After taking a couple of weeks off in deference to the all-consuming forces of the DC Fringe Festival, rooftop movies return this week, with one of the most legendary of camp classics, the movie that paired Greek mythology with roller disco, and Olivia Newton-John with Gene Kelly. Bad move for Kelly: he wouldn't work again after this until a Love Boat guest shot four years later, and he never worked in movies again. This was a just-barely-post disco musical that refused to believe that disco might be dead (or at least resting, pending late '00s reevaluation), and a film that probably ended up selling more copies of its soundtrack (devoting one side each to Ms. Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra, respectively) than it did actual tickets to the movie.
For pure kitschy disco-musical awfulness, Xanadu still doesn't reach the heights of absurdity of The Apple (one of the best installments of the old Vision cinema's midnight kick-the-keg movie screenings, to be sure). But there's plenty of laughable badness here for everyone, in a brighter, glossier package.
Also of note: the director of recent lefty political documentaries such as Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism is the same director, Robert Greenwald, who brought us Xanadu (as well as that classic of 80s made-for-TV battered-wife-revenge flicks, The Burning Bed). See if you can spot the seeds of his future liberal activist filmmaking sandwiched in between the musical numbers and the desperate death throes of Gene Kelly's career.
Join us on the roof this Thursday, July 29, and we'll get started around 9pm. Roller skates optional. We'd bring up the disco ball, but we have nowhere to hang it.
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