Here's a highly-belated movie review. Friday night, I watched the 1980 movie Xanadu for the first time. I had seen excerpts from it when it first came out. I'd seen and really enjoyed the 2007 Broadway show based on it. For some reason, I even had a DVD of the film…but I'd never watched it, start to finish. A friend of mine was here and we decided we would.
I think I can explain why I'd never watched it before. When it was in production, you could barely escape the advance publicity. It hadn't even finished shooting and already — its publicists wanted us to believe — the world had embraced it as the greatest movie musical ever…a unique blending of Classic Tradition and Today. "Today" in this case was the era of Roller Disco and other concurrent fads you could sense becoming passé as you heard about them for the first time.
When it finally came out, I felt like I was being ordered to go see it. Sometimes, we don't do something just because we resent someone telling us to do it.
Plus, with that kind of pre-hype, you'd better be damned awesome and most folks I knew said that Xanadu wasn't. But then again, it also wasn't harmful or evil or without hummable, fun moments. It was just a silly movie about nothing of consequence treated as a story of great significance…and 1980 was the time of Apocalypse Now and Norma Rae and Breaking Away and Kramer Vs. Kramer and a lot of "issue" films that made the "non-issue" ones seem even more trivial.
I think I felt sorry for Xanadu. People were dumping on it like the filmmakers had committed mass genocide by not talking about an important issue…like mass genocide. I know I often cringe at the "pile-on" damnation of certain creative works. I felt that way about the recent movie of Cats. This was Cats, people. What were you expecting?
I had a friend — and I haven't seen or talked to her in four decades — who played one of the muses in the film of Xanadu. We were dining one evening in a steak place and couldn't help but hear a too-loud party at the next table. Abetted by alcohol, they were whooping it up about how horrible Xanadu was and the air was thick with schadenfreude.
Not liking a movie is one thing. I've not liked plenty in my days. But this was raw, childish glee that the people who made it were or deserved to be in pain. One guy was taking it personally that "shit like that" gets funded, whereas all the genius movies he obviously could create — every one of them, a surefire Best Picture honoree — do not get made.
I asked my date if she'd like me to call over a waiter to see if we could be reseated farther from the Xanadu-bashing table. She said no, it didn't bother her. But you could tell it did…a lot. If the movie was lousy — and not having seen it, I didn't know if it was or wasn't — it wasn't because of what she'd done. She was proud of what she'd done.
She did tell me about a dancer she knew who auditioned for Xanadu and somehow not gotten hired. Given how many it had employed, that was embarrassing. When the reviews of the film came out, that dancer had not been able to resist calling with some faux sympathy: "Oh, I'm so sorry your movie is a flop!"
I'm not defending bad movies here; just suggesting that often, as per Gilbert & Sullivan, the punishment does not fit the crime. And I long ago got tired of people trying to prove what great, refined taste they have be declaring that almost everything is beneath them. Just let it go. It's just, at worst, a bad movie. You've seen them before, you'll see them again.
And that's kind of how I felt about the film of Xanadu: A couple of great songs. Olivia was adorable. Much of the dancing was great…and it was nice to have a relic of that period and to see Gene Kelly still being Gene Kelly at the age of 68. I didn't hate it but I wasn't furious it got made. I just can't get that incensed over something that inconsequential.