A lot of people are reticent to
talk on the internet about the ideas they have for businesses, stories,
products, and so on. You can’t blame
them. If the public in general are
opportunistic, self-serving backstabbers offline, just imagine what a bigger
playground and a veil of anonymity grants them.
But since what I’m about to talk about involves characters I will never
have the rights to use anyway, and I have absolutely zero interest in
developing the concept with characters I made up myself, I’m just going to let
the chips fall where they may. That out
of the way, this is my open letter/pitch to whomever at Marvel Studios or
Twentieth Century Fox, or elsewhere who owns the rights to The New Mutants or just has a passing interest in reading this
drivel.
The year is 1984. “Professor”
Charles Xavier's (hopeful casting would be Lucinda
Dickey) Rec Center has been a hangout and haven for the kids of the
community for years (likely Los Angeles, but I’m flexible. Aside from the usual activities the center sponsors, there is
also a video arcade lovingly dubbed “The Danger Room.” A group of teens (Codenames/street
names: Karma, Sunspot, Wolfsbane, Mirage, and Cannonball) who frequent the
center also just happen to have a breakdancing team (guess what their name is).
They take their skills to the streets to raise extra funds for the center as
well as to find youths in trouble and rescue them. This is how they run across
Illyana Rasputin and Doug Ramsey and bring these new recruits into the fold.
Naturally, they're all superpowered mutants, as well (a nice, little analogy
for teenaged awkwardness all by itself).
Often, the kids run afoul of the
ultra-aggressive students of the Frost Academy, nicknamed the Hellions (also
mutants, in case you needed to be told). Their mentor Ms. Emma Frost wants to
expand her academy, and Professor X's Rec Center is the ideal location to do
it. The first film in the trilogy would
focus on this conflict. At the end, as
all the kids are breaking and having a good time, Illyana is upstairs summoning
up demons. The second film would
introduce Magma and be about both Illyana’s trip to Limbo/transformation into
Magik as well as Mirage and the rest of the kids’ struggle with the Demon
Bear. The third film would bring alien
techno-organism Warlock into the mix, develop his relationship with
Doug/Cypher, and set the team against Warlock’s dad, The Magus. That’s the basics. Superpowered battles, teen angst, mesh
half-shirts, and breakdancing, all in one franchise. Who could resist? Pass the word along.
Samantha
Blair (Cynthia Dale) is a wage slave
in a steno pool (remember those?) for The Man, but she has a dream. Along with friends KC (Patricia Idlette) and Patty (Pam
Henry), she scrapes up enough bread to rent out a warehouse, renovate it,
and start up her own aerobics studio (the titular one, no less). As her client list expands due to her
“unorthodox,” people-friendly approach, Sam sets her eyes on a second career as
host of a morning exercise show. But
her success is ill-met by jerkweed Debbie (Laura
Henry) and her boyfriend Jack (Walter
George Alton, far better known as the eponymous Pumaman), who also owns Sam’s main competition. Can a young dancer balance love with a
football player (Steve, as essayed by Richard
Rebiere), life with a child (Joel, as essayed by Stuart Stone), and aerobicizing all on her own? The mind boggles.
Lawrence Dane’s Heavenly Bodies (incidentally co-produced by Playboy Enterprises)
is much like any other of the various Chasing Your Dream films of the
Eighties. It centers on a young woman
with a particular skill set. She has had
to (and still has to during the course of the film) struggle against forces
both economic and sexist. She has
supportive, nonentity friends (seriously, why did KC want in on this business
if she never does aerobics?), but she shines above even them because she has a
special talent that just aches to be discovered. What it does that’s interesting is
twofold. First, it makes Sam a single
mother, and this shapes the core of her character. While she does love her son (she even
explains to him what orgies are), it’s clear that she had to put her life on
hold for some time in order to earn the money to support the two of them, and
her relationship with Joel’s father was formative in how Sam views new romantic
prospects. Second (and related to the
first), is that her relationship with Steve is actually compelling and a little
more realistic than we’re used to seeing in this sort of movie. Their meet cute kicks off with the burly
pigskinner (I’m just going to own that word) dressed in quasi-drag (replete
with Daisy cup breasts and pig tails), mocking Sam and her job. After earning his respect via the most erotic
push-up contest in cinema history, she still rejects his advances. Granted, it doesn’t take tons for her to
relent, but the romance come from a place of mutual respect, and the fact that
Steve quickly takes a shine to Joel strengthens the bond between Steve and Sam
and the audience.
The
film also emphasizes watching and television (and television watching) as
elements that shape Sam’s world. She
gets her own show, and though it feels mutually exclusive from her aerobics
studio work in terms of popularity (we’re never really shown a direct correlation),
it still makes her a media personality with a modicum of celebrity as well as
providing an object of desire for some.
It also gives her the power to stand up for her cause that she wouldn’t
have had otherwise. Further, the finale
of the film is a televised “workout marathon,” and whether or not Sam and her
team win, that it is being broadcast to homes all over Canada (I’m assuming,
since that’s where it was filmed) means that she will be judged by the public
at large. Not only does she stand to
lose her business space, she stands to lose her entire livelihood, and if none of
this was being filmed for an audience, there would likely never have even been
a showdown. Also of note is a scene
where Sam acclimates herself to the set of her television program, and this
scene harkens back to the “You Were Meant For Me” sequence in Singin’ In The Rain; from the prominent
placement of a tall, white ladder, to the background color scheme, to the
self-reflexive environment including lights, fans, and cameras, to the point
that Sam names Gene Kelly as having a
major impact on her life. Of course,
there’s also a sequence that directly apes this film’s biggest influence, Flashdance, but the first one feels just
a hair more heartfelt, in my opinion.
Any
film whose main point of interest involves sweaty female bodies can’t really be
blamed for having the camera emphasize same, and this one certainly does its
damnedest to raise shots of women’s crotches clad in tight, bright lycra to an
artform. However, I believe that this
prioritization does the film a disservice in the long run, not because of what
it wants to deliver to its audience but because of its overkill in doing so (I
won’t get into the multitudinous plot holes in this thing because we’d be here
all day). This film is montage crazy
(and these are obviously heavily influenced by the style of music videos,
themselves montages in their disconnectedness from linear time and space), and
it’s quite clear from only a few minutes in that this is the way things are
going to be. The opening title sequence encompasses
the girls and their quest to kickstart Heavenly Bodies. This is almost immediately followed by
another montage as Sam’s client base expands.
Montages are often intended to cover a long period of time and move a
story into its next phase, but this film is so smitten with them that the
narrative is given no room to develop of its own accord (whether because its
producers had no faith in it by itself or simply couldn’t care less about it, I’ll
leave to you to decide). I would wager
that Heavenly Bodies is eighty-five
percent aerobics montages and fifteen percent actual story. And again, that’s all well and fine, if all
you’re interested in is watching women exercise. But if that’s the sum total of your desire in
watching this movie, why not just watch any one of the profusion of aerobics
shows that you can watch for free (and in less time) on television?
MVT:
Cynthia Dale may not light the
world on fire with her acting chops, but the woman has a plethora of heart, and
it’s all on display here.
Make or Break: The marathon at the end is what it’s all
about (like the big tournament in almost every movie like this, including The Karate Kid, released the same year),
and it works. Nevertheless, the
filmmakers emphasized so many similar scenes before it, that it robs the climax
of a good deal of its power. So, I guess
that’s kind of damning with faint praise.
Score:
6.5/10
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