My career as a movie reviewer began in March, 1984. I had
just managed to land the assignment to write a movie review for the next
edition of my high school newspaper, “The Brophy Round-Up.” I don’t know how it
happened, me only fifteen, still an underclassman. I had only written only one previous
piece, a less-than-scintillating profile of Key Club, and now, here I was, getting
a crack at the paper’s second-most-coveted gig (just behind music critic). True,
being at an all-boys school, I couldn’t count on my status as the school’s
official movie reviewer to attract girls, but still, it beat the crap out of covering
cross-country racing.
I set out to make a statement with my first review; you
know, start things off with a bang. If I knocked this one out of the park, I
reasoned, they’d never be able to pry me out of the job. I’d become known as
the movie mogul of Brophy College Preparatory. I would go down as the greatest
film critic the school had ever seen. And this would be the review that started
my inevitable rise to fame.
Brimming with ambition, I scanned the movie section in the New Times during seventh-hour Biology.
Only three films were opening that weekend: Repo
Man, Against All Odds, and This is
Spinal Tap.
The obvious choice would have been Against All Odds, the Jeff Bridges/Rachel Ward flick. I spurned
this idea, even though I liked Jeff Bridges in Tron, and really liked Rachel Ward in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, even if she was in black and white the
whole time. Odds was a romance, and I
knew I needed something more substantial than some piece of romantic fluff to properly
begin my conquest. I needed something quirkier, edgier, less mainstream. So instead,
when I arrived at the AMC Village Six multiplex that Friday night, I bought a
ticket for Footloose.
What? Aren’t quirky, edgy, and less mainstream the first
trio of adjectives that pop into your mind when you think of Footloose?
