Ten Reasons To Come And Watch Footloose With Me Next Week

It's just eleven short days until Thursday December 8th, when The Incredible Suit's Cumbersomely Titled Very Good Film And Quiz Night presents the original Footloose at the Stratford Picturehouse in East London, and oddly there are still tickets available here.

Research indicates that many of you haven't yet seen Footloose and can see no obvious reason to do so, so I'm here to give you ten very good reasons. Eleven, if you count "I'll cut myself if nobody turns up".

It's totally, utterly, 100% eighties

Officially cinema's most 1980s feet

If, like me, you yearn for a time before iPhones, The X Factor, movie spoilers, everything being too loud, "celebrities", health and safety, more than four TV channels, call centres in India, Nick Knowles and movie blogs written by unqualified nobodies, then a) you should GET OVER IT GRANDAD, and b) Footloose is for you. It's packed with mullets, leg warmers and synthesised pop and has a ludicrous premise, unlikely dance sequences and Kevin Bacon in a vest.

I can't believe you'd need nine more reasons, but I'm going to carry on regardless.

Chris Tookey's synopsis

As if being forbidden to dsance isn't bad enough, dancing has also been banned. Not sure why Tookey didn't mention that.

Peepers peeled: it's '80s Movie Mom!

She's no Mary Ellen Trainor, but Frances Lee McCain - who plays Kevin Bacon's mum - has one of Hollywood's most celebrated wombs of the 1980s. The characters she played also spawned Gremlins' Billy Peltzer, Stand By Me's Gordie Lachance, and Back To The Future's Lorraine Baines. Rumour has it she wore deelyboppers on her ovaries.

The Angry Dance

You've seen it in Billy Elliot, Hot Rod and Flight Of The Conchords, but Kevin Bacon's Angry Dance is the original and still the best.  Massive incidental kudos to findaproperty.com for this ad placement on the YouTube clip of Angry Dance '84:

The homoerotic dance montage

Gotta have a montage, and Footloose's - in which Kevin Bacon teaches new BFF Chris Penn to dance, albeit like Pinocchio on elastic - is a corker. If you're planning a thesis on gay subtext in mainstream Hollywood cinema then you could do a lot worse than make this scene your first port of call. Your second should probably be the men's shower room scene.

This

The motivational speech

You can keep your "They'll never take our freedom", your "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers" and your "What we do in life echoes in eternity": the sight of Kevin Bacon declaring "There is a time to dance... this is our time" would be enough to convince a horde of angry, hairy Scotsmen to start bodypopping there and then.

John Lithgow in "character over cliché" shocker

Pitching your young protagonists against a stuffy old Christian is a recipe for pantomime villainy, especially when the antagonistic God-botherer in question is John Lithgow, an actor prone to fits of raging scene-chewing and over-the-toppery. But Lithgow, assisted by writer Dean Pitchford and director Herbert Ross, is led not into temptation and delivers a sympathetic performance as a flawed man trying to understand a changing world.

Sadly that means there's not much of this kind of thing:

The soundtrack

Kenny Loggins - "Footloose"

Bonnie Tyler - "Holding Out For A Hero"


Moving Pictures - "Never"

"If you don't give your heart wings you'll never, never, never ever never, never, never ever fly". The very words I live by.

THERE'S A FREE QUIZ!

Turn up nice and early (let's say 6.30) and I'll be hosting a free quiz for anyone who knows stuff about films and that. There'll be actual prizes "up for grabs", and I'm reasonably confident that some of them won't be shit.

The quiz starts promptly at 7pm in the Stratford Picturehouse bar and is free to anyone who's come to watch Footloose. There's a maximum team size of six people, and it'll be worth attending just to see if there's another mighty face-off between Team Shiznit and Cheval, scourges of film quiz teams across London.

*

So there you have it. If you still don't want to come then you're either mad or dead, and either way I want nothing further to do with you. And if any of that's convinced you, there are more infodeets here. Jump back!

Because You'd Think Less Of Me If I Didn't Do It

My Week With Marilyn

My Week With Marilyn tries very hard indeed to make you hate it as quickly as possible. It begins with a plummy voiceover from an upper-class twit, who parks his glaringly obvious period car - it may as well have a hooter that shouts "LOOK AT ME! I'M AN AUTHENTIC 1950s PROP!" - right in the foreground of every shot, while Michelle Williams hovers about looking almost-but-not-quite like Marilyn Monroe, as if trying to prove that the Uncanny Valley theory doesn't just apply to performance capture animation.

But then something weird happens, and suddenly you're completely sucked into director Simon Curtis' world, in which Johnny Posh Features (Eddie Redmayne, playing Colin Clark, upon whose diaries the film is based) is actually quite charming and Michelle Williams is actually and unquestionably Marilyn Monroe. It's a cunning trick by writer Adrian Hodges, whereby he avoids many of the traps that true stories so often fall into by crafting a delightful story that has a beginning, a middle and an end without appearing contrived for the sake of drama.

The film's biggest joy, without which it would quite probably be nothing, is Kenneth Branagh's unexpectedly funny turn as Laurence Olivier, a role he demanded to play the moment he emerged from his mother's vagina. In fact the Monromance bubbling up between Marilyn and Colin soon feels like a subplot we're forced to sit through while we wait for another hilarious scene of Larry losing his shit over Mazza's incompetence as an actress. Seriously, if Ken wanted to make a two-hour spin-off of this film starring only himself as Olivier, I'd watch it in a heartbeat. I've even got a title ready.

Sadly it appears that the awkward-nobody-almost-has-affair-with-massive-movie-star storyline is the one we're supposed to be interested in, and while it's pleasantly diverting it never really grabs you by the genitals (which all love stories should), despite excellent performances all round. You're left wondering why you had to go to the cinema to see a Sunday night ITV drama, what the real-film-within-the-film The Prince And The Showgirl is like (good news! It's on BBC2 on Saturday) and whether or not Marilyn really was as useless as this film makes her out to be.

All in all then, nice enough, but no Me And Orson Welles. I imagine. I haven't actually seen it.

Quiet Round Here, Isn't It?

Sorry about that. I had to return some videotapes.

Thanks

Headhunters Completes Unofficial "Dangerous Drinks Cartons" Trilogy

Lethal Weapon (1987)

Terminator 2 (1991)

Headhunters (2011)

Snowtown

With its based-on-truth premise of a teenage boy from a broken family somewhere in the Australian underclass becoming involved with an enigmatic but vicious criminal, Snowtown immediately invites comparisons to Animal Kingdom, especially among people who've only seen two Australian movies this year (i.e. me). That would be reductive though: Snowtown is entirely its own film, and within minutes of it starting you'll have forgotten all about Guy Pearce's amazing moustache.

The enigmatic criminal this time is none other than Australia's most prolific serial killer, John "inappropriately jolly surname" Bunting, played here with terrifying serenity by Daniel Henshall, and Snowtown portrays him through the eyes of Jamie Vlassakis (newcomer Lucas Pittaway). Bunting's relationship with Vlassakis' mother initially seems like the answer to all the troubled teen's problems, but before long things take a turn for the eye-wateringly, stomach-churningly, toenail-removingly disturbing.

Brutal, bleak and raw, and shocking in the mundanity of its horrific events, Snowtown demands your attention and rewards you with an uncompromising look at the tragedy of a doomed, neglected community: there isn't a single shot of a police officer; neighbourhood watch consists of gathering round a kitchen table and being encouraged to dream up violent retribution towards gays and paedophiles, and a mother remains ambivalent to the effect that a clearly unstable man might be having on her children.

Meanwhile, the film's clouded sense of time and refusal to give an explanation for Bunting's crimes beyond his apparent hatred of child molestors and homosexuals (he was also after their welfare payments, but the film doesn't touch on that) make for an unpleasantly woozy viewing experience; a blurry, waking nightmare that stays with you long after the credits.

It's not a film to like or enjoy, but it is a film worth enduring. LOLs are non-existent and dog lovers will have almost as hard a time as they did with Tyrannosaur, but Snowtown does raise a lot of questions, and they're even harder to answer than the film is to watch.

It's not as good as Animal Kingdom though.

In other news: The production notes make for the world's worst flip book:

Jonathan Lipnicki's Six-Year-Old Head Photoshopped Onto Jonathan Lipnicki's 21-Year-Old Body

Just because.