Xanadu

I originally saw "Xanadu" when it was released in 1980. Gene Kelly was in it, so I had to see it. It didn't hurt that Michael Beck was in it as well. Wow - was I disappointed! I love musicals, especially Kelly's, and "Xanadu" really did not appeal to me - at all.

It really isn't a very good movie. It has almost no plot at all and no real antagonist. What little plot there is, I always felt was just lifted from "Down to Earth" (1947) with Rita Hayworth, and "Cover Girl" (1944) with Hayworth, and Gene Kelly (in which he also plays a character named Danny McGuire, which was a nice homage). The soundtrack is great though, and it is nice to see that Kelly can still dance.

Fast forward to 2006. I got a chance to see "Xanadu" again, on a big screen. Specifically, the wonderful Castro Theatre in San Francisco. The print was gorgeous, and the crowd, which filled the theatre almost to capacity, was incredible.

IT WAS SO MUCH FUN!!! The crowd really got into the movie and I just had a blast! What a great experience! The music is still great, and it was a really, really fun movie.

Anyway - "Xanadu" still isn't a "good" movie, but if you can see it under the right circumstances (ie., on a big screen with an audience) it is a great deal of fun.

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.

XANADU is one of the most critically and commercially panned films in Hollywood history, a 'Nouveau Art' musical with Art Deco themes, a weirdly conceived animated interlude, and performances of such widely varying caliber that a viewer might wonder if the actors were all reading from the same script! But all that being said, I would like to offer a minority opinion, and say that I didn't find the film THAT terrible, and there are some aspects of it I actually enjoyed...

First and foremost, it offers the legendary Gene Kelly, in his last musical, as charming and wonderful as ever. As retired musician/businessman Danny McGuire, Kelly has the film's best moments, including a 'classic' song-and-dance scene with Olivia Newton-John and some silly but endearing 'post-disco' routines with the talented young dancers of the cast (including future CONAN star Sandahl Bergman). Seeing him on roller-skates again, leading everyone around the club he builds, to the music of the Electric Light Orchestra, makes one realize just how irreplaceable he is. Kelly could do it all, and with style!

The premise of the film, of a Muse coming from Olympus to inspire an artist, is far-fetched, but had been done on film several times in the past (ONE TOUCH OF VENUS, with Ava Gardner and Robert Walker, and DOWN TO EARTH, with Rita Hayworth, are the examples most often cited), and while Olivia Newton-John is oddly cast in the role, she tackles it gamely, with a smile and a wink, and isn't THAT bad. On the other hand, Michael Beck, best-known as the gang leader in cliched but powerful THE WARRIORS, is totally miscast as the artist she falls in love with. An actor with limited range and no singing or dancing talent, Beck lacks the charisma to pull off the role (one wonders why British pop star Cliff Richard, who voices Beck's animated duet with Newton-John, 'Suddenly', wasn't utilized to play the part).

While the film often veers off in bizarre directions, the 'Battle of the Bands' scene between popular 80s rockers, the Tubes, and a 'Tommy Dorsey/WWII'-style orchestra (as Beck and Kelly envision what the 'look' and 'sound' of their club, XANADU, should be), actually works, and is fun to watch. The entire score, by Barry De Vorzon and John Farrar, and Jeff Lynne (with ELO) is terrific (and made the soundtrack album a hit).

Sure, the ending is hokey, but it was also the same ending of ONE TOUCH OF VENUS and DOWN TO EARTH, so XANADU can't be totally faulted!

All in all, XANADU isn't the WORST film ever made, and if you give it a chance, you might find it a guilty pleasure!

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.

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.