#25: She's a Maniac

So strobe lights can cause brain damage.

You know when you pretend you know about something that is integral to popular culture that all of your friends seem to understand except you? I have decided that I am going to begin learning about all the perceived social beacons of culture, starting with watching the classic movies I have never seen. I began this torturous road with my dear friends Olivia and Tanya. It began with Jennifer Beals in the cult classic, Flashdance.



Ms Beals is my idol. The phenomenon of how she can have basically the same body as what is illustrated in the clip above now at the age of forty-four astounds me. But her character on the L Word is totally reversed from Alex the welder; Bette wouldn't dance. Well, only if Jodhi brain washed her into doing it. Anyway, back to the subject at hand; having watched Flashdance, I really cannot comprehend how this weak plot made a name for itself. There is no actual storyline. No real start and end. And why the heck would she be a welder and an exotic dancer at the same time?

Next was Footloose. Kevin Bacon really has a weird shaped face. And appears like a pig when he smiles. Physical features aside, this film also didn't live up to my expectations. Sure, the storyline slightly more fulfilling than Flashdance, however directors really need to learn than twenty-something-year-old actors can't pass for teenagers. Their extremely protrusive mountains of adam's apples and biceps only gained from many years of weight training and puberty give away their age, as well as the matured faces of the women. And no, baggy sweaters can't hide Sarah Jessica Parker's maturity.

Everyone knows Flashdance by the momentous audition scene where Ms Beals dances her little heart out in front of a panel of judges (successfully parodied by a beer company last year), and I thought there would be a duplicate scene in Footloose. I realise the warehouse scene where Mr Bacon is having an anger release by jumping off wheat mills and whatnot is meant to be a emotion-provoking part, but I really was not doing it for me. The concept of a pop culture negated town is alien in this modern day, and I'm sure would've been in the late 80's, however the film could have been more realistic if the protagonist decided to rebel actively (isn't that what we're meant to do anyway?) instead of bouncing off the walls in an abandonned warehouse where no one could see him.



I also watched Saturday Night Fever, which, surprise surprise, didn't live up to my expectations either. The penultimate dance scene of John Travolta in his white suit, which has been burned into my brain through pop culture folklore and praises from the masses, was actually rather shit. I had always imagined it to be heroic and majestic and portray the sheer empowerment of the finger pointing dance move (you know the one I'm talking about), but he had a black eye and was angsty about his friends' stupidity. So what if he kissed the girl? The ending was weak and the film was and still is too chauvinistic and racist to be considered a classic.

The whole concept of liberation through dance leaves me rather perplexed. I don't feel any more accomplished than what I was at the start of the day; only filling the bottomless void in my library of cultural knowledge.

Now on to the Godfather and Donnie Darko and other pop culture gems that require my cynical eye to grace over their execution.



Lovemeg