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“I feel like a defective typewriter…I skipped a period.”
To hear the review
Very little about Grease makes sense. It is populated with singers who can’t act, dancers who can’t sing, actors, who can’t dance, and various combinations of all three. Today, when an actress can sing AND dance, or a singer can dance AND act, they call them a “triple threat”. That must have been a foreign concept in 1978, when Grease took the world by storm. Because not one person in the entire movie could do all three. Not only that, but they were saddled with some of the silliest, most awkward teenager-in-high-school dialogue of all time.
The special feature on this Blu-Ray (out May 5th from Paramount Home Entertainment) that deals with the history of the movie should be called Greased Lightning In A Bottle, because it’s pretty clear to me that the director and producer and actors of the film really did catch lightning in a bottle to make this as big a success as it obviously has been. There is no getting around it - Grease is an absolutely dreadful movie. And every girl in the entire world absolutely LOVES it. They LOVE John Travolta IN it. They LOVE the songs.
There is something else I couldn’t understand about Grease. The second I brought home the Blu-Ray, My girlfriend leapt for it, then leapt for the remote control, and quickly scanned through the special features until she found the one where there was a karaoke version of every single song, with the words on the screen and so forth. And she sang every song in the movie, most of the time not even looking at the words scrolling across the screen. And I sat there, it shocked amazement, utterly flabbergasted that someone could be so very much into this film. Let alone my girlfriend. Let alone every other girl she knows.
One thing I ought to mention here - I am not a car guy, by any stretch. So I thought maybe I was not identifying with the male characters and their songs about carburetors and fuel-injection because I have no idea what they are talking about. Other than “Greased Lightning”. Or something. And maybe I’m not the right kind of tough-guy. Maybe I like my tough guys to be quiet and calm yet dangerous, like Clint Eastwood or John Wayne or Charles Bronson. So I don’t understand how guys who sing and dance and comb their hair a lot can be considered “tough”. I thought perhaps these were the things holding me back.
But this isn’t the case. What is holding me back is that I am not a woman. And Grease has managed to create male characters women want, female characters with whom they identify, and a story line and songs that make them swoon. If women still swoon, that is. And in doing so they have created something that excludes men almost entirely. I have never met a man who liked Grease, and although I sat through it with my girlfriend, and admired the Blu-Ray transfer, the expression of rapt attention and glee on her face was more irritating than it was infectious. Try as I might, I could not share in her enthusiasm. And I really, really tried.
When the movie was done, we went through the non-karaoke bonus features. They included a retrospective look at the movie (NOT called Greased Lightning In A Bottle), a scene involving the Paramount DVD release party in 2002 where Olivia Newton-John adn John Travolta sing their famous songs in front of a crowd, a totally useless director’s introduction, and eleven deleted and alternate scenes. Then dancing tutorials and a ton of other stuff. I watched all of it, for one reason. I have heard, for years and years, that behind the scenes of Grease the entire cast pretty much engaged in a gigantic orgy for the entire duration of the movie shoot. I have heard this from many many sources.
All I wanted was some discussion of this. I don’t want to hear that this is the best-selling movie musical of all time. I don’t want to hear that Travolta played a different character when the musical was on stage. I wanted to hear who got with whom, and how, and why, and what kind of crazy antics were going on. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s where my morbid curiosity leads me. But unfortunately, none of these details were on the Blu-Ray disc. Just more interviews with people who said “oh, it was so much fun, and everyone was so nice”. Well, fine. But that’s the standard pro-athlete interview type stuff, isn’t it? You just won the game by five goals despite being badly outplayed. SAY something about it!
