Xanadu

A word of advice to any movie producer: if you have a big-budgeted production that you hope will become a hit, don't hire a director whose only previous experience is on TV. Director Robert Greenwald had directed only TV movie dramas before being assigned to this job, and it shows painfully. The camera either stays still or moves slowly and gracefully, when they should have flung it around and experimented with camera angles to create some oomph for the movie-going audience to feast upon. The only department that really tried here was the art department that created the arty scene-shifts with the accompanying sound effects, and the neon-colored special effects flashing around Kira and the other muses. Don Bluth also provided an animated sequence that offers the only magical moment in the whole film - makes you wish the whole movie had been made in the same style. That would have had so many advantages: the whole superficial story would have been easier to take for instance. Michael Beck would have had a movie career, and we would have been spared from watching "Oh-I'm-so-cute-but-so-poor-at-moving-my-legs-around" Olivia in a second film (or maybe not).

That said, I'm particularly ashamed to admit that I actually like "Xanadu". Very much. The music is the main reason - years before I had seen this film or even heard of it, I had heard "Magic" in the radio, and managed to get a two-minute snippet of it on tape, thinking it was an Abba song I hadn't heard before (no, I'm not an Abba fan - they have a few good songs, but I hate their albums). One day years later, "Xanadu" was on TV in the hotel room I stayed at during a holiday in Sweden - and I happened upon the very scene where "Magic" is heard, where Sonny meets Kira for the first time. Sadly, I couldn't stay to watch the rest, but I immediately wanted to catch the film from beginning to end. Now I have it on tape, and I regularly pop it on my VCR and enjoy the pretty photography, beautiful music, and the irresistibly corny 1980 kitsch "Xanadu" is so chock-full of. A guilty pleasure of the highest magnitude - after all, I'm a nostalgia freak and always will be one.

I was 12 when I saw this movie and loved it. I would dream of being a magically glowing roller skating being from another realm for a couple years after the movie. And that's the point of this comment. There is magic there for the taking if you're looking for some. But if you'd rather sit there with your pencil and steno pad, notating every intellectual criticism you can brainstorm; I'm sure you can come up with a lot.

You get to see Olivia skate and sing with Gene Kelly. There are some great songs by legendary pop band Electric Light Orchestra. There is some great music and a fun parallel universe available any time you want to put your pencil down.

It is best to fast-forward through the talking segment of XANADU and watch only the musical numbers, which ,mopsty of which are pretty terrific. This remake of a remake of a Rita Haworth movie has Gene Kelly and Michael Beck joining forces to open a rollerskating arena on a grand scale. To help them, a Muse played by Olivia Newton-John shows up in human form. She ain't no Haworth (or Ava Gardner In the first remake), but she tries hard and has a great song and dance number with Kelly. Otherwise, she is mostly window dressing. All of the acting is high school-level, with the talentless Beck totally miscast, although Kelly lends this often loony movie some class. The soundtrack is what makes XANADU a classic, of course.

Confessions time. I first saw this film in the theater in 1980 when my best friend turned 13. It was the highlight of our celebration, as was singing along to the soundtrack when we got home. Believe me, we really got into it!

Let's be honest. Xanadu is no Academy Award winner and it doesn't pretend to be. It's an attempt at a musical that's somewhat successful thanks to Olivia Newton-John and Jeff Lynn's ELO. Listen to most of the songs today and you can definitely still enjoy them. How Gene Kelly got hooked into this is beyond me but he looks like he's having a good time.

The concept is pretty simple. Painter Sonny (Michael Beck) teams up with Gene Kelly to open up Xanadu, a "radical" new club with the best of the old and new. Add into the mix Kyra (OJN), a Greek muse who comes along to make the dream come true. She's gorgeous, can dance, sing and probably make julienne fries. Naturally, Sonny's in love with her and soon, the trouble arises. Kyra, as a muse, can't hang out on earth with mortals forever. She has to go on to her next mission (dreamer).

Okay, so Beck is a somewhat lame hero. But when we were 13, we bought into it. And the angst, love and music were all a teen could want. The one scene we all loved was when the Glenn Miller-era musicians/dancers met up with the oh-so-rad rockers.

Of course, seeing it as a 35-year-old woman, I groan to look at the fashions we were ga-ga for then (esp. the velour tops on the men). The roller boogie aspect is particularly shaming but at the time, it was indeed all the rage. But you know, it brings back some good memories and the songs stand up today pretty well.

Xanadu is a guilty pleasure I indulge in now and then like Ben and Jerry's. And my best friend is still my best friend! We both love Xanadu.

I was amazed to discover that the director of this legendary fiasco is the same Robert Greenwald who would go on to make several shrewdly observed documentaries nearly a quarter century later - "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism", "Uncovered: The War on Iraq", "Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties". What surprises me even more is how in its sheer, misguided exuberance one can just giggle at the studio mindset that came up with the hilariously awful concept and resulting production. On one hand, "Xanadu" is like passing by a car accident...you can't help but stare. On the other, you have to celebrate the fact that it is indeed unique and that we will never see a musical fantasy extravaganza as bizarrely conceived again...hopefully.

A mishmash of surreal, forehead-slapping elements that never really congeal, the 1980 movie's fanciful storyline centers on Sonny Malone, a struggling LA commercial artist tired of recreating album covers on canvas for a record company. He is visited by Kira, one of nine muses from ancient Greece, who come to life from a Venice Beach wall mural (set amusingly to ELO's "I'm Alive"). She inspires Sonny to partner with Danny McGuire, a wealthy eccentric whom she may have inspired when he was a big band clarinetist with his own supper club in New York 35 years earlier. Together, they decide to take the dilapidated, art-deco Pan Pacific Auditorium and turn it into a roller disco club called Xanadu. If that doesn't sound preposterous enough, the cardboard dialogue, overdone Vegas-style sets and cheesy special effects compound the absurdities exponentially.

At her virginally pretty peak, the florescent-lighted Olivia Newton-John plays Kira in the same wide-eyed manner she displayed as Sandy in "Grease". That she is able to sing, dance and skate with some ease is a pleasant albeit limited surprise. Looking like the lost Bee Gee, a wooden Michael Beck is a blank slate as Sonny, delivering lines as if playing a romantic lead amounts to an alien encounter. As Danny, the 68-year old Gene Kelly is simultaneously celebrated and humiliated as his character is ridiculously drawn in very broad strokes. He provides the film's one unequivocally lovely moment as he shows his still-fluid movements dancing with a uniformed Newton-John on the evocative big-band number, "Whenever You're Away From Me". Between her smooth singing and Kelly's soft-shoe dexterity, it's quite magical. Unfortunately, later on, Kelly goes through a series of color-challenged pimp outfits in the silly costume number set to ELO's toe-tapping "All Over the World".

But Kelly is not the only victim here as silly moments abound - a hilariously overdone 1945-meets-1980 musical fantasy extravaganza, "Dancin'", featuring 80's rock band, the Tubes, and outlandish, Solid Gold-type choreography; and there are a couple of gooey pas de deux numbers between Newton-John and Beck - one amid rising palm trees and other props set to "Suddenly" and the other set to ELO's "Don't Walk Away" with the pair wackily transformed into fish and lovebirds in a Don Bluth cartoon sequence. The most spectacularly inane moments are saved for last - the tacky final production number with a split-screen Kelly skating and Newton-John singing the title tune as she goes through a gamut of irrelevant musical genres and variety revue costumes.

The pacing of this movie feels very off and the editing choppy, as the 93-minute movie alternately skitters and drags along coming to a dead halt with Newton-John's overlong number in Tron-like heaven on "Suspended in Time". By the time the movie mercifully ends, one feels the same way an audience member felt watching "Springtime for Hitler" in "The Producers" - utter disbelief yet an unexplainable giddiness about how ludicrously it was all presented. I have to admit some of the music is damnably catchy, for example, "Magic". By the way, I saw this movie not on DVD but on the big screen in a pristine print at the fully packed Castro Theater in San Francisco as part of a roller-disco midnight madness program, and the crowd went wild at every absurdity. I have no doubt that this is the optimal way to see this movie.