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....
