GREASE SING-A-LONG
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So what? It's a truism that people don't go to good movies; they go to movies that make them feel good. Grease accomplished that feat with its gilded rearview mirror look at the time when teenagers, and rock 'n roll, took over. Grease was also on the mark showing the cautious anthropological intermingling of separate sexual tribes: Danny and the boys, bonding in the narcissism of ostentatious hair care; Sandy and the girls, filling their nights with pajama parties that become occasions for ego-boosting and psychodrama malice. These might be givens in teen movies of the past 30 years, but in Grease's day they had a little novelty. The show and the movie were also clever in portraying cataclysmic rites of passage (like an unwanted pregnancy) in a fond, joshing tone.
A blend of retro-pop songs and references to '50s movies like From Here to Eternity, Rebel Without a Cause and Ben-Hur, the movie first appeared at a safe distance of 20 to 25 years after the music it pastiched and the attitudes it parodied had left the scene. But a much longer period than that — 32 years! — has elapsed between the movie Grease and today.For middle-agers seeing it now, the movie offers a dewy recollection of what they — and John Travolta — looked like, way back when.
What a colt he was: slim, gangly, almost goony, as if he were channeling the Jerry Lewis movies he'd seen as a kid, yet exuding the soft bravado of a young man at ease with mass adoration. In his first movie since his breakout in Saturday Night Fever, Travolta was still evolving, on his way to we-didn't-know-what, but no less fascinating in this crucial gestation phase. He and Channing, a decade apart in age, are the two actors who tell the audience they know precisely what they're doing — Channing from her years of craft, Travolta from the genius of intuition. They can sing too.
Now that Grease is enticing moviegoers to get that choral feeling, how about some more sing-along versions of favorite old films? The Wizard of Oz has about a dozen numbers in the Great American Songbook (sorry, fans, "Over the Rainbow" has to be a Judy Garland solo). Anyone for West Side Story? Evita? And, for the boys in the band, Xanadu?
But I'm heterosexual, you say; I don't even like musicals. Then turn no-song movies into sing-alongs. Enjoy a John Williams-scored double feature, with Jaws (all together now: "bump-bump-BUMP-bump bump-bump-BUMP-bump") and Star Wars, where you could invent your own lyrics to the theme ("Star Wars / How we loved Star Wars / And they were our wars / When we were young...."). Have a dialogue shout-along to The Godfather, or a fart-along to Blazing Saddles. For the Al Pacino Scarface, replace four-part harmony with four-letter words.
Finally, what's a book almost everyone knows the words to? The Bible. So let's all go to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ sing-along. And if you can't speak Aramaic, replace the dialogue in the film with excerpts from Mel's latest telephone rant. Hitting your companion is not recommended; that's too much like picking a fight with that guy sitting behind you.