Xanadu
1980 Directed by Robert Greenwald
Synopsis
A Fantasy, A Musical, A Place Where Dreams Come True.
The Greek muses incarnate themselves on Earth to inspire men to achieve. One of them, incarnated as a girl named Kira, encounters an artist named Sonny Malone. With the help of Danny McGuire, a man Kira had inspired forty years earlier, Sonny builds a huge disco roller rink.
Genres
Popular reviews
More-
You know, I'm pretty easy when it comes to musicals. All I really need:
1. A paperthin but pleasant story about finding love and following your dreams.
Check.2. A pretty girl, preferably blonde.
Check.3. A few musical numbers that stick with me. It's best if they send me off looking for the soundtrack immediately after watching the film.
Check.4. Huge dance numbers filled with outrageous colors and lacking in all sense of taste.
Check.5. And when in doubt, throw in a living legend.
Check. (Seriously, Gene Kelly has more talent in his little finger than everyone else in this film, including the lovely and talented Olivia.)A few of the musical numbers are duds, and the acting is generally atrocious. But damn, this movie makes me happy.
…
-
What the fuck was that shit?
-
Watched purely because another web site had set a challenge of watching films beginning with each letter of the alphabet and I needed an X. I couldn't be arsed re-watching the last X Men film, I wanted a first watch, though to be honest I may have seen this as a kid in the 80s. If I had, I probably enjoyed it a lot more as I imagine kids would love it.
Suffice to say its more cheesier than the Cooper's Hill cheese rolling festival and a film in which Olivia Newton John is a painting that comes to life, dancing with a Ready Brek glow around her was never really going to be my kind of thing.
That said,…
-
This must have seemed like a solid gold dead cert at the time. Hot on the heels of Grease, the biggest musical in the history of ever, how could Olivia Newton John's next vehicle fail?
Well, let's start by getting a director who can't direct dancing and has no visual imagination at all. That's usually the best choice when you're making a fantasy musical. Next, let's base the story on roller disco. The kids love roller disco. Can any of the leads roller skate in a way that doesn't make them look uncomfortably constipated? Shut up. Doesn't matter.
The climactic musical number, "Xanadu" itself, is so ham-fistedly directed that it should be taught in school. It's supposed to be the…
-
If you're going into this expecting it to have anything to do with Rush, your Dungeonmaster has played a terrible trick on you.
-
At first I though this was going to be a Xana-don't...but it turned out to be a Xana-du.
Recent reviews
More-
Sonny lost his muse in the 1940's and gave up his dream of starting a nightclub. Danny has yet to find his muse. He paints album covers for record store windows. One day, Sonny meets a beautiful girl who encourages him and Danny to open a nightclub together called Xanadu. That's the plot.
Gene Kelly plays Danny. Kelly starred in Singin' in the Rain. Singin' in the Rain is generally considered to be the greatest Hollywood musical of all time. Xanadu was his last film and is generally considered to be one of the worst Hollywood musicals of all time. It's not. It's superfuckingawesome! Sonny is played by Michael Beck. The year before this was released, he starred in The…
-
I am now truly GAY.
-
Nothing like hosting a bad movie night and then being the only person legitimately enjoying the movie - it wasn't even exciting enough to be a fun bad movie for everyone else, but I kind of really enjoyed it.
-
As a fantasy, it's just glossy, silly and unengaging. But that's ok, most fantasy's are without a vision. As a musical it's EXTREMELY bad. I will give it's always a pleasure to see Gene Kelly, but how the camera "just stays there", lifeless, in scenes of energy and movement.. it's just strange. And the whole film feels like that, lifeless. No wonder this was the film that made Mr. Kelly dispatch from moviemaking.
-
This review reportedly contains spoilers. I can handle the truth.
-
A baffling, fascinating mess of a film, Xanadu is one of those jawdropping reassurances that, sometimes, way too many of the wrong drugs were taken in Hollywood. In a rather sweet idea for a musical (albeit one borrowed from Down To Earth), Olivia Newton-John plays a plucky cosmic muse who inspires a struggling record sleeve painter to live his dreams. Yet this simple concept is wrecked by, uh, just about everything else. There's a total lack of story coherence (apparently much of script was written and improvised on set) and some astonishing misfires in aesthetic decision-making. The camerawork is dull, lifeless; the lighting almost non-existent. Huge numbers of dancers in colorful costumes have rarely looked so bizarrely funereal. The acting…
-
What should be a ridiculous overblown colourful mess of a movie is stymied by the fact that it's hideously ugly - the lighting and cinematography turns everything into a confusing, dark soup of flailing limbs. It's a real shame that this was Gene Kelly's swansong.
-
What the hell did I just watch? There was almost no story at all, maybe threads of a story. This was a boring and bad movie from start to finish. Absolutely not worth a watch.
-
This must have seemed like a solid gold dead cert at the time. Hot on the heels of Grease, the biggest musical in the history of ever, how could Olivia Newton John's next vehicle fail?
Well, let's start by getting a director who can't direct dancing and has no visual imagination at all. That's usually the best choice when you're making a fantasy musical. Next, let's base the story on roller disco. The kids love roller disco. Can any of the leads roller skate in a way that doesn't make them look uncomfortably constipated? Shut up. Doesn't matter.
The climactic musical number, "Xanadu" itself, is so ham-fistedly directed that it should be taught in school. It's supposed to be the…