Xanadu

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I know I'm risking the start of a flame war, but I have to admit that "Xanadu" really isn't that bad. Oh, I'm not saying it's great or anything. It's not even really good. But I think that it gets picked on for the wrong reason. I have a theory that if "Xanadu" had been released only two or three years earlier, it would have been a lot better received by critics and the public alike. The film's greatest flaw, in my opinion, was its timing. It was a film that celebrated roller-skating and disco-among other fads and fashions-at the time when those fads were on their way out the door. Rather than celebrating them by being the defining cinematic experience it wanted to be, it instead ended up being a eulogy for those fads, or even the last nail in their coffin. Had "Xanadu" made it to theaters even two years earlier, it would have had fared better. Let me put it this way: "Saturday Night Fever" is universally considered to be the defining disco movie and was very successful at the box office and remains comfortably so on video. Now, imagine if that film had been released in 1980 instead of in 1977. Even with John Travolta's Oscar nomination-worthy acting, it is fair to say that it would probably not have done half as well.

"Xanadu" is a remake of the so-so "Down to Earth", with Olivia Newton-John playing a muse who shows up to inspire a struggling young artist and an aging musician (the late, great Gene Kelly, in a not-so-great role). The film tries to make grand, sweeping comparisons between the music of the Forties and the Seventies, attempting to bridge the generation gap and bring some sort of twisted harmony to the world. This is all, of course, one big excuse to feature Newton-John and company in endless musical and dance numbers. Disco shamelessly abounds, roller-skating scenes seem to leap out from nowhere, and the temporal setting of Xanadu even shifts back and forth thirty years a couple of times. The filmmakers, in presumably a last-ditch effort to save this movie, even enlisted the talents of E.L.O. for the bulk of the soundtrack, and Don Bluth for an animated sequence. The director and crew, in an effort to make this a film for everyone, pulled dozens of elements from disparate and eclectic sources, and wound up making a film for no one.

But someone is buying this movie, right? I mean, it's been out on videotape for fifteen years unbroken, has come and gone on laserdisc, and now is making its grand widescreen debut on DVD. It can't be THAT bad, right?

"Xanadu" can best be described as something of a guilty pleasure. Even though the story is weak, the acting is way below par (especially Michael Beck! And he showed so much promise in "The Warriors"!), the effects are laughable, and what little talent actually exists among the cast and crew is all-but wasted, "Xanadu" still has a certain, undefinable...something. If nothing else, the film succeeds as one, long music video for the exceptional soundtrack. One gets the feeling that, had this film been slightly more lucid, it might have enjoyed some of the cult success that "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" has reaped from its midnight showings around the world. But, alas, "Xanadu" is relegated to the status of a movie that you'd never admit in public to liking, yet whose VHS tape you've kept hidden in your closet for years.