GREASE

Grease isn't a terrible musical, exactly. I liked the solo Barry Gibb's title song. Not everyone likes Sha Na Na, but their music in the school band scene is pretty good. "Summer Nights" is a catchy duet, which I've sung at karaoke. I like to change the line "I wonder what she's doing now" to "I wonder who she's screwing now." (Like the karaoke singer I heard doing "White Rabbit," who changed the line "The Red Queen's off with your head" to "The Red Queen's giving me head!")

Yet the movie of the long-running '70s Broadway show just doesn't have any style. This was the first movie directed by Randall Kleiser, and his inexperience shows in the movie's hit & miss approach. He seems to have filmed a very long movie then edited ruthlessly, and it feels like significant parts are missing. Minor characters get introduced then mostly forgotten: the quarterback, the nerd, the girl running for student council... And there's a lot of vulgar, tiresome humour. (This movie came out in the same summer as Animal House.) Yuk-yuk gags like boys looking up a girl's dress or mooning the TV camera.

John Travolta could have played the male lead in his sleep, and probably did. (It's the kind of movie where you know Travolta's cool because he smokes.) Olivia Newton-John takes two long hours to finally trade her nice-girl costume for a skank uniform. Jeff Conaway plays a rather pitiful James Dean wannabe. Stockard Channing plays the fast girl, who finds out she's pregnant, and how is that storyline concluded? In the final scene, it turns out that she wasn't pregnant after all! (What a clever twist...)

The drag-racing scene is sheer formula. Don't expect either of the daredevils to drive off a ledge and get killed: this isn't Rebel Without a Cause. Much of the movie is set in a high school, but you never see these kids learning anything; it's a centre for social interaction rather than education. And at the graduation scene in the end, they seem as ignorant as the day they were born.

Historical note: I saw the movie as a teenager, on its opening night in June, 1978. Even then it all seemed pretty second-rate to me. The original Hairspray and its musical remake both did it better.