DATE REVIEWED: 6/27/23
TITLE: Footloose
BOX OFFICE RATED: PG-13 (This is not suitable for GOD’s children.)
PRODUCTION YEAR: 2011 Paramount Pictures/Spyglass Entertainment/MTV Films
RATING [1 LEAST FAVORITE TO 5 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED]: 1
REASON: This movie began with Bomont, Georgia high-schoolers having a red Solo cup drinking and dancing party after their school won a sports game. Five teens, with the Reverend’s son, Bobby Moore, behind the wheel got in a car to go to Mama Cannon’s. As a result of their underage drunken stupor, they blasted music, and kissed while driving which caused a head-on collision with a big rig where the car caught fire. At a small-town council meeting, Reverend Shaw Moore said that no parent should ever have to bury their own child and that God was testing them because they had to bury five of Bomont’s brightest students with the reverend’s only son, Bobby, among them. He went on to say that there were other children in Bomont to raise, and once out of the care of their parents, they would go on to live in a world full of evil, temptation, and danger and that the lesson to be taken from the tragedy was the kids were there for the parents to protect and the parents couldn’t be missing from their children’s live. The council members voted for a curfew for minors under the age of eighteen to take effect immediately as a result of the five deaths in the community. Minors also had to be home by 10 p.m. on weeknights and 11 p.m. on weekends and the council went on to say that punitive measures would be taken against any individual, group or property owner who organized a public gathering where minors engaged in appropriate activities, and such activities included consumption of alcohol or unlawful drugs, listening to vulgar or demeaning amplified music, or participating in lewd or lascivious dancing. There would be no public displays of dancing unless supervised by a school, civic or church-related function, and outside of that public dancing among Bomont’s minors would be in violation of the law. Three years later, teenager Ren MacCormack from Boston got off the Greyhound bus in Bomont to stay with his Warnicker relatives, Uncle Wesley, Aunt Lulu, and their two daughters, Amy and Sarah. Ren thanked Uncle Wes for sending his family money when they needed it and for taking Ren in now that he had no other home since his mom, Sandy, died from leukemia. Wes showed Ren to his old office in the auto shop that Lulu converted into a bedroom for Ren to sleep in. Wes explained the rules in his house, which were Ren had to do his schoolwork, no staying out late (which wasn’t his rule but actually the law), and no giving people attitude. Wes found Ren a job at the local cotton gin and Ren could start next week. Ren he couldn’t work at Wes’s car dealership because the economy was bad and there wasn’t a job there. Since Ren said he was good with cars, Wes made him a deal that if Ren got the old yellow Volkswagen Bug in the garage up and running, it was all his to take to work and school. As Amy and Sarah spied on Ren, he put in his earbuds and scared them off with loud singing, and then he went to work fixing the car and even jerry-rigged a radio into it so he could blast his Quiet Riot rock music as he drove off down the working bug down the road. Ren didn’t get far before the teen was pulled over by the police, and Officer Herb wrote him a ticket for disturbing the peace with his loud music and told Ren he had to appear in court. Ren and his family went to church, where Reverend Shaw preached about how families were becoming more distant from each other because of all the surfing on the Internet, the texting on cell phones and mindless television watching. He said if that was a portal to the world, he wanted no part of it, and also that the people at the church were the ones who needed to tune into themselves and not the junk in the world. Wes then introduced Reverend Shaw to Ren, and then Ren met Roger Dunbar the Bomont high school principal and was told that there 220 seniors in the school that year, which was the biggest senior class in Bomont history. Roger told Ren that if he was going to play football for them, he needed to stay clean because Roger heard that Ren already had a run-in with the law. Wes didn’t know about that and couldn’t believe that Ren got a ticket for playing music. Reverend Shaw’s wife, Vi, introduced Ren to their daughter Ariel, but all she did was say hi to Ren and then asked her dad if she could stay overnight at her girlfriend Rusty’s house to work on a school project which would take them all night, to which Reverend Shaw reluctantly agreed. However, the girls went to the Cranston Motor Speedway instead (with Ariel in her half-shirt) and cheered on Ariel’s boyfriend, Chuck Cranston, in his #44 car who just won as they arrived. Ariel ran out on the speedway with her checkered flag and sat halfway in Chuck’s car so he could drive a victory lap. Afterwards, Rusty wasn’t happy about that and walked away because she believed that Ariel put her life in danger by acting crazy like that. Rusty told Ariel that ever since her brother Bobby died, she didn’t know what was going on with Ariel anymore and Rusty left Ariel there telling her to get her own ride back home. In the back of the racecar carrier, Ariel and Chuck were seen later that night making out on the hood of his racecar. She gave him the yellow flag when he tried to go further than she wanted, and he told her that he was her man and she was his rebel child. She agreed to prove that she wasn’t a child, and the adult man shut the door of his trailer as teenage Ariel started undressing herself, and then they had sex. Rusty drove herself and Ariel to school the next day, and they made amends in the car and then Ren showed up in his VW bug blasting music again and Rusty told Ariel that Ren was cute. Inside the school, Ren looked at the shrine on the wall for the five students who died in the car accident. He accidentally bumped into another boy named Willard as he was walking, and they got into a disagreement where Willard said he didn’t wear orange because he wasn’t a Tennessee fan, he was a Georgia Bulldogs fan. After Willard found out that Ren’s funny accent was from Boston, they introduced themselves to each other and it was an instant friendship.At lunchtime, they discussed how Willard went overseas to Alabama, and Ren went overseas to Russia with his gymnastics team because his Massachusetts school was a sister city thing with Moscow. Ren talked about how he danced with Russian girls while he was there and even joked to his new buddy that he had a threesome but then said he just danced. Later on, as Ren was fixing up his car at the house, Willard and Woody from school discussed Ariel. Woody said that she used to be a goody two-shoes, but then she changed into a hellraiser and wore tight clothing. The two boys told Ren about the law against dancing in public and added that they couldn’t even wear a bandana to school otherwise people would think they were in a gang or something. Bomont had the Fall Ball instead of prom, where all the churches got together to sponsor a dance and watched the minors to make sure they were all dancing at least six inches apart, and Willard said it was a boner killer when the boys had to dance with their mothers for one song. Ren said that dancing wasn’t a sin that would judge you to heaven or hell, and Willard and Woody told Ren to take up the law with Reverend Shaw. One night, all the teens went to hang out at the Starlite outdoor drive-in theater, where Uncle Claude told his teen nephew Woody to check outside to see if the police were still on-site. Woody replied that they were just leaving and then asked his uncle what he had for Woody hidden behind the counter. It was a bootleg David Banner cd, and Uncle Claude said he was going to pull the plug in his diner at the first sign of the police because he didn’t want to get a fine and Woody didn’t want to get another ticket. Woody’s girlfriend chimed in and told Ren that Woody got two tickets for dancing, and if he got one more, he was off the football team. Uncle Claude put the cd in the player, and everybody moved their cars so they could have a dancefloor. As Chuck watched the girls dancing erratically, Ariel asked him if girls dancing like hussies was turning him on, and he replied it didn’t suck. Ren joined everyone dancing, and Ariel jumped off the truck and started acting like a stripper pole dancer. She then leaned up against a car, and as Ren made his way over to dance sexy in front of Ariel, Reverend Shaw came into the diner and the saw what was happening out the window. An employee freaked out and hurriedly went to tell Uncle Claude, and the reverend caught a glimpse of his daugher dancing provocatively and close-bodied with Ren, and Shaw was in disbelief. Chuck was not happy about getting caught. Ren stopped dancing and walked away from Ariel telling her that he wasn’t going to put on a show for Chuck, and she could but he wasn’t going to participate because she was dating Chuck. Uncle Claude told Ariel over the loudspeaker to come inside because her dad arrived. Reverend Shaw told Ariel that her mom was afraid she didn’t have any money and thought she would be at the movies, so dad stopped by to give Ariel some money. Ariel, in her daisy duke cutoff shorts and belly revealing shirt, told her daddy that it wasn’t a big deal and they were just messing around. Reverend Shaw replied it would be best if she went home with him now, and Willard told everyone that daddy was going to take Ariel out to the woodshed because she was in deep sh**. Ariel got back home and walked up the stairs. Vi wasn’t fazed by her daughter’s attire and asked Ariel if she had fun, and Ariel told her momma that she was just breaking the law and walked upstairs ignoring Shaw who still wanted talk to his far-gone child. In court, Wes called the judge Eddie because they were buddies, but Eddie wanted Wes to call him by Judge. Wes told Judge Eddie to give Ren some slack because he was just playing his music too loud and it was about as loud as Judge Eddie and Wes blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd in Eddie’s impala when they were Ren’s age. Judge Eddie suspended Ren’s sentence of Saturday School because Ren had a job at the cotton gin on Saturdays. Officer Herb was not happy that Ren got off so easily, and outside Ren and Wes discussed separation of church and state and how in Boston you could buy a beer on Sundays but not in Bomont. Wes schooled his nephew that in Bomont, they could drink beer on God’s day, which was Sunday, but they had to buy it on beer day, which was Saturday. He added it was right there in the Bible, separation of God and beer, and if God said it then Wes believed it and that settled it. Another day, Ariel stopped by the cotton gin and told Ren that Chuck wanted to see Ren the following day at the speedway at two o’clock to be there or be square. She added that she volunteered to tell Ren instead told of Chuck himself. The next day, after Ren and Chuck had words at the speedway, Chuck hopped on a tractor and told Ren to try dancing with the tractor as Chuck drove it to the side so he could show the four buses lined up. Chuck explained that every weekend, they raced the school buses in a figure-eight pattern around the track. Ren sat behind the wheel in one of the buses to race and said it was pretty dangerous and they could get killed, and Woody said “What’s this ‘we,” white boy? Crazy…like I’d get my black a** up there.” As Chuck tripped up the stairs of his bus, Ariel asked him if he was okay because he had a lot of stuff (dope/weed) to smoke, and he told her not to tell him when he had enough. As it was said over the loudspeaker telling the gentlemen to start their engines, there were three males and one female driving the buses. Chuck was in Burn in Hell, Ren in Fun Zone, Caroline in #13 Danger Zombies Run, and Russell in his camouflage Get R Done bus (with the words “Don’t let the door hit you where the Good Lord split ya.”). Ariel got in the back of a truck that was leading the buses onto the speedway, and she took off her shirt so she was standing there in only her bra and shorty-shorts, and Chuck yelled “Preacher’s daughter, my a**, baby!” as Ariel waved her shirt around like a flag. As her version of a smooch, Caroline rammed into Ren multiple times when she pulled alongside his bus. She wasn’t paying attention and ended up going off the speedway crashing her bus into the wall when Russell pulled in front of her, but Ren slammed on his brakes and was fine. Russell started ramming Ren, and he rammed Russell back hard and sent Russell’s bus into a huge speedway light pole. That caused the pole to fall to the ground, and it caught the back end of Ren’s bus on fire, to which the announcer said they had fireworks and God bless America. As Ren took the corner, he headed straight for Chuck, and the announcer said somebody had to back down but neither did. Ren gassed it and rammed the side of Chuck’s bus, flipping it over onto its side. Chuck escaped from the bus as Ren took the lead with his fun bus (with highly flammable stuffed animals all over it) and still on fire. Ren drove by everybody watching and yelled to them that he had no brakes on his bus, so Woody grabbed a fire extinguisher and ran after Ren trying to catch up and put the fire out. Woody and Willard climbed up onto Ren’s bus and attempted to put the fire out, but then they saw that they were about to run into Chuck’s fiery overturned bus so they all jumped out. They then laughed about the collision and sang, “The wheels on the bus go boom, boom, boom.” (Chuck’s dad was going to have a hissy fit when he saw the damage his son and his buddies did to his property with the wrecked buses, destroyed walls, and the light post). In the school library, one of Chuck’s buddies, Rich Sawyer, came up to Ren and told him that he had been around to places like New York, St. Louis, and Chicago and wanted to know if later on after school Ren wanted to go outside and smoke some weed with Rich, who said he got high every day. When Ren got up to look at a book, Rich put a joint in Ren’s pocket and said it was on him. Ren tried to give it back to Rich and said he didn’t want it, and then the librarian, Mr. Parker, asked to see what was in Ren’s hand. Rich made a speedy getaway and Ren took off running to the bathroom, where he flushed the joint down the toilet just as the librarian opened the stall door. In the next scene, Ren was in Principal Roger’s office with Roger telling Ren that he wouldn’t tolerate it in his school. Ren told everyone that he couldn’t smoke weed when he was on the gymnastics team for three years because he was drug tested all the time, so he certainly wasn’t going to start smoking now. Officer Herb asked Ren if he was going to sell the joint or smoke it, and Roger added that Mr. Parker said Ren was with Rich Sawyer when all of that happened. Roger asked Ren if it was Rich’s joint, and Ren replied that he didn’t do drugs so they could test him, and when it came out clean he wanted Mr. Parker investigated for barging into the bathroom stall with Ren because that was gross. Since there was no evidence, Roger decided to let Ren off with a warning and then lectured that life was not a big party and no matter what the rap music people said, marijuana was just wrong. Roger sat down next to Ren and told him he knew Ren’s mom, Sandy, and how she had a wild spark just like Ren. Roger added that Sandy ran up north and lived the high life and that might have been a lot of fun, but it got her into a lot of unexpected trouble, meaning Ren. Ren went off on the principal and said told him that he could arrest Ren or suspend him or whatever, but never talk about his mother like that again and he stormed out of the office. As Ren walked out of the school, Ariel tried to talk to him but he kept walking and sped away driving like a maniac and blasting his rap music on the car radio. He drove into an old warehouse on Andy Beamis’s cotton gin property and played out a scene calling Officer Herb a huckleberry and telling him to try being a cop in Boston. Ren then screamed at Mr. Dunbar calling him Mr. Douchebag and Mr. Dumba** with his righteousness and little vest, and Ren told the principal that he didn’t know Ren’s mother or the pain she went through every day. Ren blasted some more music, danced wildly, kicked over things in the warehouse, and did gymnastics on the rafters. He got up on the hood of his car to twirl around and fell into a hole on top of some empty pallets, but he got right back up and swigged a beer-like can he got out of the trunk. He then did some more angry hate dancing and ripped the wood in the building so he could throw it into the glass windows and shatter it. Ren even grabbed a chain attached to the ceiling and started swinging around on it. Ariel showed up and cheered Ren on and made herself known. She told him there were eyes everywhere in the small town, so he was never alone. She asked Ren if he thought she was a slut, and he told her he thought she had been kissed a lot and she replied that Chuck didn’t own her which was why he wasn’t with her at that moment. Now nighttime, Ariel took Ren to a hideout of the teen kids by the railroad tracks with writing and paintings on the wall that the schoolkids called the yearbook. They wrote quotes from books, poems, and lyrics from songs they weren’t supposed to listen to. She added that people just hung out there and did other stuff (sexual things), and as she drank a beer, Ariel told Ren that she applied to colleges even her dad didn’t even know about because nobody wanted to put Bomont in their rearview mirror more than her. Ariel asked Ren if he wanted to kiss her, and he said someday. She wanted to know why someday, and Ren said they could drop down on the floor and have sex right there and the sweat would dry but Ariel would still feel like sh**, and that was Chuck’s way and not Ren’s style of being with a girl. Ariel then ran outside because she heard a train coming and told Ren that sometimes after football games, all the teens went out there and made out like crazy as the train went by, or they played chicken on the tracks. Ariel stood in the middle of the tracks and wasn’t going to move, and the train would have hit her if Ren hadn’t pulled her off the tracks just in the nick of time. Ariel tried to sneak into the house, and Reverend Shaw was waiting up for her and asked her how he could impose a curfew for the young people in his church when he couldn’t even enforce it in his own home. She lied and told her dad that she hadn’t been drinking, smoking, dancing or reading books she wasn’t supposed to and added that Ren brought her home. Reverend Shaw told Ariel not to see Ren anymore because he was trouble, so she quoted Job 14:1 from the Bible and walked past her dad to go to bed as he told her that her behavior was atrocious and it seemed to start when Ren came to town. Ariel told Reverend Shaw that Ren was the least of his worries and shut the door in his face. Another night, Ren drove Ariel, Rusty and Willard to the Cowboys Bar in the big city so they could hang out away from small-town Bomont. When they arrived, Willard wouldn’t go dance because he didn’t know how to, so Ren left Willard with a female to learn some country line dancing moves while Ren went and danced with the two girls to a song about fake IDs. Willard decided he didn’t want to learn dancing, so he got something to drink instead and his date, Rusty, started dancing with another guy. That didn’t sit too well with Willard especially after Rusty just kissed him, and he had enough when he saw the other guy putting his hands all over Rusty’s butt as Ren and Ariel dirty danced on the floor. Willard got into a confrontation with the other guy, who punched Willard to the floor, so Rusty broke a glass bottle over the guy’s head and called him an animal. On the way home in the car, the teens drove over Crosby Bridge and discussed how that was where the five teens died. Ariel explained that her brother Bobby was driving and lost control, so he was hit head-on by a truck. She went on to say that Ren would have liked Bobby and he was Ariel’s hero, but now every time she thought about her brother she thought about the death bridge. The next day, Reverend Shaw showed up at Wes’s car lot and said he was there to talk to Wes about his daughter, not get an oil change. Wes told his coworker Charlie to show the client Katelin the Cadillac outside so Wes could speak with Reverend Shaw alone. Reverend Shaw told Wes that he wasn’t comfortable with Ren pursuing Ariel, and he mentioned Wes’s two young girls and believed Wes should be able to understand where Reverend Shaw was coming from as a father. Wes wanted to know if the reverend heard that Ren was doing drugs at school from Roger, the same principal (city official) who wanted Wes to take down his sign out front. After Reverend Shaw said he didn’t want that kind of influence around his daughter, Wes asked Shaw if he had ever seen anybody die from leukemia because it was a slow and ugly death and Ren watched his mom go through it alone. Wes added that Ren’s dad was a deadbeat and never lifted a finger to help, and when Sandy got sick her husband bolted and it was Ren who took care of his mom. Wes told the reverend that he might think Ren wasn’t good enough for Ariel, but Wes could argue it was the other way around. Reverend Shaw walked out and Wes said he would see him in church. As Ren washed his car with Willard, Ren said there was no progress in the town. Willard said that he would sign a petition for a wet t-shirt contests because if they couldn’t have braless, wet women there in Bomont, the terrorists won. Ren said they should start their own petition and challenge the law against dancing, and then they could organize their own dance. He wasn’t talking about some drunken kegger or free-for-all orgy, and was talking about a formal, respectable dance (meaning not the kind of dancing they’ve been doing all along) that wasn’t held in the church with everyone’s eyes on them. Willard warned Ren about going to jail because it was against the law, and Ren replied that the law was meant to be challenged. He added that nothing was set in stone, and Willard replied that the Ten Commandments were, and Ren’s smart-aleck reply was spraying Willard with the hose. At the next council meeting, Willard, Ren and Woody were there so they could bring up their new order of business. However, Ren hesitated and the local meeting was adjourned before he said anything. Reverend Shaw and Roger walked out together making plans, and in the hallway, Ren stopped the men and told them that he was going to start a petition against the ordinance of public dancing and he just wanted to make sure his intentions were clear. After they left, Ren told the corn-fed hick Willard that if Ren was going to stand up in front of the city council to make his case, then Willard was going to learn how to dance. With a Barbie music player, Willard got some dancing lessons from two young girls with Amy and Sarah singing “Let’s Hear It For The Boy,” and the days that followed Willard took turns dancing with Ren and then bouncing like gangstas with Woody and his homies. Ren went to the library and got city ordinances to read from Mr. Parker telling the librarian that reading was what you did at the library other than getting stoned. Ren printed out “Oppose The Dance Ban,” flyers and cards, and he later had a talk with Aunt Lulu where she told him not to worry about Wesley because he was trying to sell cars in the middle of a recession (he was a business owner too because he also owned the dealership). She asked Ren why the dance was so important to him, and the teen boy explained that he wasn’t surprised when his dad left because he wasn’t reliable anyway, and that Ren’s mom was the strong one until she got sick and then Ren had to be the strong one. Ren wasn’t able to get his mom better after he put so much hard work and effort into trying to take care of her, and he hoped that by him challenging the dancing ban, he could do something himself this time and actually make a change. Aunt Lulu signed the petition and told Ren that his mom would be proud. At the speedway sitting in Chuck’s truck, Chuck told Ariel that he knew she liked Ren and was just waiting for the moment to wrap her legs around him like she did Chuck. They got out of the truck, and Chuck told Ariel that he thought she came out there on the weekends to hang out at the racetrack and be a hussy, and he added that being a preacher’s daughter didn’t give her a free pass on acting like a slut. Ariel punched Chuck in the face and started attacking him, so he threw her on the ground and told her to walk her a** back home to daddy. Chuck said he treated Ariel decent and better than she deserved and he was about done with her anyway, and then Ariel grabbed a pipe that was in a barrel and cracked the windshield on the driver’s side and smashed the headlights as Chuck drove by in his truck Chuck got out calling Ariel a crazy bit**, and he grabbed her and knocked the pipe out of her hand. He hit her and threw her to the ground, and then he drove off in his truck. By the time the reverend arrived at the church, it was pouring down rain and Vi was inside with Ariel, who had a beat-up face. Reverend Shaw assumed it was Ren who assaulted Ariel and said that SOB, and he started walking away saying he was going to call the police on Ren. Ariel chimed in and said she could see how that would work for the reverend to blame everything on Ren just like he did with Bobby. That set Ariel off yelling at her parents because Bobby was to blame for all the bullsh** in town and he caused the underage kids to miss out on things that other kids had freely in different places, such as dancing and staying out late. Ariel told her parents that she had been so lost the last three years and was losing her mind and they didn’t even see it or care about it because they weren’t allowed to talk about it. Reverend Shaw said he didn’t expect Ariel to understand everything her parents did that was intended to keep her safe, and Ariel blew up at Reverend Shaw inside the church and told him that she hated it when he treated her like a child and she wasn’t even a virgin anymore. Reverend Shaw told his daughter not to talk about that in church, and Ariel asked him what was he going to do, pass another law because that sure as hell didn’t keep the man out of her panties. Reverend Shaw slapped Ariel across the face, and Vi got onto him for doing that because Ariel’s face was already bruised. Ariel stormed out of the church saying they should go get that boy who blackened her eye because they didn’t hit girls in Bomont, do they Reverend? He tried to apologize, but Vi told him to leave Ariel alone and ran after her daughter. Later on at the house, Vi sat on the bench with Shaw and told him that Ariel was staying at Rusty’s house. Shaw said he didn’t know what came over him because he didn’t usually hit people, and Vi replied that was where Ariel and Shaw were alike because the two of them dealt with their pain in extremes. Vi went on to say that she understood they were trying to make laws to protect the children, but the laws were too much, too soon and Shaw’s obligation was to his own daughter, not everybody else’s children. Vi added that she had been the minister’s wife for 21 years and she had been supportive and silent and still believed he was a great preacher, but it was the one-on-one where Shaw could use a little work.Later on, Ren told Ariel that her throwing Chuck in jail sounded good, and Ariel said she just wanted the whole thing behind her. She gave Ren a present, which was her Bible that she had since she was seven and she marked a few pages hoping it would help Ren when he went up against the city council. Ren and Ariel kissed. At the next council meeting, there was a huge crowd attending, including Ariel who flashed her “Dance your a** off,” tank at Ren. Roger started the meeting and reminded the teens that no disturbances were allowed because it was town business they were conducting inside the meeting place. Ren stood up, said his name, and spoke on behalf of the majority of the seniors at Bomont High School that the law against public dancing within the town limits of Bomont be abolished. Reverend Shaw responded on behalf of the town that aside from the alcohol, drugs, and lewd behavior that always accompanied those unsupervised events, he was most bothered by the spiritual corruption. He added that the dances and music distorted young people’s attitudes, and in his opinion, both dancing and celebrating certain types of music could be destructive and he thought that most of the people in the community would agree with him. The council tried to take a vote immediately after that, but Wes stood up and told the councilmen that it wasn’t right what they were trying to do by not hearing Ren’s speech. Roger tried to lecture Ren that he was an out-of-towner trying to come into their community and change things, but Roger didn’t get any further because Vi spoke up and told Roger to be quiet. She told everybody she believed that Ren had a right to be heard, and Ren went to the podium. He explained that just because he wasn’t there for the five students’ death three years before didn’t mean that he didn’t mourn them because he saw their pictures every day at school and was reminded of how precious life and how quickly it could be taken away whenever he saw their faces. He went on to explain that he knew this firsthand in his own way, and that three years ago almost a dozen laws were put in place to protect the children of Bomont. Ren could see from a parent’s perspective how they made sense, but his right to dance where, when, and how he wanted was his own right that they couldn’t take away from him. He said that the teens didn’t have a lot of time left because they were going to grow up to have jobs, bills and families just like the adults in the room and then have to worry about their own children because that was the job of a parent, but the job of teenagers was to live, play their music too loud, act like idiots, and make mistakes. Ren mentioned Psalm 149 that mentioned praising the Lord in dance, and then he told everyone to look in his or her Bibles at the Book of Samuel, 6:14 and read how David danced before the Lord celebrating his love of God and celebrating his love of life. Ren quoted Ecclesiastes about how it assured them there was a time for everything, including dancing. In his Boston accent, Ren said this was the children’s time and there was once a time for that law but not anymore, and he left the podium after thanking everyone. At the cotton gin, Andy told Ren that he was railroaded because Shaw Moore walked into that council meeting with those votes already in his pocket and Ren didn’t have a prayer (kangaroo court). Ren told Andy nothing happened now because it was over, and Andy suggested that the teens have their dance in Bayson. Ren said that the whole point was to have it in Bomont and he thought Bayson was thirty miles away, and Andy replied that Ren was standing in Bayson. They walked outside and Andy pointed to the water tower across the street and announced that it was in Bomont, but everything east of it was in Bayson, including the cotton gin. Andy said if the Bomont fire trucks couldn’t come that far east, then neither could the long arm of the law, and Andy told Ren to try to convince Reverend Shaw that the dance wouldn’t create a spiritual corruption. As the reverend was practicing his sermon in the church, Ren walked in, and that startled Reverend Shaw because where Ren was sitting used to be where Bobby sat when Shaw practiced his sermons. Reverend Shaw and Ren discussed the deaths of Bobby and Sandy, and Ren said that death had its own clock. He added that he knew the council people voted against having the dance, but Andy gave Ren permission to have the dance at his place so it was happening regardless. Ren asked Reverend Shaw for his permission to take Ariel to the dance, and Ren said he wouldn’t do anything to hurt or disrespect Ariel and he wouldn’t let anybody else do that to the reverend’s daughter either. He added that the dance meant a lot to him but Ariel meant more, and that if she couldn’t come to the dance then he wasn’t going to go at all. The next day in church, Reverend Shaw gave a sermon about how even he made mistakes and that if parents didn’t start trusting their children, how would they children ever become trustworthy? He asked everyone to join him in their prayers that the Lord would guide the high school seniors in their endeavors to get the dance going on at Andy’s place. Everybody was happy about that, and Reverend Shaw told them all to turn to page 472 in their hymnal books. The townspeople went to Andy’s old warehouse to clean it up for the dance, and they also hung lights and a disco ball. The night of the prom dance, Vi surprised Ariel with a corsage as a present and said it was from both of Ariel’s parents. Reverend Shaw helped Ariel with her corsage and told her that he wanted what every parent wanted, which was for their child to come home safe. They hugged it out, and then Ren picked Ariel up to drive her to the dance with Ariel’s parents spying on them out the window. The passenger door on Ren’s car was stuck, so he picked Ariel up and put her through the open window (Duke boys). At the dance, Ren recruited Woody to get his football teammates to step up and be men and ask the girls on the other side to dance instead of just sitting it out on the bench sidelines.The teens danced to “Almost Paradise.” As Rusty and Willard arrived, Chuck and his boys drove up in his truck and Rusty reminded Willard that he promised no fighting. Willard said they didn’t want any fighting, and Chuck responded by punching Willard in the stomach. Two boys held onto Willard while another grabbed hold of Rusty, and Chuck yelled for Ren to come outside. Rusty told Willard to kill the SOBs, so Willard went crazy and threw one of them against a car breaking the glass window. Ren appeared and told Chuck that he was really tough when it was four to one, and he jumped on Chuck and they wrestled on the ground. Rusty and Ariel beat up one man while Willard handled the other two, and Chuck grabbed a crowbar and swung at Ren with it. Ren was able to knock Chuck to the ground and punch him in the face and told him the race was over. One of the boys grabbed a brick and was going to hit Ren in the back of the head with it, but Andy came out, grabbed the punk, and told him to play fair before Andy punched him out. Andy told Ren a little less boxing and a little more boogie because it felt like a morgue inside, so Ren ran inside with the other teens. After the confetti machine brightened up the room, everybody danced to Footloose and Willard surprised Rusty by dancing with Ren out on the floor. This movie had the following listed on the cover art: Scott Mantz, Access Hollywood, “Footloose rocks! It’s irresistible!”/ Alynda Wheat, People, “Footloose had an infectious spirit.”/ Bryan Erdy, CBS-TV “Awesome.”/ Harry Knowles, Ain’t It Cool News, “Exciting.”/ Joel Amos, MovieFanatic.com, “Fantastic.” / Mara Reinstein, US Weekly, “Fun.” / Rafer Guzman, Newsday, “Timeless.”