Something to watch tonight: Wednesday 20 March

World Happiness Day Special!

Today is the United Nations’ International Day of Happiness, the one day a year when we are all asked to pri­or­it­ise hap­pi­ness – our own and the hap­pi­ness of those around us.

I don’t know about you but, loc­ally and inter­na­tion­ally, hap­pi­ness seems to be a com­mod­ity that’s in short sup­ply. We wake up to awful news every day. Meanness, selfish­ness and cruelty appears to be the stand­ard order of busi­ness wherever you turn.

Life is a con­stant struggle – this house is not insu­lated from those pres­sures – and we end each day exhausted, won­der­ing when the tide might turn.

So, when the UN issues an instruc­tion to be happy, my first thought was, “what are they smoking in New York?”

But, on reflec­tion, maybe it isn’t such a bad idea. 

Last night I asked my beloved what we could watch that would make her happy. Since child­hood, she’s always had a soft spot for the 1980 glor­i­ous shambles that is Xanadu, a film notori­ous for its excess­ive pro­duc­tion, messy res­ult and sub­sequent crit­ic­al failure. 

Xanadu is the film that inspired the Golden Raspberry Awards, a notion so tox­ic to film cul­ture and appre­ci­ation that true movie fans should choose to watch it as a form of protest.

We weren’t protest­ing last night. We wanted to have fun and fun was what we had. Almost 45 years on from its ini­tial flop, we saw a film that was kitschy, romantic, and true to its time.

Michael Beck (who had become a star in Walter Hill’s gang drama The Warriors the year before) plays a frus­trated artist named Sonny. He’s a gif­ted drafts­man but has no inspir­a­tion. One of the nine greek muses, Kira (Olivia Newton-John), comes to life and inspires him to start a roller-disco with former jazz­man, now prop­erty developer, Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly).

Against pro­tocol, but not against the odds, Sonny and Kira fall in love, for­cing a very mild con­front­a­tion with the voice of Zeus (Wilfred Hyde-Whyte) to per­suade him to let Kira live on Earth.

An attempt to fuse the glam­or­ous Hollywood music­als of the past – there are visu­al nods to Busby Berkeley among oth­ers – with the disco and new wave present, it is a film that tried so hard to please every­one but ended up sat­is­fy­ing no one.

But from this dis­tance, without the tri­bal alle­gi­ances to big hair, jit­ter­bug­ging, roller-skating, etc., we can enjoy it for what it is. A lot of that is down to the music, thanks to Jeff Lynne and ELO being at the peak of their powers (not a sen­tence I thought I would ever write).

Kelly (68-years-old at the time) is game for a laugh and charm­ing, as always. His duet with Newton-John is beau­ti­fully built up. At first you think he’s going to walk through it, like Rex Harrison talked through his music­al num­bers, but by the end he’s raised quite a sweat and you can tell that he’s still got it.

And there’s a Don Bluth anim­ated inter­lude to ELO’s “Don’t Walk Away” – I think included because Beck can’t carry any of the songs him­self – in which our two leads trans­form into fish and birds, Newton-John’s bird weirdly wear­ing the same leg­warm­ers that the char­ac­ter sports through­out the film.

Once upon a time, I was bemoan­ing my unhap­pi­ness to a pal who looked at me and said, “think of a time when you were happy”. Sure, I said. “What were you doing then?” I told him. “So, why don’t you go back and do that again?”

So, for World Happiness Day we went back to Xanadu.

Where to watch Xanadu

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from Apple

Australia: Stream on Binge, Stan or FoxtelNow

Canada & USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel (until 31 March)

UK: Digital rent­al from Apple, Amazon or Sky