Xanadu

While doing research for a game, I came across a poster for a movie I had never seen before and was immediately captivated by it. Diving deeper into the hole, it turns out the woman on the poster was Olivia Newton-John, most famous to me for being one of the stars of the awful 1978 movie Grease.

If I see a pretty lady on poster with crazy hair, you have my attention.

I’d been told Grease was really good. What I assume people meant was that the songs were really catchy, but the rest of it was a hot pile of garbage with all the characters being irredeemable vessels of nastiness. Initially Olivia Newton-John’s character Sandy was the only character who was actually a decent person, but the catchy show-tunes got to her in the end too and she became a scumbag like the rest of them.

Apparently The Breakfast Club was a good movie too, but the people that told me that were wrong, and this time they didn’t have any catch songs to hide behind. So the general consensus on movies before my time is that I have to not listen to what people say about them.

Xanadu was the movie I was now fascinated with finding more about it. It was hated by the critics. It was hated by Universal, who were the studio that made it. And it was one of the films that brought the Golden Razzberry’s into existence. Everyone says this film is bad. But it’s got a good poster, and I’ve now ended up watching a clip from the film - a musical number titled Xanadu - about 20 times.

I wanted to watch more, but it wasn’t on any streaming services, so I did what any sane person would do and handed £13 over to Jeff Bezos so he could get one of his lads to bring the movie to my house so I could watch it (£21 actually, with a 10-pack of Jelly Tots to get over the £20 threshold for free delivery).

The film opens with some titles which is the Earth spinning in space and some words popping up over the top of it. Universal Presents. Olivia Newton-John. Gene Kelly - a name I recognise but couldn’t tell you anything about. Then the film opens with a man playing the clarinet and some more text appears saying “also starring” because we can’t just show the planet spinning the entire time - there’s action to get to. Painting action. Painting action by the painting man. Painting action by the painting man who isn’t really that good at painting.

That’s not even me saying it - he agrees. He rips one of his drawings up and throws it out the window. There’s then several shots of paper flying through the air, which for some reason they decided to do with CGI - in 1980 - and it doesn’t look very good, because it’s CGI in 1980. The setup kind of feels like a Disney Channel Original Movie.

The paper lands in front of a mural of some women, and then these women start to come to life and dance for some reason. They’re also outlined with a neon glow. I’m not worried about the neon, I just want to know why they’ve come to life and why they are dancing. As the audience, we can hear ELO singing what I think is called “I’m Alive”, but can these girls hear it too?

During my previous bits of research, I know that ELO - famous in my world for being used in the soundtrack for a 2006 episode of Doctor Who that everybody hates - did the music for this movie. People are wrong about that episode of Doctor Who as well. It’s pretty good up until the end, and I think most people remember how it ended and have retroactively decided the rest of the episode was like that.

The girls then run off in opposite directions and suddenly gain super speed, disappearing like The Flash does in the TV show, *checks notes* The Flash. But they don’t stop in the corridor for some chat like “But, Barry, you’re the fastest person alive. How can the villain of the week be faster than you. Again?” and instead blast into the sky - now in the same direction - like the 90s Power Rangers. This movie is a decade ahead of its time. Or Power Rangers was a decade behind.

One of the lights then heads down into the city, and Sandy from Grease then appears (oh, yeah, she was one of the dancers that came out of the mural) but she’s now wearing roller skates and skates through some pigeons before skating right up to a man, kissing him without his permission, and then skating off again (I think the man is the painter, but it’s actually been about 20 minutes since I last saw him, since right after seeing the CGI paper, I decided I had to commit to writing this so went to get my laptop to type everything above this part out).

The man rightly says “What the?”, but does not report sexual harassment because this is 1980 and those kinds of things don’t get reported. Painter Man then meets up some painter friends and gets mad at them because he doesn’t like painting. His boss tells him no more “artsy-and-craftsy” stuff, which is a pretty dumb thing to tell someone who you’ve literally employed to paint.

He then picks up an album cover which has Sandy from Grease on it, and he recognises her. Not as Sandy from Grease, which is weird it was a mega-hit just 2 years earlier, but as the girl who kissed him earlier. He goes to ask around town to see if anyone knows who she is and then heads back to the spot where she kissed him. Presumably because of the whole criminals return to the scene of the crime thing.

Painter Man - his name is Sonny or Sunny - then goes to the beach and meets the Clarinet Man. They have a chat, and then Sandy from Grease appears. Painter Man borrows a bike from some girls and gives chase along a footpath and he ends up driving off the edge of a pier. Sandy then teleports back to the Command Centre because Zordon has detected an emergency in Angel Grove.

Back on dry land, Painter Man bumps into a guy whose van he painted, and the van driver offers to give him a ride to wherever he wants to go. Instead of getting in the van, he clings on to the back of it and is now for some reason wearing roller skates. It must be a magical power in this universe to conjure up roller skates out of nowhere.

The van drives past an abandoned theatre which just so happens to be on the album cover Painter Main saw earlier and he decides to detach himself from the van and take a look round. He walks next to a sign that says no trespassing, and decides the best course of action is to trespass. Inside he sees Sandy skating around piles of boxes. He attempts to strike up a conversation with her but she keeps vanishing like a ghost. Before she vanishes for the last time, she tells him her name is Kira.

Painter Man’s job is replicating album covers in a bigger size for shop displays, and he is painting the album cover when his boss berates him because his work is “too good”. Boss man’s reasoning is capitalism. A good job doesn’t make any money, but a bad job does.

The movie also has some interesting transitions between scenes. It’s not a simple cut, or a Star Wars wipe, but some weird rectangular effects that look like you’d find in Windows Movie Maker. But Windows Movie Maker doesn’t exist yet, so clearly Microsoft took inspiration from here.

Clarinet Man shows up again and takes Painter Man to his house so they can listen to some music, and Painter Man see’s Kira in a picture inside a book. Clarinet Man goes “that’s me!” during one of the songs, and then mentions he had a thing for the singer who just disappeared one day. Painter Man leaves and then Clarinet Men starts speaking to himself before he has a flashback.

This flashback involves him sitting down in the present day on the left of the screen, and then the flashback taking place at 50% opacity on the top right. There is a band with Kira singing, and then Clarinet Man stands up and starts singing, walking towards the flashback. The Clarinet Man and Kira are then both ghosts, before they they fully take physical form in a now-empty room. The two of them dance. But not with roller skates, because this song has a tap-dancing sequence. Which they failed to synchronise the images with the tapping.

There is also some whistling, but it is unclear where this is coming from. Presumably there’s a kitchen next door and he’s left the kettle on. Clarinet Man picks Kira up and spins her around, and then suddenly everything reappears in the room and Kira vanishes. The man seems confused, and it’s a shame that Painter Man has left because he’s clearly having some mental episode and needs care.

Painter Man is painting the album cover again when Kira shows up. He takes her into a dark room which has something that looks like a TARDIS console in the middle, and they both skate over to it. Yeah, they’ve got their skates back again. He activates the TARDIS and they start skating around a rooftop set. They somehow defy the laws of physics while making their way over to a desert set. After sitting down on a park-bench, a giant Dalek appears behind them, although a sign that comes into shot makes it a bit clearer that it’s the front of a train. All sense of jeopardy is lost when it disappears in a cloud of smoke for some reason. It seems the only point of the giant Dalek was to get them off the park bench.

The boss man then appears inside the TARDIS, and Painter Man and Kira quickly make a getaway. Out on the street they are no longer wearing skates - or carrying them - and she takes him to the old theatre. Clarinet Man’s deal is he’s always wanted to open a club, and Kira convinces Painter Man that this is the place so he returns the next day with Clarinet Man. Both of them walk past the no trespassing sign and it turns out that the front door is just open, which makes me wonder why Painter Man had to sneak in round the back last time.

Clarinet Man starts envisioning what he wants to do with the place - taking it back to the 40s with a swing band - but Painter Man tells him that it’s the 80s now and should be home to some rock and it keeps cutting between the visions of the two. It then gets stuck in the 40s for a whole musical number, and I do not care for the 40s so was desperate for it to get back to the 80s section. When it happened, a woman was tied up with telephone cables so that probably explains why cordless is a thing.

The two visions then merge - the 80s band and dancers sliding in from the left, and the 40s coming in from the right, which is a fantastic political metaphor about old people. There was definitely a lot of ambition in this sequence, and it’s a shame that some of it comes off as not great.

Clarinet Man decides he is going to buy the place but wonders what he is going to call it. Kira appears again and starts reciting a poem or a song or something which mentions the word Xanadu, which Clarinet Man decides to use. She introduces herself, and he is confused because he seems to remember her but decides he is mistaken.

Painter Man confronts his boss and does an impersonation of his boss firing him, so he… fires himself? He goes off to have drinks with Kira, and tries to kiss her but she does not consent and doesn’t let him, meaning she’s got some real double standards issues. She tells him that she lives with her sisters and is really cryptic with her answers. They then kiss and suddenly turn into a Disney cartoon.

There’s a song playing over the cartoon, and Disney Painter Man tries to kiss Disney Kira but she refuses again, presumably because another kiss would end the cartoon sequence and then they both turn into fish because they are now underwater. They jump out the water and turn into birds. They turn back into cartoon humans again and kiss before it fades to black.

Clarinet Man insists that when his club opens that he gets to do the first dance, and Kira tells him he needs something good to wear so the two young ones take their senile grandfather to what is clearly a circus to find some clothes. Panning down from a giant painting of a woman, her legs split apart and Clarinet Man jumps out from between them, but his grandchildren do not approve. Grandad then skates through the shop because he has skates now.

At the end of the shopping for clothes musical sequence, the club is apparently nearly ready to open. Clarinet Man is nervous because he hasn’t had an opening night since 1945, and Kira tells him to just remember 1945 and I am fully prepared for a war flashback that never happens.

Painter Man tells Kira that he loves her, and she says she loves him but she shouldn’t because she’s actually a daughter of Zeus that was only sent as a muse to make Xanadu happen. He doesn’t believe her so to prove it she puts on the TV where the characters all start breaking the fourth wall to talk to him. She then surrounds herself with neon and vanishes.

Painter Man is depressed and Clarinet Man finds him at the beach. Clarinet Man tells him to pull himself together otherwise he’ll be sat on the same rock for over 30 years. Painter Man skates off and comes across the mural where his ripping up paper landed at the start of the movie. After taking a long look at it, he then decides to propel himself towards it and ends up Platform 9¾-ing his way into a neon dimension where Kira appears.

Kira tells him he can’t be here and he needs to leave otherwise he’ll be trapped. He then talks to Zeus who sounds like David Dickinson. Zeus is just a disembodied voice, reading lines straight from the script, who insists that Painter Man goes away. Kira’s mum - also a disembodied voice - wonders if maybe they should let Kira go with him, but Zeus doesn’t care and Painter Man is forced out of the neon dimension. Kira sings a song before her parents decide she can go.

The club then opens with Clarinet Man leading a group of skaters round, because the club is not a place with a 40s swing band or an 80s rock band, but is actually a roller disco. After a few minutes of skating round and dancing, and a lot of drumming but no signs of any actual drums, Kira appears to kick off the bit of the film I’ve seen at least 20 times already this past week, which once again makes me question why Modern Family never did a spin on this because Kira looks just like Julie Bowen.

There’s then a sequence of other musical numbers led by Kira. The first is a simple tap dance, then there’s a rock song where she tells everyone they are losers but the crowd seem to love it, then it goes all country, before Kira comes out as an alien princess before randomly transforming back into one of the dresses she wore earlier in the film. The dancers then all vanish, before Kira does as well.

Painter Man has been watching on and is upset that Kira has vanished again, and then goes to sit down with Clarinet Man. Clarinet Man asks for someone to fetch him a drink and Kira hands it over.

And that’s it. That’s the movie.

It’s nowhere near as bad as I was led to believe. I’d give it 6/10. Both the other movies I mentioned at the start - Grease and The Breakfast Club - are worse. I’d never watch them again, but I definitely want to watch this again, without pausing to write about what I’d just seen.

The way the ending sequence was put together is very symbolic of the movie as a whole - jarringly disjointed. At times it feels like they lost pages of the script (maybe the writer tore it up and threw it out the window, which is probably how the start of the film came about).

I hadn’t read anywhere that it was just going to straight up become a Disney animation for a couple of minutes for no apparent reason, and I was questioning what Jeff had slipped into the Jelly Tots he’d sent me.

Kira serves her purpose - as a muse - as Clarinet Man has wanted to do something and getting Painter Man to convince him to open a club has done that. She’s kind of failed from Painter Man’s perspective though because even though he always wanted a big project, he doesn’t seem content in having redecorated an entire building.

Painter Man’s relationship with Kira is not convincing. While I was watching it, I knew that Clarinet Man reminded me of someone and it wasn’t until the credits had ended that I realised he was reminding me of the neighbour character in Gremlins whose house gets ploughed into. Not because of the ploughing, or his reappearance in Gremlins 2, but because he’s an older character that lived through the war who is imparting his wisdom onto a younger character.

The musical sequences must have taken ages to put together, and they mostly pull them off, which isn’t surprising since one of the choreographers is High School Musical legend Kenny Ortega. Most of the songs are OK, although my favourite is the one I’d already seen coming in.

I’d like to know if stuff did get cut, and that’s why some stuff doesn’t really seem to fit together that well. Why did none of Kira’s sisters - the other dancers from the mural - show up in the neon dimension to convince Zeus instead of having two disembodied voices arguing?

And most importantly - where did they keep getting skates from?