Sometimes films surprise you with how quickly they're over, despite how much they manage to pack in – how can the time have flown so quickly? Again, not a problem for Xanadu, which is best described as operating on gym-time: surely you must have been pounding this treadmill for at least half an hour by now? You check. Xanadu is very much the opposite – it's a curiously flat film, and it's really quite difficult to see where all that money went. Some films take your breath away with how ingeniously they managed to create so much spectacle on so little money. In the cursed treasure map that is Xanadu, this bit should have large letters warning Here Be Monsters.
If you wondered what the leads from Xanadu would look like as horny goldfish, this is the part of the film for you. Xanadu's animation feels like a Golden Films experience, an ersatz calamity. Did you ever end up with a Disney film on VHS from a man down the market, only to find it was a mockbuster from Golden Films? Founded in 1988 by Diane Eskenazi, a female film-making pioneer of sorts, Golden Films created animated adaptations of public domain fairy tales like Beauty & The Beast, Aladdin and The Little Mermaid, coincidentally releasing them in the same years that Walt Disney had a bash too.
Oh, and there's also an animated sequence. These competing elements, each hoping to hook a different demographic sector of the audience, go to war throughout the film.
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It is a film that is partly borrowing from Greek myth, partly a tribute to a 1950s Rita Hayworth movie with a similar plot, and it is also about the flash-in-the-pan roller-disco craze of the late 1970s. The aesthetic clash embodied in this opening number cuts to the core of what feels unique about Xanadu. It is as if the Anthropologie summer collection got stuck in the mainframe in Tron. The Muses perform a kind of contemporary ballet through a miasma of fluorescent lasers. The Muses are dressed in off-the-shoulder tiered pastel midi-dresses – think shepherdesses in Ancient Greece, as imagined by one of those Halloween shops called something like 'Party Delights' that sells knock-off Austin Powers outfits labelled '60s secret agent'. The Muses then come to life and emerge out of the painting, in a blaze of less-than-special effects, to the immortal accompaniment of the Electric Light Orchestra. His scraps of paper are borne on the California breeze to an epic dayglo mural depicting nine fetching young ladies. The film opens with a young artist tearing up a sketch in frustration. Directed by Robert Greenwald from a script by Richard Christian Danus and Marc Reid Rubel, Xanadu stars Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly and a Jim Morrison mannequin that's broken out of Tussauds to pursue the acting dream.