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By
NICK ZEGARAC
"Grease" is the phenomenally successful musical that transformed John Travolta into an icon of the 70s, put Olivia Newton-John on the US pop charts and brought hot pants back into vogue. It's the 70s slant on 50s pop culture and it moves like gangbusters. The songs are "electrifying" and the energy generated by all of the cast members is "greased lightning." The plot concerns Sandy (Newton-John) a goody two shoes bobbysoxer who is destined to be corrupted by Danny Zucco (Travolta). He's a grease ball from the wrong side of the tracks that caught the heart of Miss Priss' one summer. Now he has to prove that he loves her. Stockard Channing is positively evil as Rizzo, the hep' chick with a penchant for pouring salt into open wounds. She softens some after a pregnancy scare, though.
Paramount has given us the film in a really lackluster edition that is doomed to disappoint from the start. The print, although restored, exhibits grain, dirt and digital grit, along with aliasing, shimmering and edge enhancement problems that really distract. There are also a couple of curiosities to watch for during the scenes that take place at the malt shop between Danny and Sandy. All the background ads (presumably Coke or Pepsi advertising) have been digitally altered or blurred. Perhaps, like Warner's release of "The Devil's Advocate" which ran into copy infringement when it chose to use a particular piece of sculpture, one can only assume that whatever was hanging on those walls in the cafe, Paramount no longer owns the rights to and was thus forced to do some digital manipulation to satisfy a law suit before releasing the movie to home video. The digital manipulations during these scenes are obvious and horrible, drawing attention to themselves with aliasing, hard edges or halos appearing around characters as they walk back and forth in front of the obscured art work. The audio is also not well represented. Dialogue is strident, scratchy and soft while the musical numbers explode from the 5.1 mix with too much bass and side channel information that all but drowns out the lyrics.
True to their penny pinching, Paramount gives us the same old tired featurette that accompanied the "Grease" laserdisc release. That's it. All of Paramount's marketing has gone into hailing this disc as "The one that you want, the way that you want it." I assure you, this isn't the case. |
