It is not only a funny movie, but it allows a great amount of joy for anyone who watches it.

Watch something else. There are very few redeeming qualities to this film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

On a whole, I went into Flashdance as a fan of dance films. I love dance films, I really truly do, but there comes a time where a dance film becomes a music video, and Flashdance has just crossed that thresh hold.Jennifer Beals, playing the lovable and very talented Alex, is one of the only highlights of this film. She is very good at what she does and quite endearing, but her appearance as the main character doesn't make up for the fact that this film is pretty bad in many other ways.The prominent men in Alex's life are creepy, and she falls in love with the one who follows her home in his car, buys her way into an audition, and generally just uses his power as her boss over her. The film itself lacks a majority of a plot, and the exposition needed to explain Alex's existence simply isn't there. Why does she want to dance? How are these people she spends time with related to her? How old is she in relation to her partner? Why should we care about her story? It's bad to come out of a film and realise that you haven't really been impacted by any of the characters' stories.The continuity is messy. There are cuts where there shouldn't be and chronologically, everything is a bit of a disaster.However, the dancing is very good, and the soundtrack is awesome. This film could be worse.

Released in 1983, "Flashdance" is a drama/music/romance film starring Jennifer Beals as, Alex Owens, an 18 year-old welder in Pittsburgh who dreams of being a professional dancer and longs to be accepted into a prestigious school. She dances at a nightclub in her spare time, which is contrasted by the strip club across the street, owned by a sleazebag who tries to lure the respectable dancers into his seedy lair (Lee Ving). One of her friends aspires to be a figure skater (Sunny Johnson) and another friend a stand-up comedian (Kyle T. Heffner). Meanwhile her tall, dark and handsome boss takes a liking to her (Michael Nouri). This is an entertaining dance flick with the requisite early 80's soundtrack. All the dance sequences were performed by the uncredited French dancer Marine Jahan, who later sued the producers for not crediting her (the brief break-dancing scene was done by a dude). While the wide-eyed Beals and Jahan are in top shape and comely enough, I favor Sunny (the skater).I was impressed by the quality characterizations for a relatively short sports movie. I call it a "sports movie" because that's essentially what it is – "Rocky" with a female protagonist and dancing instead of boxing. I also like the Pittsburgh locations. Despite my positive feelings, the less-popular "Heavenly Bodies," which came out 9½ months later and stars cutie Cynthia Dale, is superior IMHO. The film runs 95 minutes and was shot in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. GRADE: B

It takes practice to probe ourselves for insight of how we felt about something, it's not easy. Easier to numb ourselves, watch and forget it afterwards, but in this way we never really know anything. This is also in a roundabout way the point behind musicals, easy to be numbed, takes practice to probe and push yourself to create something that is true.The enemy of the protagonist in the musical or dance film then is compromise, mediocrity. It's the nagging worry that life will never amount to something, it will be drowned in routine—the antidote is dance, love, staging the circumstances that will permit purity of expression. In the musical this usually took the shape of showmen and women fighting to stage a show that sublimates the difficulties, this is also the case here, but with a twist.A final show is promised early on, a dance audition that makes or breaks her future (she thinks), failing which she's going to become just another 9 to 5 person chasing after the next bill. The place is glum Pittsburgh, she works in a factory by day. Around her we see the people who have been numbed by failure, lost their color—the failed comedian, her ice-rink dancer friend who ends up on the floor of a sleazy titty bar after a bad performance.They could have done something here. A bleak urban landscape instead of Broadway, the factory as the place where self is constructed to be only another cog in the machine—and yet in this place, dance, expression, sexuality. Her latenight show (she's an exotic dancer by night) struggling to find purity and truth in the midst of cheap thrills, still exhilarating in spite of how viewers consume it. Can dance become routine? Does it matter how the viewers see it?Their twist was something else. The final show is always postponed and the fight to stage it and dream to be someone are dredged from a pseudo Cassavetes desperation about life instead of using the snappy cadence of the musical. A bit of dance in the beginning and end and the whole middle is an hour of wallowing. The idea must have been, first make the viewer bleed, serve us 'reality' instead of a musical fairytale.But what I see is no less of a fairytale. A materialism about the difficulties but when it comes to the last release, the dance audition, we go back to the snappy, idealized Hollywood dance we expected all along. She triumphs of course. An awestruck committee member claps childishly at how good. The slice- of-life was merely an idealized style, a trope rather than commitment, so that it manages in one swoop to kill both the fun and the honesty. Terrible.

Last thing Flashdance page needs is another review, but I felt so compelled to write one, and I will keep it short. As someone not even born in the 80s I have only heard about Flashdance, but I knew the song before watching the movie. Sure the storyline feels sappy and the dialogue at times is very cliché; I don't want to give any spoilers I rather suggest you watch it before reading others' comments to get a feel of it yourself. But I guess what draws you in is not only the amazing song selection that works so well with the movie's rhythm but also Alex's character overall. She is very relatable, dignified and so much soaked into her own world of dreams that she takes you there with her. Here as far as the acting goes, I can say that Beals does a fine job; you can tell she feels Alex in her bones. I loved how comfortable Alex seemed in her own skin and surroundings meanwhile feeling isolated and lost. Would I watch it again? Maybe just to watch Alex's character and see some of the dance sequences. Yet, I recommend watching it to everyone else, as it is already a part of pop culture history.