TRASH REHASH
Flashdance is Everything Wrong with Eighties Romance Movies
Brought to you by Richie Blazek’s fedora
One of my favorite humor podcasts, The Bachelor Zone, was poking good-natured fun at the opening credits of season 9, episode 1 of Bachelor in Paradise. They’d picked up that it was an homage to an old movie but none of the thirty-something hosts could name it. As an Old, I found myself shouting “It was Flashdance you guys!”
I can’t really fault them even though this dance-centric romance with an infectious pop soundtrack was the top-grossing film of 1983. That was forty years ago, after all.
This rehash is teeming with unapologetic spoilers. But can you truly spoil a movie with a plot thinner than Scott toilet paper? Even Paramount Pictures gave up and put the final scene in the original trailer.
Set in Pittsburgh, the story centers on Alex Owens (Jennifer Beals), a gorgeous teenage welder by day and burlesque dancer by night. She lives with her pit bull, Grunt (Jumbo Red) in an enormous warehouse apartment. I’ll skip over the trite subplots involving secondary characters, like fry cook/wannabe comedian Richie Blazek (Kyle T. Hefner), a character so utterly forgettable that he has to wear a fedora in lieu of his missing personality.
