I recently watched the remake of Footloose staring Julianne Hough of Dancing with the Stars.

Personally, I greatly enjoyed this movie.  Granted I have a heavy biased towards the Footloose story in general.  I love the original movie (especially the “Angry Dance” by Kevin Bacon) and one of my first gigs in community theatre was in a production of Footloose, the Musical.  In fact, the movie was originally going to be the musical, but that was panned and replaced with a remake instead.  I’m glad it ended up like that; I think it reads better overall on film to just do a remake with basically the same script and some kick ass, updated dancing.  My favorite dance of the movie was to “Fake ID” where the characters escape to the big city to finally “cut loose.”

So why does the remake work?  Though it keeps the majority of the script, the parts where they do update the dialogue make a lot of sense for our current society.  We have been dealing with a recession since about 2008–and it’s changed all of us.  How many people my age are already married, or already have at least their first child?  When I was a kid in the 90′s and early 2000′s, I really didn’t expect that to be true.  I thought that was for more conservative cultures.  But it feels as if our culture as a whole has gotten a lot more conservative.  It’s as if the conservative come back and the recession has come hand in hand.  With the uncertainty of how most of us are going to pay our bills (especially our student debt), it makes sense that many of us would turn to the comfort of being joined with someone, or going back to old values that we maybe forgot during times of peace and prosperity in our country.  My siblings waited till their 30′s to start settling down with marriages and children.  Did my sisters feel any pressure to get married in their early 20′s?  I feel it every time I see another wedding photo on Facebook.  And I feel so conflicted because that pressure doesn’t match to the rest of my life.

The relationship between conservative values and the recession has been playing in my mind for a while, and this film really made me explore this dynamic again.  The recession is clearly stated in the script and the conservative values are rather a bit extreme of not letting kids dance, it makes sense since the parents of a small town are desperately trying to gain control on at least one part of their lives as another part (their finances) drifts further from their grasp.

Maybe these thoughts are too heavy for a dance movie, but I’m impressed that it brought it back to mind for me.  If you’re just interested in the dancing (and there’s nothing wrong with that), then check out this clip to see if this movie is right for you.