James: (age 6) ***** Five stars. I liked it when Danny was mean to Sandy in front of his friends. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. When the girl poured her pink drink on that guy. Oh yeah, yeah yeah, yeah. When they mooned and showed their butts in their air in the middle of the dance. Juepy, Jupey, you kknow what they did? (James shows Jupiter what mooning is.) They pulled down their pants and showed their boutts in the middlle of the dance.
Jupiter: (age 4) *** I don't know. High School musical 1 and 3 were better. Grease was boring.
Justice: (age 3) (fidgeted throughout, then went to bed.) Fun.
Popi:**Horrible sound for a musical, and bad sound mixing. The dialogue was fast light banter which you could never hear over the tinny, canned reverb sountrack. And the two stars were for Travolta only. If this had been a dramatic monoogue from Travolta singing all of the songs nad playing all of the girls, I would have given it five stars. Just as a side note, it was sad to see Jeff Conway as such a vital energetic young man, knowing that he was going to become broken, addled and addicted, in a wheelchair. How could you do drugs after watching "Celebrity Rehab?" It's true the kids were tired, but all three fell asleep. James was dying to sleep through Duma, but he pressed on. There were only two decent musical numbers. What was the decent writing? Is there a memorable line? The line I remember from years ago, is Rizzo's line, "I feel like a defective typewriter. I skipped a period." What other line would it have been. It makes me not cringe so much when Shwarzennegger has "the line," or Bruce Willis has "the line." It's weird for a movie to not leave a single line of dialogue in your head. The best song was "Summer Nights" where they did a cross cut-- one was filled on the bleachers and the other was the girls at the picnic table, instead all these crane shots that completely lacked energy. One of the shots from the musical in the finale was a camera man going over the ferris wheel, like filming them from space or something. Band stand's coming, this is going to be good, but those dances numbers were lame. The guys moon the camera, right out of American Graffitti. It seemed
Mama: ** John Travolta had it! I can see why he catapulted to stardom. He exudes charisma and humor, his hips were made for gyrating and there's something about the glitter in his eye suggesting a personal complexity that gives added depth to a fluffy role. Adam and I spent an hour on the imdb after the movie, marvelling at John Travolta's resume which reveals a pattern of breakout role, then bad decision after bad decision leading to obscurity, including the notable "Staying Alive," directed by Sylvester Stallone, and "Battlefield Earth" but also ten per decade you've never heard of. As for "Grease" I have to say I was absolutely distracted by all of the thirty and forty year old high school students. They had to cast the principal and coach as 70 year olds to make all of those other middle aged actors look like juniors and seniors. Travolta himself looked 24, undeniably a man with a five o'clock shadow, so they must have had to cast the other characters older. Overall this was disappointing, in terms of acting, music and story. I'm sorry about how much it shaped my sense of what high school would be like. As a family movie I would recommend the delightful High School Musical over Grease, hands down.
