dancing, but not partying in general.  So, they may go across state lines to dance, but I don’t think I’m gonna see any beers in their manicured hands.

3.) Ariel (who will not be allowed to look like a scarecrow anymore but will instead still be thin and willowy, but also shorter, with boobs and a butt) will reveal at some point late in the film that she’s actually a virgin and didn’t go all the way with bad boyfriend Chuck–and that’s if the Ariel badgirl element is still even in the movie. Because slutty badgirl heroines in current teen movies only appear that way until the middle of act two when they reveal they’ve been pretending to be bad for the most part (ie, when you think they’re skipping class to screw they’re actually feeding homeless people to protest dissecting pigs in bio) and “saving it” for true love (and for after the movie ends) because they are romantics.  What was most moving about  the 1984 Footloose last time I watched was how Ariel gets to come back to her old self from being the town slut and, somehow, is still allowed to be just a teenager without being revirginized by a plot twist.  There’s one scene in particular where Ren picks her up for the prom and tells her she’s beautiful and she acts shy…really shy and like she doesn’t believe him, and pretends like she didn’t hear what he said so that he’ll say it again.  Not because she’s secretly a virgin who is inexperienced with men, but because she’s not a virgin and nonetheless hasn’t had the experience of feeling special yet because she’s just a kid who is figuring things, including sex, out, with varying degrees of success. This leads me to another prediction:

4) In this movie, when Ren picks Ariel up to go to the prom, he’ll come into her house and she’ll walk down the stairs in a ridiculous dress and look perfect (and like her hair and makeup were done by professional movie make-up and hair people), and she will know she looks perfect and his adoring look up at her will be expected.  Because real feelings of vulnerability about real imperfections have been jettisoned in current teen movies in favor of the kind of gloss and glamour that used to be reserved for MGM musicals about rich, perfect people, not 16 year-old country bumpkins.  Sure, today’s teen protagonists all have to figure out how to be themselves (because as of about 1999 it has been required by LAW that that is the moral of every movie that is made for primarily under-25 consumption), but the process of doing so feels perfunctory, like it’s just an excuse for dancing and set pieces. In other words, characers are constructed as perfect, then imbued with one technicality that has only to be removed for true perfection to be attained.

5.) Everyone will be extremely good looking and wear VERY trendy clothes.  The kids in the old Footloose looked like kids. Their clothes looked cool but worn in and cheap. I predict not so, the remake.

4.) The religious aspects of the story will be a total mess.  The original was able to take parse the religious ideology, finding a way for everyone to be a human being AND make up their own minds about what God would want them to do, without taking a stand on religion itself.  Since no one is allowed to get near the church one way or another in current tweener and teen films without the films being deemed more “adult,” (again, teens aren’t allowed make up their own minds and need a clean, clear message delivered to them), I have no idea what will happen with this. Except that it probably won’t be terribly coherent.

5.) Whereas Kevin Bacon was the kind of biscuit that women of all ages and stripes could sink their teeth into, Zac Efron will only be attractive to girls who are younger than he is.

6.) All of the kids will be far more jaded, knowing, etc. than high-class hookers.  Again, they won’t have ever done anything REALLY wrong (because that would make them unredeemable).  But they will know it all, because kids in movies aren’t allowed to be naive anymore, like Willard was back in 1984 (RIP Chris Penn).  They have too many blackberries and pop songs to sell.  So that great scene where the kids don’t know what to do at the prom that they have been fighting for once they finally get there will be pretty hollow.  I can’t picture any trendy teens in trendy clothes who have been likely using trendy lingo for the first hour and a half of the film standing against the wall, picking their noses and needing someone to run in and scream “Let’s DANCE!” to give them their cues.

I feel sad writing this list. I really do believe that movies come in cycles and that cycles fit within historical periods, so I’m not making the argument that all movies from Before are good and all movies from Now are bad and that movies in The Future will be worse, so much as I’m saying that I don’t like this historical period, just like i wouldn’t have liked the 1960’s musical epics and beach blanket films.

The 2000’s have wound up being kind of a mixed bag, where cool, smart, original movies that challenge a lot of the stuff discussed above come out frequently, but are clearly marked and marketed as such to smaller audiences who are credited with more irony and taste but also with less power to drive the market, while mass entertainment is not allowed to deviate from formulas that ensure not only plot and structural sameness, but also ideological containment.  If the 80’s was the decade of great popcorn movies and the 90’s was the decade of the indie, maybe the 2000’s are a decade of efficiency: giving people the quickest path to the genre of their choice, and showing them films that adhere so closely to that genre as defined by its most successful entries that there is no time or opportunity to movie the genre forward (as most of the old successes -1984’s Footloose included– actually did when they came out).  I don’t like it. We need another American New Wave. Somebody start one.

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