re: Footloose, Original: despite all its flaws

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And there are otherwise too many flaws to list.

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I think you're being too hard on it. It was the product of its time.

First off - you have to ignore that Bacon and Singer were in their mid-20s when they filmed the thing, and that Wiest and Lithgow were only 10 to 12 years older than Bacon and Singer. The performances were good enough to suspend disbelief.

And in addition to those 4 performances, I think you're ignoring Chris Penn and SJP - outside of Reservoir Dogs - I think it is Chris Penn's best work, and it is my favorite performance of the little filly - maybe tied with Honeymoon in Vegas.

Finally - I think you're missing the importance of the film for incorporating music. Now that wasn't new - even since the beginning of the "New Hollywood" movement, although the musical form itself had fallen out of favor, you still had the occasional musical (i.e. Grease), as well as films with significant musical content (i.e. Saturday Night Fever and Urban Cowboy) - but these all seemed to involved John Travolta.

Footloose (1984) along with Top Gun and the Miami Vice television series are arguably the three most important products of the 1980s involving musical integration into the content and style of visual media (other than MTV and music videos themselves).