Features:
- Color
- Closed-captioned
- Widescreen
- Box set
- Dolby
Description:
Put on your boogie shoes for this five-film nostalgic trip back to the 1970s and '80s. In Saturday Night Fever (1977), a 19-year-old Italian American from Brooklyn, Tony Manero (John Travolta), works in a humble paint store and lives with his family. After dark, he becomes the polyester-clad stallion of the local nightclub. The soundtrack, which spawned a massively successful album, is dominated by disco classics from the Bee Gees, including "Staying Alive" and "Night Fever." The Oscar®-nominated Travolta, plucked from the cast of the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, for his first starring role, is incandescent and unbelievably confident, and his dancing is terrific. Oh, and the white suit rules. Travolta went on to Grease, a 1978 adaptation of the Broadway musical. With unforgettably campy and catchy tunes (like "Greased Lightning," "Summer Nights," and "You're the One That I Want") and fabulously choreographed musical numbers, the '50s-nostalgia story about a group of graduating high school seniors remains fresh, fun, and incredibly imaginative. Travolta struts, swaggers, sings, and dances appropriately, while Olivia Newton-John portrays virgin innocence. And then there's Stockard Channing as Rizzo, the bitchy, raunchy leader of the Pink Ladies, who steals the film from both of its stars. Travolta traded in disco duds for a cowboy hat in Urban Cowboy (1980), a corny love story about a workingman who breaks up with his girlfriend (Debra Winger), then plays out their relationship's turmoil inside a huge honky-tonk called Gilley's. The story essentially parallels Saturday Night Fever in its blend of ordinary life, incomplete relationships, and personal pride channeled into niche stardom at a neighborhood club, and the film is really a time capsule on a lot of levels--notably Travolta's career and late-'70s Western kitsch. That Oscar-winning title song buzzes in your ears long after Flashdance (1983) has stopped. Jennifer Beals holds down a macho job as a welder by day but performs erotic dance numbers in a club at night. She dates her wealthy boss (Michael Nouri) and practices hard for the day she can audition for the upscale, local dance school. It is malarkey, of course, but as a romantic fantasy it works because you are carried along by the sheer force of the energetic, boisterous, MTV-style imagery by director Adrian Lyne. For Footloose (1984), director Herbert Ross pulled a winning movie out of an almost self-consciously archetypal tale of teenage rock rebellion. Starring as a hip city kid who ends up in a Bible-belt town where rock is frowned upon and dancing is forbidden, Kevin Bacon rallies the kids and takes on the establishment. Between a good cast really embracing the dramatic screenplay and imaginative, highly charged dance numbers, you can get lost in this all-ages confection, and you won't even mind Kenny Loggins's bubbly pop.
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