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throb turned overweight housewife, John Travolta. I doubt anyone watching Grease all those years ago would ever have imagined that the next time he’d be seen in a musical would be in a fat suit playing a mother, but it works. John turns in a very enjoyable performance and plays off his fellow cast mates extremely well; after a while you begin to forget about the fact that his character is the only one sporting a “Baltimore” accent. His duet with ‘husband’ Christopher Walken is priceless (although personally I wanted to see the kiss).
Walken is in rare form and lighter than ever on his feet as his dancing and singing prove this man has not lost any of the charm or charisma that made him the legendary performer that he is.
Michelle Pfeiffer makes a welcome return to the screen after a four year break from the biz as Mrs. Baltimore Crabs and proves that you can be sexy and seductive at any age. (Well, unless you’re Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 2.)
The younger members of this ensemble are not overshadowed in any way by their elders. Nikki Blonsky was plucked straight out of a Cold Stone Creamery in New York and thrown into the Hollywood limelight as the lead of this sure-to-be hit movie and she seems as unaffected by it as one could imagine. There is a truthfulness and subtley to her performance that could only come from someone who has yet to be ruined by the studio system.
One of my favorite actors working today shows a completely different side of himself going from superhero to super singer: James Marsden couldn’t be more perfect as the uber-corny but forward thinking Corny Collins. Both James and Queen Latifah, who plays his ‘Negro Day’ alternate host Motormouth Maybell, are caught in the middle of the age line: not as experienced as actors like Travolta, Pfeiffer and Walken, but also not as young and green as Efron, Snow and Bynes. My guess is they are speaking most to those of us late-twentysomethings scarily approaching that thirty mark.
Moving on to those younger tikes, Zac Efron star of the hugely popular High School Musical, personifies the term ‘dreamy’ in this role as Link Larkin, the object of all teenage affection. I honestly didn’t understand what ‘dreamy’ meant until I saw him in this role; that might sound wrong, but just try not to melt every time he winks.
Brittany Snow really shines as the pushy ‘but-I’m-the-prettiest’ teenager, you can tell that she had an enormous amount of fun playing this character and it translates right onto the screen. Ditto for Elijah Kelley, who proves himself to be an incredibly talented singer. Amanda Bynes, meanwhile, while not having much chance to sing, does manage to steal almost every scene she’s in with her finely-tuned physical humor and some priceless facial expressions.
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