Xanadu

Oh Lord. Here I thought the greatest indignity to befall a dancer of Hollywood's Golden Age of Musicals was Fred Astaire's turn in the absurd original Battlestar Galactica.

Then I saw Xanadu.

Poor Gene Kelly. At least Fred Astaire got the reputedly decent Ghost Story as his silver-screen swan song (according to my recollection of its reviews at the time, anyway). For Kelly, on the other hand, Xanadu was his last big-screen appearance. And Xanadu is a mess in so many respects, it's hard to grasp all at once.

It's badly reliant on special effects. This was a huge mistake: the effects must have been cheap-looking even at the time (the aforementioned Battlestar Galactica boasted better effects on what must have been a tighter budget) and, unsurprisingly, have not aged well. A movie that promised a spectacle at the time now looks as ridiculous as Filmation's 1970s Saturday morning live-action TV series. Perhaps Hollywood learned an expensive but valuable lesson here: post-Xanadu musicals have largely eschewed effects in favor of traditional song-and-dance routines.

The apparent attempt to satisfy Kelly-era fans with outbursts of pseudo-'40s music and dancing just looks silly, although one of the featured couples performs some impressively athletic maneuvers. And these moments are preferable to the insipid rock numbers. Hmm. Can I say anything more substantive than "insipid"? ... Um ... no, not really. They don't deserve more thought than I've already given them. When you've bet your musical fortune on Olivia Newton-John, you haven't given your audience much to sing about. (As a Jeff Lynne/ELO fan, I give him/them a pass. I thought they acquitted themselves with as much honor on the soundtrack as was possible under the circumstances.)

(Oh, and about the film's incessant linking of Kelly's character to the 1940s -- didn't anybody making this film know that in real life, his greatest triumphs were in the 1950s? If you're going to hire a legend, shouldn't you know how he got to be one?)

Kelly's trademark athleticism is on display here, and this is one of the few treats the movie offers. To see him gamely skating at the end is to get a whiff of his glory days. His performances are even more impressive when you consider that he was more than twenty years past his prime.

The acting ... well, the acting suits the writing. And the writing is execrable. Remember how some teachers would drop your lowest test score when computing your final grade? Every performer in this fiasco deserves to have it dropped from his or her CV on that same basis. It's simply not possible to judge whether any of them can act just by watching this piece of tripe. I'm sorry to judge the writing so harshly (writers are human too, or so I'm told), but it reeks of opportunism. It was an attempt to link a falling music star (Newton-John) with a recognizable eminence grise (Kelly) in a newly revived niche film genre (the much-despised musical, resuscitated by Saturday Night Fever). Only a true fan of musicals could have pulled this off, and based on the results, it's hard to imagine anybody who worked on this (always excepting Kelly) being such a fan.

[EDIT: removed mention of Newton-John as a TV star]