I saw the trailer for the remake of Footloose yesterday. It looks truly awful, and not just in comparison with the 1984 Kevin Bacon classic, which, I must confess, I loved as a pre-teen boy. Judging by the trailer, this new version just has all the earmarks of an objectively bad movie. It’s hard to justify an overall impression of that sort. The first minute or so of the trailer is full of melodrama, a lot of uncomfortably close camera work, and disorienting fluctuations in lighting. It looks simultaneously like a completely formulaic teen comedy, and a completely formulaic teen dance movie, which apparently is a genre unto itself now. However, if you didn’t notice any of these things on your first viewing of the trailer, you probably won’t sense them much more clearly after I’ve pointed them out.
But it’s that dance movie formula, which becomes particularly evident at the 1:20 mark, which gives me something distinct and analyzable to criticize. It shows a scene that presumably takes place somewhere in the middle of the movie, wherein a rather absurd number of teenagers are dancing in a large parking lot, and not merely shuffling and swaying, but showcasing rigorous choreography and acrobatics. So apparently, in this modern update of the town of Bomont, dancing by young people is outlawed, but all young people residing in the town are trained dancers, and they all still dance in spite of the law. Got that?
But then that looks even more ridiculous when you rewind to the first seconds of the trailer, and see a bunch of kids dancing at the party that led to the deaths that set the stage for the dancing ban. In that case, they all appear to be dancing by simply jumping in place – that is, dancing the way normal teenagers do. So in light of the apparent weird discrepancy, Bomont is actually a place where a few kids died in a car crash, the town outlawed dancing, but teenagers continued to dance for the three years of the ban, and got really, really good at it. Sensible plotline.
And that’s just it really. The final moments of the trailer also feature the female lead being pushed out of the way of a speeding train and a school bus exploding with two characters leaping into the air in the foreground. I get the impression that they’ve done about all they can to strip the film of any pretense of believability. The original was not a science fiction film; it required a fairly modest suspension of disbelief, and all of the events plausibly could have happened in the real world. The new version apparently sees no value in making a realistic drama inside of which the viewing audience can easily see itself.
This plays into the post that I made recently about analysis versus escapism, and may well say something about changing approaches to filmmaking and film viewing. When I watched the 1984 film and was not yet an adolescent myself, I cast myself into imagining what it would be like to be in the setting of the film. Bomont was not like any place that I was likely to live, but reactionary social pressures are real in every time and place, and with that as the antagonist, Kevin Bacon’s character was something to admire. I could watch him leaping across the screen and fighting his rival for the girl’s affections and think that if I kept up my martial arts training, then I too would be able to perform his feats of strength and agility. (I haven’t quite lived up to those ideals, admittedly.) I could watch him speaking before the town council and think that his conviction in the face of overwhelming opposition was something I should emulate as I grew up. But it was possible to identify with that character, because when the music kicked it, it wasn’t a stage play with three dozen hand-picked extras all with four years of modern dance and seven of jazz-tap, it was just a physically fit, outgoing guy dancing in the company of his friends. Not so with today’s version, or with any of a number of movies just like it.
I imagine that any child or adolescent who watches this sort of movie nowadays must be either so seriously deluded that he thinks that with a little work he can be talented enough, cool enough, and good-looking enough to join in with the crowd depicted on the screen, or so personally detached from the entertainment that he’s only interested in the spectacle, consciously recognizing no themes of personal significance underlying it.
When I heard about the remake of Footloose in the first place, I wondered, why on Earth does this need to be remade at all? What relevance has it really lost in the two-and-a-half decades since the original was made? Now that I’ve seen the trailer, I wonder, why on Earth was it remade like this? But on the other hand, it has at least answered part of my original questions. Apparently, the relevance that has been lost is the very presence of any relevance at all in the original.
Showing posts with label escapism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label escapism. Show all posts
Friday, June 24, 2011
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Analysis vs. Escapism
Almost exactly three years on from its original release date, I’ve finally gotten around to seeing Wall-E. It has still be quite low on my Netflix queue, but a friend of mine had it lent to her, and she offered that we watch it together. I knew to expect an excellent, critically acclaimed film, and I knew to expect a post-apocalyptic setting. My friend, however, was apparently completely free of any expectations. By the end of it, she was crying almost openly. The word “almost” is important there, because when the credits began to roll, she conspicuously avoided looking in my direction and said, “That was a stupid movie.”
I struggled to try to get her to elaborate. It was extraordinarily well animated, it was touching, it had moments of terrific suspense, and highly relevant themes. But when I asked her just what it was she didn’t like about it, the best response I was able to get from her was a synopsis of some of the plot points, which she gave while dabbing her eyes with a crumpled napkin.
The friendship that she and I share is of an odd sort. We have a scant few points of profound similarity, and apart from that we have virtually nothing in common. She is also not forthcoming with opinions or explanations of her beliefs or feelings, so gathering a better understanding of her takes a substantial bit of labor. One of the things that has long puzzled me about her is her taste in movies. That is, there seems to be no coherent pattern to what she chooses to watch and what she reports that she enjoys. She scoffs at some of the suggestions that I offer, but then speaks highly of films in the same genre, with similar styles or themes. She pretends not to like a particular class of film, but then eagerly embraces an individual film that is perfectly representative of it.
Eventually, after working to understand why she indicated that she didn’t like Wall-E in spite of clearly having been affected by it, I came to the conclusion that our distinct viewing habits were not exactly indicative of different tastes in film. Rather, they speak to differences in the very way that each of us consumes media. She felt shocked an uncomfortable after watching Wall-E because when viewing an animated film, she doesn’t expect an emotional rollercoaster or an overall challenge to the lifestyles of modern society. She only expects to be entertained.
I believe that that’s exactly the way that it is with her and virtually every move that she chooses to watch. She finds a film’s trailer appealing because it looks like the feature will be entertaining, and that it will provide good, non-threatening escapism. I have never been that way. I have never found appeal in pure escapism. Everything I watch, read, or listen to, I do so because I expect to get something out of it, something that speaks to the human conditions, or issues facing modern man, or at least the contemporary cultural aesthetic. Even if I find myself consuming a piece of media idly, I do not then merely let it wash over me. My mind’s tendency toward analysis never remains switched off for long, as so I’m eager to find emotional or intellectual content in even the simplest, most casual things, like television commercials.
It is always difficult to fully comprehend the notion that other people think differently than you do, and it is an essentially foreign concept to me that some people consume media as little more than a distraction. When I am challenged to think about it, however, I wonder whether fans of pop culture are more likely to do just that than they are to take my approach to the enjoyment of media. For me, real enjoyment only comes from the belief that something I am doing, whether actively or passively, is contributing to who I am as a person, what I understand, and how I think. Am I correct to surmise that this is something of a cultural divide within the population, and if so, am I in the minority of it? Am I an anomaly, and is there anything damning or self-injurious about over-thinking as I do, and striving to see that none of the themes of a work of art escape my attention, even if it’s a children’s movie?
I struggled to try to get her to elaborate. It was extraordinarily well animated, it was touching, it had moments of terrific suspense, and highly relevant themes. But when I asked her just what it was she didn’t like about it, the best response I was able to get from her was a synopsis of some of the plot points, which she gave while dabbing her eyes with a crumpled napkin.
The friendship that she and I share is of an odd sort. We have a scant few points of profound similarity, and apart from that we have virtually nothing in common. She is also not forthcoming with opinions or explanations of her beliefs or feelings, so gathering a better understanding of her takes a substantial bit of labor. One of the things that has long puzzled me about her is her taste in movies. That is, there seems to be no coherent pattern to what she chooses to watch and what she reports that she enjoys. She scoffs at some of the suggestions that I offer, but then speaks highly of films in the same genre, with similar styles or themes. She pretends not to like a particular class of film, but then eagerly embraces an individual film that is perfectly representative of it.
Eventually, after working to understand why she indicated that she didn’t like Wall-E in spite of clearly having been affected by it, I came to the conclusion that our distinct viewing habits were not exactly indicative of different tastes in film. Rather, they speak to differences in the very way that each of us consumes media. She felt shocked an uncomfortable after watching Wall-E because when viewing an animated film, she doesn’t expect an emotional rollercoaster or an overall challenge to the lifestyles of modern society. She only expects to be entertained.
I believe that that’s exactly the way that it is with her and virtually every move that she chooses to watch. She finds a film’s trailer appealing because it looks like the feature will be entertaining, and that it will provide good, non-threatening escapism. I have never been that way. I have never found appeal in pure escapism. Everything I watch, read, or listen to, I do so because I expect to get something out of it, something that speaks to the human conditions, or issues facing modern man, or at least the contemporary cultural aesthetic. Even if I find myself consuming a piece of media idly, I do not then merely let it wash over me. My mind’s tendency toward analysis never remains switched off for long, as so I’m eager to find emotional or intellectual content in even the simplest, most casual things, like television commercials.
It is always difficult to fully comprehend the notion that other people think differently than you do, and it is an essentially foreign concept to me that some people consume media as little more than a distraction. When I am challenged to think about it, however, I wonder whether fans of pop culture are more likely to do just that than they are to take my approach to the enjoyment of media. For me, real enjoyment only comes from the belief that something I am doing, whether actively or passively, is contributing to who I am as a person, what I understand, and how I think. Am I correct to surmise that this is something of a cultural divide within the population, and if so, am I in the minority of it? Am I an anomaly, and is there anything damning or self-injurious about over-thinking as I do, and striving to see that none of the themes of a work of art escape my attention, even if it’s a children’s movie?
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