precursor to MTV era?

Say what you will about “Xanadu” but it has a kind of cheesy whimsy which is infectious in small doses. For me I guess I wish it just went into something that felt a little more cinematic than what it ultimately became- a collection of music videos there to cynically sell a soundtrack. In fact the movie brings up a question- was it an influence on the MTV generation of selling music through lip-synced video art?


The flimsiness of the conceit here can be seen right in the opening scene, as an artist rips up his idea and the paper flies out the window, landing right by a mural which magically unleashes the women within. The women dance and lip sync to some song about being alive before zooming off, Powerpuff Girls style, with a different colored flash of light behind each one. It’s inventive…and I have no clue what’s going on.


One of those women is named Kira (Olivia Newton-John), who roller skates around the boardwalk and has a habit of dissolving and reappearing in people’s apartments, workplace, ect at a moment’s notice. She keeps popping into the life of Sonny (Michael Beck), a disillusioned painter resigned to recreating album covers for the corporate world when he really wants to branch out and create something of his own.


Who is this woman who keeps kissing him and then skating away to swerve through abandoned buildings? Maybe Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) knows. He’s a former Jazz band musician Sonny meets while playing the clarinet on the beach. Turns out McGuire’s time as a musician was augmented by a mysterious woman who then disappeared and his career was never the same after that. In a cool looking fantasy sequence that melds the present with the past- McGuire remembers singing and dancing with her, and its Kira.


McGuire wants back into show biz and Danny wants his art to mean something and so both men team up to turn an old auditorium into a club called Xanadu, though “WTF” would be a more appropriate title. In another dream sequence, both men lay out their plans for the club, seemingly trying to turn it into a melding of 40’s bandstand and 80’s metal/rock and roll. Yeah, “WTF” is the wayyyyy better title.


What’s more confusing about these musical sequences is that they’re flamboyant and cartoonish without ever being enjoyable musically. In fact they seem detached from music. The hoofers and the rock band enthusiasts lip-sync, terribly, to these songs but even as choreography it looks like a bunch of people doing what they feel in bizarre fashion- one guy even picks up a woman and plays her like a guitar- than actually feeling the music.


John and Beck have similar problems. Neither sings so much as allows the music to be played over them. I guess singing and roller skating together was too much of a challenge. Director Robert Greenwald and choreographers Kenny Ortega and Jerry Trent try to dress it up sometimes in even weirder ways like a soundstage with a floating exhaust chimney, collapsible desert, and rain. What?!!!!


I’m pretty sure the filmmakers were hoping that musical montages could carry the story through a weak script. Another where John and Beck suddenly turn animated, dancing through the night before suddenly becoming fish, reminds us of some later romantic work of movies like “Aladdin” and “Fern Gully”. The problem is it’s way better than the entirety of live action scenes where they both come off like smiling dullards.


Greenwald is obsessed with lights in this movie- flashing ones, sparkly ones, ones that engulf characters in enchantment. At one point, after we find out Kira is a muse, the film takes us to heaven, which looks like “Tron” gone disco. I’m not sure he knew what kind of film he’s making- all these scream enchanted fantasy but then his awfully dated looking break-apart scene transitions look like they belong in really old sci-fi.


Few moments in this movie really work. When John, who is lovely looking, actually does get to sing, when Kelly gets to dance, when the montage makes a certain amount of sense. But mostly it looks like everything has been thrown together in the hopes of possibly making anything stick. That the soundtrack became a bigger success than the movie is no surprise. The rest is all narrative chaos.