Footloose
For a musical about organising a dance off, there’s less dancing than you would expect. It’s more ugly brawls, sermons and grieving over dead loved ones.
Even though the film is two hours long, it feels like everything is rushed. Most characters are left undeveloped, and what little development there is crumbles in minutes, because the end is nigh and they needed an ending.
Speaking of ending, a fade to black in the climax? Adding a pointless burly brawl in the end instead of finishing with a massive dance off? The whole plot of the film is organising the dance, but when they actually do it, it ends in a few minutes! So much teasing for a miserable pay-off.
The most shocking scene is when for some reason they are playing chicken with tractors (itself already stupid) and the soundtracks shifts to “Holding out for a Hero”. What the fuck were they thinking?
I surely hope they wrote the songs first and then randomly assigned them to the scenes, otherwise I have to think that a human made that choice deliberately and my brain explodes.
Bottom line, I give it a 7 out of feet lose. Doesn’t hold a candle to Dirty Dancing, not even in the same ballpark.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.