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GREASE (PG) (110 min.) - After last year's successful re-releases of the Star Wars trilogy and The Godfather, Paramount Pictures decided it was time to make Grease the word for moviegoers again. If this one clicks again at the box office, it's only a matter of time before we get a special encore engagement of Love Story, since it made so much money from a previous generation.
Randal Klieser's 1978 box office smash really hasn't been that far away, since it can regularly be found by channel surfers at home. But viewers have been getting only part of the candy-coated flavor and energetic dancing in the versions typically squeezed into the smaller screen.
To celebrate the film's 20th anniversary, Paramount has remastered the print to restore the visuals and tweaked the soundtrack with multi-channel audio that wasn't possible 20 years ago. Fans who are hopelessly devoted to the movie should be impressed.
It seems odd to get nostalgic about a movie that was all about nostalgia to begin with. Grease has turned into that sort of event; another chance to see John Travolta before he grew beefy, when his unique dancing style was a happening, before it became a tribute gimmick in later films. Whenever we see Travolta dance now, at an inaugural ball in Primary Colors or a dance contest in Pulp Fiction, we think back to then (and one year before, of course, in Saturday Night Fever).
Travolta is Danny Zuko, the coolest delinquent at Rydell High School, who has a summer romance with an Australian student named Sandy Olsen (Olivia Newton-John). Turns out that Sandy is transferring to Rydell High, and the summer lovers cross paths, causing problems...