On Feb 18, 2007, at 9:57 PM, Darcy James Argue wrote:
Well, yes, but it's very clearly *supposed* to be that way. The
film *wants* to draw your attention to the anachronism of Frankie
Valli singing over a disco beat. (I can only talk about the movie
-- haven't ever seen the original stage version.)
I knew the show before I knew the movie, so I suppose it's possible
that has diminished my ability to truly appreciate the subtlety of
the movie ... but I really doubt it. I think it's more like the
opposite.
Grease (the movie) is like Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love"
-- or, for that matter, Mingus's "My Jelly Roll Soul" or
Stravinky's Concerto in D. Sometimes it's an *almost* plausible
pastiche of a "historical" style, and sometimes it's deliberately,
jarringly ahistorical.
That may not be your thing, particularly -- I don't have any
particular affection for the movie or the songs -- but it just
seems weird to complain that the music is anachronistic when the
movie does absolutely everything in its power to make you filter
the nostalgic 1950's setting through a 1970's sensibility. That is,
as I said, what I take the whole *point* of Grease (the movie) to be.
I think you give the movie way too much credit. It's not
"deliberately ahistorical" as part of any artistic message. It's
ahistorical because they wanted to make a movie out of a hit musical,
but at the same time they wanted to showcase their superstars in the
contemporary style of music they could do best. The title song and
the final duet did indeed become the chart-toppers they were intended
to be, but the director of the movie hated them both precisely
because they were so inappropriate to the 1950s theme. The others
were added at the insistence of Olivia Newton-John's producer (for
hers) and John Travolta (for his).
If filtering the 1950s setting through a 1970s sensibility is a
purpose of the film, it's only a post-hoc attempt to make virtue of
necessity, sort of like turning Olivia Newton-John's character into
an Australian exchange student as a way to explain her unremovable
accent.
You might be on less shaky ground complaining about the
anachronistic music in a show like "Dream Girls," where there
doesn't seem to be any reason at all for the music to sound so
totally unlike Motown.
To the contrary, I like Dream Girls. Unlike Grease's, the score for
Dream Girls isn't built around the idea of music that matches the era
of its setting. That's probably why, unlike the Grease movie, the
recent Dream Girls movie was able to stay quite true to the stage
show. Whenever a musical is made into a movie, there are always some
changes and adaptations, but I can't think of any others that
completely turn the score upside-down like Grease does.
mdl
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