Last night I watched Drew Barrymore chattering to David Letterman and a could-be historic moment happened, which is that DB revealed that she and the other two Charlie's Angels ladies (that would be CD and LL) had been singing songs from Grease 2 down Mexico way, during their "world tour" to promote Charlie's Angels – Full Throttle. Charlie's Angels – Full Throttle can look after itself:
The Charlie's Angels stars are returning to the big screen again, battling forces of evil with the world's most advanced technologies, including the Sony Ericsson T616 mobile phone.
To hell with that. It's the Grease 2 angle I'm interested in. Could there be a buzz starting to resurrect this much maligned and neglected little movie? And does saying that make me gay? Probably in many eyes and on many gaydar screens, but I made my decision about whether I was going to allow that kind of thing to bother me during the long dark era, now definitely over, of Abba neglect.
If you want to delight Michelle Pfeiffer, tell her she was great in Grease 2. Which is true, she was (look for "Stephanie Zinone" in the meet the cast bit). But, and this would be the source of all that malignancy and neglectfulness, her leading man was abysmal. Then as now, still (in ridiculous TV soap operas etc.) he called and calls himself "Maxwell Caulfield". Now Maxwell Caulfield was the hero of J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, the novel of choice for a whole generation of cogitating ne'er-do-wells, and if you draw attention to yourself with a name like that, you'd better be able to live up to it. Maxwell Caulfield 2 couldn't. His singing in Grease 2 was a movie-destroying atrocity. Plus he's a hopeless actor.
[EMBARRASSED UPDATE: That paragraph is stupid, because the hero of Catcher in the Rye is, as commenter number one Michael Jennings points out, not Maxwell Caulfield but Holden Caulfield. So not such a silly name then. But whatever he's called he's still a bad actor and an atrocious singer. No excuse to offer. Just wrong. When you blogger in hole, dig no more, climb out, brush off dirt, hope everyone soon forget.]
Which was a real pity, because the best songs in Grease 2 were great. Best of all was probably the number during the opening credits, called (I think) "Back To School", sung by the Four Tops. Whenever I see Four Tops greatest hits CDs I look for it, but never find it. Why is that? It was great. And who could forget "Rockahula Luau"? – not that I ever knew how to spell this in the first place, but if you know the one I mean, you'll know the one I mean.
Think pink.
