It was just last week that we saw the poster for the upcoming Chipmunks movie. Now comes word that a remake of Footloose is in the works. And the same geniuses who decided that Simon, Theodore and Alvin could be improved by making them a whole lot more gangsta have identified the fatal flaw in the original Footloose: not nearly enough gay subtext. Instead of Herb Ross, the director will be Kenny Ortega, a choreographer and the director of various TV shows and a ton of tweener crap for the Disney Channel. And in the role of Ren McCormack, you won’t be seeing anything like this:
Instead, you’ll get this:
Ren McCormack will be played by Zac Efron, a veteran of the Disney Channel and regular fodder for Bop and Tiger Beat. And, obviously, a man who makes Elijah Wood look like a seething wad of hormonal male sex appeal. Oh, and Zac’s making his big-screen debut in the not-at-all-gay musical remake of Hairspray.
Maybe I’ll just quit going to the movies. I’ve already seen all of this stuff anyway, and it was all much, much better the first time around.
8 comments
From your description it sounds as though the remake will have a whole lot less gay subtext.
Kevin Bacon was a guy that straight men could see as cool, and he had a plausible bad-boy sexiness for most women. No woman over the age of fifteen could find Zac Efron sexy, and he’s probably too effete for most gay men. My other point was the IMDb links: compare the bodies of work between the two directors and see which looks more gay. Kenny Ortega directed multiple episodes of The Gilmore Girls, for crissakes.
Totally O/T, I can’t believe your blog didn’t mention Robert Heinlein’s centenary on Saturday, 7/7/07. The vaunted Flea intelligence network slipped up on that one.
Gawd. I just saw this Zac person on everything from notebooks to backpacks up at the Wal-Mart.
Bleck.
Footloose? Seriously?
I fail to see the relevance of a remake - what could they possibly do different or better than the original?
Okay, maybe they could take out the Kenny Loggins stuff and replace it with . . . yeah, nevermind.
Wha? A remake? I thought it was gonna be a sequel. Because, you know, there are so many questions left unanswered from the first Footloose.
Dance your ass off.
I thought it was a movie version of the stage version of Footloose, like the Hairspray thing. I guess this is now Zac Efron’s niche.
By the way, the extra on the music on the Footloose DVD is fantastic. Did you know all the songs were written specifically for the movie? The director/writer/producers all consider the movie a nontraditional musical.
Herbert Ross did, however, direct Steel Magnolias and Funny Lady. Doesn’t get any gayer than that.
How ironic that Craig Zadan, one of the producers of the original Footloose (and openly gay), is now part of the Disney made-for-TV inferior-remake factory that gave us Matthew Broderick in The Music Man. Robert Preston is looking down on us and saying “what goes around comes around, bitches!”
He also co-produced that miniseries that should have been called Ronald Reagan Eats Babies, not to mention some truly awful made-for-TV biopics of The Beach Boys and The Three Stooges.
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