Now |
But I will never pass up an opportunity for yet another
viewing of A Few Good Men. The Lion King. Or It’s a Wonderful Life. Sneakers.
Or even Wayne’s World (it’s deeper
than you think).
But remakes? They don’t often seem to offer anything new.
Did we really need a third King Kong? Or two new versions of The Hulk, just a few years back? This
reviewer votes no.
This past weekend, I took a chance on a remake of one of my favorite films of all time: Footlose. I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen the original version with Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer. Surely it had its share of violence and foul language, not quite wholesome family fare. But it’s rich with spiritual lessons, and astute observations of human nature and adolescent growing pains.
For the uninitiated: Big-city kid Ren MacCormack (Kenny
Wormald) moves to a small town where dancing and rock music have been banned. He
takes up with the preacher’s daughter Ariel (Julianne Hough) and conspires to put on
a senior prom for the town high school. I won’t spoil the rest for you.
Then |
Conspicuously absent, though, are two scenes that serve to explain
Rev. Shaw Moore’s eventual change of heart: In a conversation with church elder
Roger Dunbar, Moore shows that he wasn’t the most puritanical guy in town in
the first place. And in the book-burning scene, he calls a halt to the
madness and orders the remaining offending volumes returned to the library; Ariel sees that her dad is actually more open-minded than she ever imagined.
Without these crucial five minutes, Moore’s turnaround seems strangely and unnaturally
abrupt.
As before, the story turns on a handful of false arguments. Ren makes his case before the Town Council by quoting from the Bible, but none of it is truly relevant to the matter at hand. The local ordinance technically forbids only unsupervised dancing by minors, but no one suggests that a crisis could be averted by simply inviting a few adult chaperones.
Kevin Bacon’s Walkman became an iPod, and they choose new
music from current artists. Dennis Quaid has his own quiet preaching style, a
far cry from John Lithgow’s fire-and-brimstone theatrics. Some of these changes were
inevitable, I suppose.
Still, it's a wonderful story with a good moral. Altogether, my wife and I enjoyed this new take on an old
classic.
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