Xanadu Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I think we can all agree that the 1980 roller-disco romance Xanadu isn't exactly what most people would call the height of film making achievement. But as a 5-year-old girl (yeah, I watched movies at a really young age -- strange, I know), it was possibly the best thing I had ever seen. The story of a young artist named Sonny (played by Michael Beck) slaving away recreating album covers (is that even a job?) and the muse who inspires him to pack it in to start the roller disco of his dreams may have been a huge success on the Billboard charts, but the film barely broke even at the box-office -- my god, the spandex budget alone would have bankrupted the production. Of course, none of that mattered to me as I watched Olivia Newton-John glide across the floor to the tunes of E.L.O.

So in a movie chock full of guilty pleasures, the scene in which Gene Kelly and Beck envision their perfect club is by far my favorite. Combining a big band sound with the new wave rock of The Tubes may sound like a horrible idea on paper, but when you watched those worlds collide on stage it took two great songs and turned them into one. guess you could say this was my introduction to the mash-up.

Xanadu Fun Facts:

• The film was an unofficial remake of the 1947 film Down to Earth starring Rita Hayworth.
• John Wilson was inspired to create the Razzie Awards after catching Xanadu playing on a 99-cent double-feature with Can't Stop the Music.
• Andy Gibb was originally cast to play Sonny.
• Xanadu was Gene Kelly's last musical performance.

Dancin'

Among the perks of being a sought-after Oscar-winning screenwriter is, apparently, the ability to fourwall a movie theater for two weeks and play a bunch of your favorite films for an appreciative audience. That's exactly what Juno's Diablo Cody is doing at LA's New Beverly Cinema from today through July 24th, and it won't come as any surprise to Cody's admirers that the lady's got good taste. Her slate includes reliable classics (Stripes, Pretty in Pink), off the wall genre picks (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors), some culty fun (Wet Hot American Summer) and the expected shout-out to Juno director Jason Reitman.

Previous guest programmers at the New Beverly have included Edgar Wright, Eli Roth and Joe Dante. Cody will introduce some of the films herself, and the theater's MySpace page promises "many guest appearances."

Kudos to Movie City News for coming across this. Check out the entire schedule after the jump -- it's really an inspired slate of picks. She's got a nose for filmmaking that's smart and unabashedly mainstream, as both Juno and this film festival proves.

My friends, I just don't know. Falling in love with a real atrocity is a mystery for me. It's not all about pathetically proving my self-worth by laughing at someone else's failed effort: "better to have never made a feature film at all than to make a monstrosity like this! Haw haw! Oh, I'm so very superior." I know I ought to be saving my limited spare time for masterpieces instead of outlandish dreck. But I still have one particular friend who knows where to find this stuff, and we sit side by side on a couch and laugh ourselves into hypoxia. Companionship is part of the experience. But so is the out of body experience ... it's like my brain is trying to reject the very message the eyeballs are trying to convey to it.

There are a few classic films that I simply refused to rent while growing up, specifically for the reason that I knew I should see them for the first time on a big screen. Of these, I managed to see both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner in a theater, while others, such as Lawrence of Arabia and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, were on television too often to ignore them on the small screen first. One film that I'm still dying to see in a theater is Terrence Malick's Badlands. A few years ago I actually went to a special screening of the film in Connecticut, but it was disappointingly (understatement) projected from a DVD copy. Then two months ago it played one show at NYC's IFC Center, but I had to miss it for another engagement.

Last week Entertainment Weekly presented an article/photo gallery titled "23 Movies You'd Like to See on the Big Screen," which lists these kinds of films (there's actually many more than 23 cited), most of which should ONLY be seen on the big screen, as they were originally meant to be. The list includes obvious epic choices like 2001, Lawrence of Arabia, Gone With the Wind, The Greatest Show on Earth and The Ten Commandments, as well as other classics, like Malick's Days of Heaven, Casablanca, Once Upon a Time in the West, Star Wars, High Society, Halloween, Singin' in the Rain, To Kill a Mockingbird, Psycho, Oklahoma!, The Music Man, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Searchers, Stagecoach and The French Connection.

When I was a kid, I watched all the awards shows ... except the Tonys. Even when I was involved in theater as a teenager I wasn't a follower of Broadway. And I lived an hour away from Manhattan. But today's youths may be more interested in tuning in to the 2008 Tony Awards, because everyone's favorite boy wizard is among the presenters. Daniel Radcliffe will likely be there solely to promote his Broadway debut this fall, in Equus, but that shouldn't deter fans of the Harry Potter films, the latest of which, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, also opens in the fall. Despite the significance of Radcliffe's role in Equus (remember those sexy photos?), Radcliffe will presumably be dressed fully and sharply.

Other presenters include Laura Linney, Alec Baldwin, Marisa Tomei and Radcliffe's costar in both the Equus and the Harry Potter films, Richard Griffiths. This year's Tonys are also of interest to movie fans for its nominees, which include movies-turned-musicals Cry-Baby (4 nominations), Xanadu (4 nominations), The Little Mermaid (2 nominations) and Young Frankenstein (3 nominations), as well as the comic adaption of The 39 Steps (6 nominations), based on the John Buchan book that Alfred Hitchcock and others turned into hit films (with a fourth version reportedly in the works).

The Tony Awards will be held at Radio City Music Hall, and broadcast live on CBS, June 15.

When Pamela Smart was seducing Billy Flynn, I bet she never fathomed not only getting caught, but just how far her life would travel in the realms of the media. In case you somehow missed the whole Smart drama -- she was the older woman who seduced the 15-year-old Flynn, then threatened to leave him unless he killed her husband. He followed her wishes, and now she's got life in prison without parole. The story was made into a television movie, and then a novel by Joyce Maynard that spawned Nicole Kidman's To Die For. Now Playbill says that the producers of the musical Xanadu are looking to adapt To Die For to hit the Broadway stage. The production will be an update of both the novel and the film.

Xanadu producer B. Swibel says: "The message of To Die For is more timely and provocative than ever." Maynard, who is also involved, continues: "If ever there was a larger than life character, destined to belt out her songs on Broadway, it's the character of Suzanne Maretto -- a woman who recognized the power of reality television about twenty years ahead of the rest of America. I feel excited, watching the story I wrote and the characters I created taking shape for the stage." The project is only in the beginning stages, but I'm sure we'll soon here more about the production, see it hit Broadway, and probably then re-hit the big screen with all its singing glory. What do you think? Are you ready for some Broadway Maretto full of songs, seduction, and murder?

Oftentimes Hollywood's lack of originality leads to overexposed trends. Remember when every action movie seemed to be easily defined as 'Die Hard on a ...'? Remember when disaster movies were all the rage? And then twenty years later when they were all the rage again? Remember when there were like a hundred body-swapping comedies? Well, there appear to be fewer trends these days, or maybe it's just that Hollywood turns trends into full-blown practices, as in the case of sequels, comic book movies and fantasy films based on literary franchises. Nowadays even a promised trend, like the one involving religious Passion of the Christ copycats, isn't necessarily going to happen. But despite there being so few here-today-gone-tomorrow film fads, there's at least seven bad ideas currently in vogue in Tinsel Town, and all of them need to disappear soon, lest they too become permanent.

1. Torture Porn

I'm going to start with an easy, surely obvious one. Torture porn is the latest trend in horror, a genre that changes its predominant style every few years, and it may be the most despised -- at least by us non-horror junkies. I miss the days when a friend, an actual junkie, could drag me to a harmless scary movie that provided a few screams, a few laughs and afterward, at the most, a few silly nightmares. Now, with each new horror movie there's promise of a seriously depressing experience. After watching The Hills Have Eyes, I realized I hadn't been frightened at all. Instead I wanted to cry my heart out. I haven't been to a horror flick since, and my friend is going solo. Sure, I hear that Eli Roth's movies are a lot more enjoyable than watching a young woman raped while watching her father burned alive and her mother raped and then shot in the head, but I just haven't been in the mood to find out.

Apparently the torture porn trend is already on its way out. Hostel II performed poorly at the box office and Captivity may have peaked too soon, reaching maximum tastelessness before even opening in theaters. So what will be next? I'm rather looking forward to when slasher movies are in fashion again, when I can delight in seeing sinful human beings killed off quickly and deservedly by an implausible maniac. Which brings me to the next trend ...

The holiday season is the time to ask for those big items you've been wanting all year, those toys or gadgets or appliances or DVDs that were just too expensive to splurge on with your own money. And now, with the holidays being so associated with the expectation of gifts, Christmas lists (and Hanukkah lists and Kwanzaa lists, etc.) are made by kids and adults alike. Nobody wants to receive a gift they don't desire, and nobody wants to buy a present that the recipient will not like, so it is now common to go ahead and tell Santa, your parents, your spouse and/or your friends exactly what you want from them. And depending on the gift-giver, you probably will wish for ask for tell them to get you something big.

When it comes to movies, single-title DVDs just aren't going to cut it. Criterion editions are almost there, but not quite. No, for your present demands, you need something bigger, like a box set. The same can be said for DVDs as it can be for CDs, that box sets are the greatest gifts for the holidays because few people purchase them at regular times of the year. Nowadays there are DVD sets for just about every movie fan. For the documentary lover, however, there are some titles that must be purchased in a box set (due to them being series), and many of them are essentials.

Be sure to be specific on your list, because there are a lot of cheap doc sets out there that might be interesting to watch, but which are not well made and which were definitely bought at the nearby drugstore rather than the video shop. Don't let your gift-giver be confused and/or frugal. And if you are the gift-giver, this list may be a good source for ideas for what to buy your gift-receiver, but keep in mind that documentaries can be an acquired taste for some. Sure, a baseball fan may be into Ken Burns' Baseball and a jazz fan should enjoy Burns' Jazz, but you really never know for sure unless they tell you so directly. And at doc box prices, you don't want to go wasting your money.

Despite the unveiling of footage of Sicko in Toronto, we still have a while before Michael Moore's next documentary hits theaters. So, while he takes longer and longer to give us the politically charged films we crave, let us celebrate the quicker filmmaking of Robert Greenwald, who last year gave us the controversial Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (I keep fudging that title as "the high cost of living" -- anybody else?). In case you haven't been reading Cinematical for more than a few months, that film received a lot of attention; so much that I have decided to limit related links to this original story.

Greenwald's follow-up is already finished and is available on DVD next week (it is also receiving his usual scattered and limited theatrical screenings). Titled Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, the doc focuses on the private corporations charging exuberant prices for goods in Iraq (a six-pack of Coca-Cola for $45?), much of which is, in the end, paid for by American taxpayers. Among these corporations, Haliburton is obviously given great attention, and the company has already spoken out against the film calling it, "a theory in search of a conspiracy."

Personally, I keep hoping that Greenwald will deliver a follow-up to Xanadu (at least the soundtrack, anyway), but as I'm in the minority there, I'm glad that fans of his other films can keep getting more and more from him.

We report periodically on movies currently being developed for the stage though the brilliance/insanity of various studios (Xanadu is my personal favorite so far -- and it's supposed to be good! Well, campy-good -- but it's not as if Xanadu could be anything else.), and it's time to tell you that things at MGM really seem to be getting out of control.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the studio is licensing stuff like crazy: During the 2006-2007 season alone, five MGM properties will be hitting stages around the world. Among the titles? Midnight Cowboy. And get this: While not actually a musical, the thing is being described as "A play with music," which is perilously close if you ask me. I mean, good God, MGM -- have you no decency?

Other MGM films heading stage-ward in the next year or so are: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which is a musical -- and probably magnificent -- and will premiere in Sydney in October; Legally Blonde, due to bend and snap its way into San Francisco next spring; Where's Poppa?, premiering in LA in March 2007. Oh, and for those of you who can't wait to see Ratso set to music, Midnight Cowboy made its debut at the Edinburgh Festival earlier this month, and will soon open in London's West End.