by Jerry Roberts

June 2, 2002

“In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately pleasure dome decree.”

- Samuel Coleridge, poet

I can’t say much for Kubla Kahn but at least he had sense enough not to turn Xanadu into a disco roller rink. Can’t say the same for the characters in this movie. Come to think of it, I can’t say much for the characters in this movie.

I am more or less indifferent to a movie like Xanadu because the movie asks so much and gives so little. But I point it out this week because having looked back on it, I have found that it stands at an interesting crossroads in the history of American bad taste. It came out in 1980 right at the moment when disco was an endangered species and the early age of ear-shattering 80’s pop music was about to be dubbed MTV. Between groovy and gnarly lies this humiliating effort to fuse the two eras together. It turns out to be little more than a long bit of publicity for the soundtrack. And yes, I do believe that this is a movie wrapped around Top 40 songs (though one is hard-pressed to call it a movie).

The “movie” takes place in a beach community in Southern California (a warning flag in and of itself) where we meet Sonny (stoic hunk Michael Beck) a frustrated commercial artist who specializes in the kinds of album covers that made Journey famous. As we first meet him he is . . . well, frustrated. How do we know he’s frustrated? Because all dissatisfied artists in the movies destroy their work inches before completion. But in this case you can’t blame the guy because his latest work looks like a cross mutation of O.J. Simpson, Bill Cosby and a little bit of Margaret Drysdale’s beloved French poodle. Anyway, he shreds his work into confetti and tosses it out the window where it lands in front of a mural (painted on a brick wall) depicting nine muses from Ancient Greece. Well, that’s what we are told anyway, because the girls are all dressed the latest fashions and are all sporting roller skates. They dance around in a blue glow like the post mortem Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Apparently littering breaks the magic spell because the muses come to life. One of them is assigned to Sonny who sees her for the first time as she roller skates around him and disappears uttering only the information that her name is Kiera. Kiera is played by Olivia Newton-John, the tow-headed, drink-your-milk pop star of Grease upon whose image this cinematic house of sand was constructed. She smiles and beams appropriately enough to sell Coppertone and seems a perfect match for Sonny because one’s personality is just as dead as the other.

Kiera has skated into Sonny’s life at just the right moment because Sonny has one of those gruff, butt-headed bosses that you only find in two places: the movies and real life. The tyrant throws an assignment at him to paint a beautiful girl (guess who) in front of a building. What?! Can this be?! Yes it can Sonny, this is a movie, shut up.

Anyway, he finds Kiera roller-skating in an abandoned roller rink called the Platinum Palace and it doesn’t take Kreskin to figure out what Sonny will be inspired to do. What we don’t see coming is the presence of the greatest performer ever to put his feet on the floor. Enter: the great Gene Kelly. He beams as always as Danny Malone who tells Sonny that he once played clarinet for Glenn Miller’s band and shows him a picture from WWII with whitebred Kiera on it. Shuffling Sonny out of the way, we get an extended scene in which the great hoofer is transported back to the good old days to dance with Kiera in full 40s regalia. The dancing? Remember those guys who used to spin plates on long sticks on The Ed Sullivan Show? It’s just about as underwhelming.

Sonny and Danny are inspired by their various fantasy/hallucinations to turn the dilapidated Platinum Palace into a disco roller rink featuring a mixture of 70’s and 40’s music (Yeeks!). This is illustrated by a scene that has to be seen to be believed. In a fantasy musical number, a battle-of-the-bands ensues with group of 40s girl group on one side and a heavy-metal band on the other. Of this, all I can tell you is that some unions just aren’t meant to be made.

So Sonny quits his job working for the tyrant and devotes his time to the disco roller rink. It is Kiera who decides to name this dump, er paradise and she dubs it . . . c’mon guess, just take a guess. This new venture is celebrated as Kiera and Sonny turn into cartoons (don’t ask) animated by the great Don Bluth, not doing his best work here. This is followed by a painfully disturbing shopping montage in which the lovers dance around affirming capitalism while the department store dummies sprout to life and start dancing (it’s that bad).

Turning the Platinum Palace into Xanadu apparently takes as much time as vacuuming your living room because it’s up and running in a cinch (Kiera apparently got help from some of Zeus’ contractors). The movie then moves on to the single dumbest moment (yes, there is a moment dumber then dancing department store dummies):

After having pulled herself in and out of time, appeared in a 40 year old photograph, appeared and reappeared on Sonny’s album cover, turned herself and her boyfriend into cartoons and animated dancing department store dummies, Kiera reveals to Sonny that she is a muse . . . AND HE HAS THE NERVE TO LOOK SURPRISED!! Oh, why couldn’t it have been this Sonny who stopped at the tollbooth?!

Grrrrrr, I gotta get some coffee and maybe a Valium. Be right back. Okay, I’m fine.

But the movie isn’t over yet . . .

Kiera reveals that her work here is done and that she must return home. She does and so then does Sonny begin to miss her. He misses her so much that he decides to return to the wall from wince she came and skate head-first into it (Geez, what some dopes won’t do for love). Instead of the massive concussion that one would expect, Sonny is instead magically transported to Mt. Olympus (yes, Mt. Olympus). Olympus, as represented here, is very large space where the guys who run the fog machine get paid handsomely. There he finds Kiera talking to Zeus and pleads for her freedom. Remember those scenes at the end of “Mork and Mindy” where Mork reports to Orson about the lesson that he learned? It’s kinda like that. Anyway, Zeus refuses, Sonny leaves, Kiera belts out a top 40 hit and Zeus grants parole.

And still it’s not over . . .

There must be a closing musical number and Xanadu provides it at its most stomach churning. It’s a roller-skating finale on Xanadu’s opening night with hundreds of extras skating behind Olivia and clapping in unison as she knocks off the title tune as we inch (mercifully) to the closing credits. I’m no songwriter but I find it rather damaging when a movie’s title song begins with the line “A place where nobody dares to go”. Wouldn’t you say?