The Academy’s Best: Are they ready to battle Footloose?
[Author’s note: this article was written a few years ago. All Academy Award winning films since the article are summarized in an epilogue at the bottom of the article.]
My wife and I were recently discussing movies over dinner and the film Footloose came up. Out of the blue she asks “if you were stuck on a desert island with one film to watch, would you pick any recent Academy Award winning films over Footloose?”
In other words, would you actually chose to repeatedly return to and experience any of these Academy Award winning films, rather than be subjected to repeat viewings of Footloose?
Let’s put these vaunted Academy Award winning films to the test, shall we? It should be a cakewalk for them, against this humble B film from the much maligned 1980’s! Since it’s the 25 anniversary of Footloose, we’ll test the last 25 years of Best Film winners from the Academy.
First, a few words on Footloose. I am not some Footloose cult fanatic, nor do I have a sentimental attachment to the film from my childhood. I saw it for the first time a few years ago and I watched it again for this article. I don’t own a copy, and do not have plans to acquire a copy. With that said, Footloose is an interesting, enjoyable and well-written film. It has substantive and uplifting messages about a variety of powerful themes – an interesting father/daughter story, a sensitive portrayal of kids growing up and coming into their own, an exploration of egoism and its effects, thoughts (both positive and negative) about the sense of community in small towns, and a hopeful message about the role of religion in society.
The writing in the film is actually really good. The structure of the overall flow of scenes is great, and the dialog, while not super deep perhaps, it engaging, funny, and altogether well done. Kevin Bacon and Laurie Singer are terrific in their roles. In the town meeting, notice how Kevin Bacon actually sounds like a kid (as he should) while he delivers his “dramatic speech” – that would never happen now. Laurie Singer looks just like a rebellious flirt from a small town. The kid who plays Kevin Bacon’s friend is fabulous, playing a slow but good-hearted, doltish type. Even the various supporting kids are good, and when they are called on for humor they do not play it over-the-top, another directorial lost art from the past.
Then there is John Lithgow. Many people acknowledge it is a good performance, but I don’t think that really captures it. The performance is astounding – it has to be one of the great understated naturalistic performances of the last 25 years. He simply never hits a false note or beat in the entire movie, and is a big reason that the film manages to transcend its somewhat limited genera.
Finally, there is lot of good 80s music, cool dancing, and general all-around fun. When you watch the film your energy changes for the better, and by the end of the film you feel happy and uplifted without feeling manipulated.
Now, let’s take a look at the Academy’s best:
2008 Slumdog Millionaire
A boring idiotic game show where you already know the answers, a hero that spends half of his on-screen time staring at his own foot and trying not to drool, a love story with two ugly, completely uncharismatic people with no chemistry, a couple of dull repulsive gangsters mutilating people, a score filled with wretched over-autotuned Indian music, and dancing in the final credits that comes close to inspiring suicide. WINNER: Footloose.
2007 No Country for Old Men
An ugly, creepy, robotic, emotionless killing machine kills everyone in the film with incredibly large and powerful weapons of various kinds. This is book-ended by incoherent, babbling monologues from Tommy Lee Jones that are unrelated to anything. WINNER: Footloose.
2006 The Departed
A bunch of violent one-dimensional gangsters and gangster wannabes doing their gangster thing – beating people up, threatening people, murdering people … at least until they all blow each others guts out in the end. A line typifying the film’s predominant psycho-social message: “Don’t disappoint me on this, or some other guy will be putting their fat cock up little miss Freud’s ass.” WINNER: Footloose.
2005 Crash
Utterly retarded exercise in hate, with nothing positive, uplifting, or even accurate to say about the human condition or race relations in the United States. WINNER: Footloose.
2004 Million Dollar Baby
Ugly Hillary Swank getting punched bloody, paralyzed, and suffocated with a pillow. Morgan Freeman adds the cheese. WINNER: Footloose.
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
This isn’t even a movie – it’s the last one-third of a movie. Whatever dialog there was occurred in the prior films; this one consists of ENDLESS, kind-of fake-looking and boring CGI battle scenes where people and other creatures are smashed and hacked up, with a gray filter applied on top just to emphasize the fakeness. WINNER: Footloose.
2002 Chicago
A bad musical that made an even worse movie. I honestly couldn’t believe it when I found it on the list of Academy Award winners! I thought it had been relegated to the dustbins of cinematic history along with outtake footage from Waterworld and The Postman. WINNER: Footloose.
2001 A Beautiful Mind
A made-for-TV movie about paranoid schizophrenia. Fine, but how many times are you going to return to THAT?! WINNER: Footloose.
2000 Gladiator
Okay, on re-watching it recently this is not a bad film. A man is wronged, and he comes back for revenge in grand style. It even postulates an alternate history for the Roman empire. But the CGI is abominable, the dialog is minimal, and the story is kind of dreary and ultimately not that interesting. As with A Beautiful Mind, do you really want this as your only movie to watch on a desert island? WINNER: Footloose.
1999 American Beauty
The profound and uplifting story of a creepy man obsessed with humping an underage girl, and the Nazi-guy next door who wants to hump him. WINNER: Footloose.
1998 Shakespeare in Love
This film has the distinction of having the most unconvincing and pathetically limp pair of lovers ever in an Academy Award winning film, worse than Slumdog even! These leads are completely unbelievable, are bad actors, have no chemistry, and are just plain dull. The movie’s attempts at humor are downright embarrassing and the scenes of the play in the Globe theater induce nausea. WINNER: Footloose.
1997 Titanic
Its score has a strangely haunting central theme, and the film features a few really realistic and harrowing action sequences in the sinking ship. But it is mostly an exercise in cringe-inducing dialog and painful scenes, culminating in old-looking Kate Winslet getting humped by a sweaty little boy (it all started here,) after which almost everyone dies really horrible, writhing deaths. WINNER: Footloose.
1996 The English Patient
Voldemort, the early years. WINNER: Footloose.
1995 Braveheart
People getting their arms, legs and heads hacked off in headache-inducing CGI battle scenes. Then Mel Gibson gets publicly disemboweled. WINNER: Footloose.
1994 Forrest Gump
It does have a great soundtrack (used really well in the film) and an earthy and natural performance by Robin Wright Penn that is wonderful enough to successfully propel an entire love story from one side. But it also has Tom Hanks (never a good thing) in a role that has come to define bad taste both in social behavior and in shirt choice, a really insipid score, and you have to hear the line “Life is like a box of chocolates …” more than once. Plus it has a weird message – the monochromatic retarded man gets endless glory while the smart, vivacious and beautiful woman gets shit all her life and then dies ignominiously of a shameful disease. WINNER: Footloose.
1993 Schindler’s List
Who on Earth would watch THIS film over and over? It has a bad score that is clearly written with the explicit goal of being emotionally manipulative, it has Ralph Fienes as one of the most boring villains ever, it has Ben Kingsley playing a righteous little man (please, no!), and it has Spielberg’s trite and manipulative over-the-top melodrama that ruins a perfectly decent story. Plus, the man actually goes for cheap-shot humor in a Holocaust film – has he no shame?! WINNER: Footloose.
1992 Unforgiven
A boring, filthy man walks around, not saying much. In this genera, Pale Rider was 10 times more interesting and fun (and looked better too,) and I wouldn’t pick Pale Rider over Footloose. WINNER: Footloose.
1991 The Silence of the Lambs
A revolting man who always speaks in third person kills women and skins them to make a “girl-suit” for himself. He is caught with the help of a man who is glamorized for eating people. WINNER: Footloose.
1990 Dances with Wolves
I’m going to let my wife handle this one: “If you are at a party and you utter any sentence with the phrase ‘Dances with Wolves’ in it, you will get a laugh.” WINNER: Footloose.
1989 Driving Miss Daisy
A black chauffeur is treated like shit by the unlikable old white bitch that employs him, until she finally gets too old to be nasty to him (or do anything else, for that matter,) at which point he gets to spend his time feeding her pie. WINNER: Footloose.
1988 Rain Man
Let’s face it: this cheese-ball piece of crap is basically a universal joke at this point. The film’s only contribution to human civilization: “Ten minutes to Wapner. ” WINNER: Footloose.
1987 The Last Emperor
Possibly the most boring and unmemorable film ever. I know I sat through this film twice in my life, but I’ll be damned if I can remember a single thing about it. If I had spent the time staring at a brick wall, it would have been more interesting, a more valuable investment of time, and I would remember more about the experience. WINNER: Footloose.
1986 Platoon
It has good music (even if it is leaned on a bit heavy-handedly) and a good soundtrack, and it has a warm and winning performance by Willem Dafoe. But how many times are you going to watch Charlie Sheen in this role? Plus his platoon mates are pretty cheese-ball, really, and Willem Dafoe get killed off in a really unrealistic, unnecessary and depressing way. I have not had the urge to see this film since 1986 – that tells you something. WINNER: Footloose.
1985 Out of Africa
It has great music, beautiful scenery, and you get to look at and listen to Robert Redford. But it also has Meryl Streep (one of the most overrated actresses out there) sporting a hilariously ridiculous accent that makes her sound like a drunken Swede. It also has lots of hack dialog and plotting, really bad incidental acting, and a generally uninteresting love story. Plus, in the end you realize that you don’t like or care about any of the people. WINNER: Footloose.
1984 Amadeus
Well, you do get to listen to a lot of snippets of Mozart, and see tiny little bits of opera, but they don’t amount to a movie. This film totally rides its music – otherwise it’s just cheesy, over-written, over-acted tripe. As with Platoon, I have never had the urge to re-watch this film in the last 25 years – I watched Footloose twice. WINNER: Footloose.
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Epilogue
Since the writing of this article, there have been new contenders to Footloose in our little desert island film competition. I’ve decided to continue putting the Academy to the test going forward, and in this epilogue I will add the results for each new Best Picture winner.
2009 The Hurt Locker
Once you know who gets blown up, watching this would be excruciatingly boring. Hell, it was pretty boring the first time through! It has no character development, no interesting dialog, horrifying music, and is unpleasant visually. WINNER: Footloose.
2010 The King’s Speech
This was actually a pretty okay film. The dialog is decent, and its theme, while somewhat narrow and not particularly deep or interesting, is still reasonably captivating, human and uplifting. Performances never dip below tolerable, and Firth and Rush are both really good. It shares some of the same traits that make Footloose re-watchable. It’s a tough decision. But in the end, Footloose has more emotional variety, its themes are broader, deeper and more accessible, and it has fab music and dancing. WINNER: Footloose.
2011 The Artist
A (bad) silent film on a desert island? WINNER: Footloose.
2012 Argo
More tough competition for Footloose. Argo made my short list of the best films of the year (usually the Academy and I have almost no picks in common.) Argo had a very strong set up, an interesting story, great camera work and sense of place, and good acting. It’s a fine film, perhaps the best Oscar winner of the last 30 years. However, how many times can you watch the sacking of the U.S. Embasy in Teheran? And Ben Affleck, while certainly more than decent in the film, does not exactly give an electrifying performance. The dialog is a little spotty – the dialog among the stranded folks is lacking, as is character development. Once you know they make it, the desire to re-watch goes down considerably. I think in the end, Footloose is more rewarding in many ways. WINNER: Footloose.
2013 12 Years a Slave
Are you really going to sit on a desert island watching these people getting tortured? WINNER: Footloose.
Current Score: Footloose 30 Academy 0
EVERYBODY CUT FOOTLOOSE!!!!
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