Xanadu

It was supposed to be the next Tommy or Grease. Instead, it was more like... fuck, it's not like anything. It's 80s roller disco 40s retro mythology clusterbang. It's Xanadu.

So, we open with a mural of the Nine Muses somewhere on Venice Beach springing to life. They all dance, then fly off into various directions in a a streak of neon and legwarmers.

Which begs the question: Where the hell did the other eight Muses go? Did Thalia fly away with a kilo under each arm to help with Stir Crazy and The Blues Brothers? Did Urania flit off to get high with Carl Sagan and inspire Cosmos? Was it Euterpe or Calliope who headed for the Sunset Strip to rock out on the lyre with Eddie Van  Halen? And, my word, which of these poor lasses wound up with Roman Polanski? One of them was played by Sibyl Danning, which means she apparently flitted off to inspire Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, both for good and ill...

Olivia Newton-John is Terpsichore, the muse of dance, given to saying things like "Shakespeare's written sonnets about us. Beethoven's composed music for us. We're  not supposed to feel emotions... Wait! Doesn't anybody care about my feelings?" She rollerglides down the Venice boardwalk in search of a hot dog, a nickel bag or someone she can inspire into opening a nightclub with a nice big dance floor.

... which she finds in one Sonny Malone, a frustrated painter. (Don't ask why a singer is playing a deity of the dance who is inspiring a painter. Mythological sloppiness is to be expected in the movies.) Sonny himself is an artisan of a time long past. A time when, if you wanted an 8x8 foot version of your album cover to hang outside of Tower Records, you had to hire some guy to paint it by hand. And there was still a Tower on Sunset to hang it in front of. And record labels to pay for it all.

Sonny Malone is played by Michael Beck. And this was another reason Xanadu should have gone well: Beck was fresh off of his role as Swann, the war chief of The Warriors. "Whatever happened to that guy?" you've wondered.  And, well, what happened was Xanadu. Now, Xanadu has a sort of epic badness that can be truly entertaining but somehow I doubt that the idea was “I’m gonna make two movies that are total bewildering, facepalming flops that will one day be admired for, well, their facepalming badness.” The sad thing is that Xanadu is not the worst of the pair. That would be Megaforce, which involved Beck and Barry Bostwick cruising around the desert (actually Henderson) on quads wearing silver spandex jumpsuits.

When he’s being the surly artist, he’s pretty good. When he’s debating the nature of dreams with Gene Kelly, he’s okay. But any time he’s interacting with Olivia Newton-John or wearing dolfin shorts and conversing with Zeus in a neon minefield, he’s fucking awful--although who wouldn't be awful doing those things? They should've gotten Gregory Hines, which would at least has left us with some astonishing dance scenes. Or Richard Gere, who would have at least been fun to look at.

As for Miss Olivia Newton-John, well, she’s game, she tries, but she’s not much good. Especially when you consider that Xanadu bascially jacks its plot from the far superior Down to Earth, starring the truly godesslike Rita Hayworth as a Terpsichore who actually could dance supremely well. It also cribs a little from One Touch of Venus, which starred Ava Gardner, 'nuff said. Newton-John is pleasant and pretty but she's not much of a dancer--not next to Kelly, not that anyone ever could be. (Okay, okay, Fred Astaire, the Nichols Brothers, Ann Miller, Eleanor Powell, Hayworth. Or if you wanna go new school, Michael Jackson or Savion Glover. Anyway…) But she is at least essential to the soundtrack. In the movie... she mostly she just has to look pretty and rollerskate through dry ice.

Oh lordy. I had those barrettes. A few sets. I made them with plain ol' goldtone Goodys, two colors of satin baby ribbon and a few beads on the end if you're fancy.

After he's been kissed by a Newton-John and bitches about his lack of inspiration and how no one appreciates his talent and the man hassles him, Sonny meets Gene Kelly. Kelly is wearing a porkpie hat and playing clarinet while sitting on the beach. Kelly still carries himself like a prince. He's a bored, rich ex-jazz musician--wait, rich ex-jazz musician? the film at least has the decency to explain that he invested in real estate with his jazz musician money... or something.

So he agrees to partner up with  Sonny to open a nightclub. Because people just really dig Sonny. Chicks loan Sonny their mopeds, some dude lets him hitch a rollerskate ride on the back of his amazing bus (now that i think of it, so did Steve Gutenberg in Can't Stop the Music) and generally has everyone sitting around talking about how fucking awesome he is. I will not comment how Sonny's proclivity for dolfin shorts and financial reliance on a much older man with bespoke suits and real-estate holdings seems, well...

The scene where they both describe--and, in the world of Xanadu, thus enact--their respective visions of the club is one of the moments in the movie that actually works, in a weird way. Kelly's swinging' Bette Midler/Manhattan Transfer/Kid Creole vision of the 40s melds with Beck's shoulder pads/jumpsuits & synths version of the 80s, as enacted by the Tubes. It's basically a mash-up long before such things had a name.

The, back in the realm of horror, they also have a makeover scene with Gene Kelly, where he tries on a bunch of outfits. At Fiorucci. And then it become a big dance scene. And roller boogie scene. And it's ELO. Excuse me: I need to sit down.

During "Suspended in Time," Olivia sings a powerless ballad in some kind of Tron space mid-shot. No one can endure that treatment: Frank Sinatra barely survived in in The Tender Trap--the protracted mid-shot, not the Tron part. And then there's "Suddenly," which is basically just the audience having to sit through three minutes of "Couples skate only!" I assume that it was part of the contract that every. Single. Song. on the soundtrack be played in. Its. Entirety. Because five minutes out of every ten, Xanadu stops stone dead while an ELO song plays. They even resort to a bizarre animated sequence to find yet another way for Olivia and Sonny to stare soulfully at each other while Jeff Lynne warbles in the background.

Some bullshit about how Olivia is a muse and has to return to Olympus but she loves Sonny but Zeus says no but Hera says okay and Zeus says maybe, who gives a shit, isn't it time for happy hour yet...?

So the club opens. There's a montage of Hopper cocktail waitresses and Nagel go-go girls roller skating in circles to marching-band drums and disco war chants. The Olivia returns for an absolutely bombastic and completely mediocre musical number whose sole raison d' etre seems to be costume changes and genre changes, none of which amount to anything. Not the tiger-striped vinyl, not the fringed white cowgirl, not the beaded headdress and Flash Gordon knockoff, none of it...

Apparently it was a double bill of Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music that inspired the creation of the Razzie Awards.

I recall when this movie came out, the anticipation was huge. I remember sitting around the elementary school cafeteria table while a friend who had finally Seen. It. As soon as we set down our trays and popped open our lunchboxes, we eagerly asked her how it was. "Well [long pause] I liked all of the colors." She did not lack for opinions on other matters, so it became clear that Xanadu was not that all that we had been promised....

The Donny & Marie Star Wars.... Special?

The Star Wars Holiday Special is considered by many to be the Holy Grail of crappy Star Wars kitsch and, oh, it is not. That honor belongs to the Star Wars episode of Donny & Marie. It makes the Holiday Special look like it was scripted by Billy Wilder and directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Unsurprisingly, we open with Marie in Leia drag and Donny Skywalker (in white, stack-heel go-go boots) boogieing through their first excruciating musical number in front of a bunch of glitter-covered risers. R2-D2 and C3-PO wander in, along with Chewbacca and Darth Vader because the producers apparently had a platinum account at Western Costume.

But then things start to get (really) weird: Redd Foxx meanders past a primitive green screen as “Obi Ben Okefenokee,” while Paul Lynde briefly turns up to whine and wave his hands in the air as the Grand Moff Tarkin. But the oddest guest star is a visibly, erm, out of it Kris Kristofferson, wearing aviator shades and leaning against a cardboard rocket ship like it’s the only thing that’s holding him up. He lurches through a half-assed disco cover of “I Want to Take You Higher” (Sure you do, Kris, sure you do.), then a half-dozen Stormtroopers show up, accompanied by a slew of chorus girls in white unitards and motorcycle helmets for an awkward dance routine to Up With People-like renditions of “Get Ready” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” The whole experience takes about thirteen minutes: Ten to watch and three to try to figure out what the hell you just saw.

Disco Godfather

SCHLOCK!!! That's the word for Disco Godfather. It's a ridiculous piece of over-the-top blaxploitation with a heavy dose of drugsploitation and a shot of disco wrapped up with an amusing attempt at martial arts.

Rudy Ray Moore, in a bit of a turnabout from his pimpin' days as Dolemite and Petey Wheatstraw: The Devil's Son in Law here plays an ex-cop turned club owner turned D.A.R.E. booster. His disco gig provides an excuse for endless scenes of folks shaking their polyester-clad asses and, occasionally, busting out the tube socks and roller skates. ("To be a member of the disco squad at the Godfather's you have to get funky and get down.") All the while, Rudy Ray grooves around behind the decks in a variety of chest-exposing spandex jumpsuits, often hollering "Put your weight on it!" sometimes for five straight minutes. I think it's supposed to be a song.

 

"I'm fine, divine and guaranteed to blow your mind!"

But there is a serpent in Rudy Ray's funky paradise: The wack. His basketball star nephew has a run-in with angel dust, causing him to freak out on the dance floor, blow the big game and go to kooky crazy dusthead rehab.

"Bucky, what has you done to yourself?"

"No need to talk to him. He's wacked out."

So the next day Rudy Ray puts on his best silver satin newsboy cap and white carnation boutonniere and goes to dig the scene at the "PCP Unit." (Where the Head Doctor In Charge  looks like an old junkie jazzbo in ultra-dark shades and carries around a clipboard with his script on it. No! Fucking really! If you ever see this movie, look at the doctor's clipboard as he holds it and there's a script with the dialogue highlighted. Which proves that at least there was a script, because i would have sworn a good bit of this is improvised.  Definitely a chunk is dubbed in post, but whatever...)

Rudy Ray takes one look at all these bad actors in ratty wigs bugging their eyes our and jumping on the furniture and decides something must be done! So he looks up his old chief of police and cop buddies and sets out to "come down on the suckas who's producin' this shit!"

One thing we come back to incessantly during Disco Godfather is the bargain-basement surrealism of the angel dust possession scenes. Plastic skeletons, rubber masks, fright wigs, zombie makeup, giant snakes, homicidal Globetrotters, sexy demon ladeez, yo' mama... all emerge from the poorly-lit background and hover threateningly in semi-focus.

So Rudy Ray gets busy. The Godfather gives interviews to a Jayne Kennedy-knockoff lady reporter, gets the cocktail waitresses to go undercover, throws an "Attack the Wack" rally, "makes some contact with my snitch friends" and, of course, kicks butt in some of the most ridiculous "kung fu" battles ever. These are some of the most delightful moments in Disco Godfather, where the movie somehow pulls off being oblivious and self-parodying at the same time.

And, yes, that is a piece of wall art made out of carpet remnants. When it comes to craftin', Martha Stewart ain't got nothin' on Rudy Ray Moore!

The mastermind behind the wack is a local entrepreneur with an afro and a basketball team and who i swear to Christ is Dave Chapelle doing a Billy Dee Williams impression.

 

... and here we have the lab that manufactures, processes and packages all the PCP in Dolemite City. Yup, two guys could easily create "15,000 gallons" of narcotics in such expansive, high-tech facilities....

You know, all this heavy, intricate plotting and intense atmosphere is wearing me out. Let's take another disco break! With wheels! And a fetishy abundance of crotch shots!

But enough filler. Back to the action! Or maybe we'll watch some more praying and singin' over angel dust junkies. Disco Godfather is a firm believer in Jesus steppin' in when the 12 steps don't work.

"Praise the Lord, baby, you gonna be alright!"

Okay, now we're back to the action. Rudy Ray is out for vengeance! He stomps around in loud doubleknit suits and babbles overdubbed tirades about the wack. He and his buddies do a lot of bursting into rooms full of people in wigs and opening up a can of (supermarket-brand) whoop-ass on whoever is nearest the door. ("And Betty! One of the nation's most notorious shoplifters. Bitch, you know I know ya!") Allow me to again remind you that neither he nor anyone else in this film seems to have any actual martial arts skills, so the  kicking and chopping is pretty sloppy. So we've got no actual kung fu masters, but wwe do have this guy, who seems to have taken a few classes and speaks in the weird staccato diction and vaguely Asian accent of a dubbed Shaw Brothers movie.

Rudy Ray gets serious enough to change his three-piece threads and bedazzled jumpsuits for a down-to-business tracksuit with matching knit cap.

 Actually, all the good guys wear sweatsuits. Bad guys wear bellbottoms.

"Hey, what's happenin' man? You need some help?

"This is an angel dust factory!"

"An angel dust factory! Well, let's kick ass then!"

"I can dig it."

A nice touch is that the credits open with "Assistants to Mr. Moore." Because what else are these folks doing but help the creative visions of Rudy Ray Moore take corporeal form? 'Tis truly a great mission indeed. If you're seeking a nice chunk of cray-cray that will put a (disbelieving, indulgent) smile on your face, look no further than Disco Godfather.