Word: kleiser
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Directed by Randal Kleiser...
...movie version is everything the play was not. In an enterprise that seems to be all mistakes, the basic one may just be that Director Randal Kleiser, who is 30, doesn't seem to know what he is talking about. He has no feel for the times when kids were trying to resolve the contradictions between an inherited style of surviving adolescence and the radically different, new possibilities. Pat Boone and Elvis Presley, the malt shop and the rock concert, the jalopy and the drag racer, white bucks and black leather jackets-for a while...
...places like the high school lawn. Chorus members are not even given attitudes they can maintain when they are in the background of a shot. Camera work is film school simple, and movement within shots does not even reach the levels we are accustomed to in TV, whence Kleiser sprang or, more properly, stumbled. Even the lip-sync in the musical numbers is terrible...
...high school, it stars Pop Singer Olivia Newton-John and Travolta, who has already scored a huge success as a '70s greaser in Saturday Night Fever. "It's going to be a '70s look at the '50s," says Director Randal Kleiser. "Stylistically, the actors will stop and break into song-that's old-but we are using all the '70s film techniques we can muster, like split screens and high-powered sound...