A Bad Way To Sell Records

Rating: 4/10 (5 January 2005)

This movie was Jerry Bruckheimer's idea to sell some records . No seriously it was . The thinking behind it is that if you made a film full of pop songs you could stick the tracks on a LP , sell it and make even more money for the studio . You could also release a few tracks as singles and intercut the promo video with clips from the movie so that when MTV play a track you're actually getting free advertising for the movie . This is a good business deal but an artistic disaster because many of us still have nightmares about Hollywood movies from the 1980s and I rate the mid 1980s as the poorest time in artistic terms for American film making and FLASHDANCE opened the door to this " Let's make a 90 minute pop video instead of a movie " type film making
Jennifer Beals plays Alex Owens a dancer who works as a welder to make ends meet and right away logic disappears with this career choice . Welding is a fairly sophisticated trade , it's not something you walk into and learn in five minutes . There's other gaps in logic like ballet dancing and " flashdancing " being somehow similar . ie if you apply to be a ballet dancer and do some hot , dirty flashdancing the male judges might want to meet you after the audition but you won't get the job . it's kind of like saying that screen writing , novel writing and play writing are somehow the same when they're not
But I guess none of this mattered to Jerry when he asked director Adrian Lyne to make the movie . Actually Lyne almost makes a very sexy movie , JenniferBeals is very sweet and innocent looking . Fortunately I sussed out why her face is brightly lit in close up while her silhouette is darkly litin long shots except when the camera cuts to close ups of her heavenly toned body . That's because a body double is used most of the time and frequently the body double is a man ! I bet there's a few naughty boys who are feeling guilty not to mention slightly disgusted to know that