2023-04-22 18:08:26
A Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies well-intentioned and ambitious, he even tries to say things, but the general mediocrity drowns out his voice. Series review.
We live in the age of revisiting great classics: through the lenses of progressive ideologies, woke, PC, we look again and again at our old favorites to see if they pass the test. Unfortunately, most of them do not pass, but this does not mean that these works belong in the sink, and yet, these tests make a lot of sense. They beautifully shed light on the development of collective consciousness, the characteristics and logical pitfalls of public thinking that is valid at all times, and the working methods of flourishing oppression. And if we’re not completely inflexible, it’s even possible that we don’t have to suddenly start hating our old favorites just because they might not be free from racism, misogyny, homophobia and the rest.
It is also possible that a Grease-t – which I am not willing to do Pomadeto call it for nothing – you can like it despite the fact that it is full of macho, misogynistic, harmful nonsense. It will still be good as a period documentary, and in a certain sense as a deterrent example – not to mention what a fun, sticky, sweet little nothingness it all is. At the same time, it is not surprising that if someone thinks of reviving the Grease its world – in fact, the surprising thing is that we had to wait so long in the fever of remakes and reboots that have been going on for decades – and the only way to do that is to try to hammer out some of the mistakes that the original made. THE Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies he was clearly committed to this task, and it might even have come together, but there was just less gunpowder than what would have been needed for such ambition.
The setting is the same Rydell High School as in the original, but four years earlier, in 1954. Even the basic situation is similar: the school’s most popular boy, Buddy, and the moldflower’s new girl, Jane, have been secretly romancing all summer, but now, on the last day of the break, it’s clear that they’ve reached a watershed – except that what Jane expects, Buddy breaks up with him, on the contrary, it would make their relationship official. That’s how it will be, but the joy doesn’t last long, because there is a rumor of their huddle in a car, the rumor swells, it becomes wilder and wilder, and, as usual, the boy immediately starts to be considered cool and the girl a slut, the budding relationship fizzles out, Jane his plans for the school’s student government seem to be falling apart.
But after some hesitation – and with the help of Cynthia, an outcast like her, who wants to be among the boys, Nancy, the fashion enthusiast, and Olivia, who was ostracized due to a mess with her English teacher – she decides to face the difficulties and still run for the position of student president, as an opponent of her summer crush. He doesn’t have much of a chance, because Buddy is the most popular student in the school, but his new girl band – yes, they are the Pink Ladies – still does everything, because the goal is not just to win, but to give a voice to those who are out of line. Their struggle becomes a fight for women’s rights, ethnicity, and social status, so that a more representative leadership is created instead of the monopoly of well-to-do, pedigreed white men.
So it is probably already clear what kind of progressive changes I referred to at the beginning of the article – and they are also very good for the basic material. The question of assimilation versus pride, status desires, the nightmare of the idea of ”boys are just boys”, the taboo of female sexuality, female ambitions and their systemic suppression are all topics that fit very well in a series set in the ’50s, especially , if it takes place among teenagers who are typically more receptive to progressive ideas. The series deals with these topics relatively skillfully – for example, Jane’s Puerto Rican mother wants to break into the city’s elite so much that she even denies her origin, almost all the teenage girls are abused by their sons, the fact that Jane enthusiastically participates in get-togethers, she is considered a whore, all the duties of the school director are performed by a woman, but she can only be a deputy, on paper a man is the leader, and so on – but in vain, because good intentions could not make up for the lack of skills.
The rise of the Pink Ladiesthe biggest problem with it is that it cannot meet the quality requirements on almost any front. The script is by far the best, the events move forward nicely, the guessing works, the affections develop nicely, the basic ideas of the individual characters also work, there are clever jokes, and the super costumes can also be highlighted – but on all other fronts, the series sinks into painful mediocrity.
The performances – the one portraying Cynthia – manage to rise above average Ari Notartomaso it worked most of the time, not always for him – we don’t believe for a minute that the set is real, the choreography is mostly flat,
Moreover, for some inexplicable reason, they are mixed in such a way that they are quieter and more difficult to understand than the dialogue parts, and recorded and choreographed in such a way that we can hardly believe that the songs are actually being sung by those who put them into their mouths, and mostly they don’t even try to to pretend they are being heard live. And obviously they don’t adhere to the main rule of musical theater either, that we break out into song when the emotions have reached such a high level that it can no longer be expressed in prose. The lyrics often play the role of narration, but they are not original or insightful enough, in three episodes only two songs remained in my mind, even though I was paying close attention, but nowhere was there a hint of a hit.
A Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies he came with great ambitions, and he did so correctly – but unfortunately he could not bear the weight of them. The mission is not impossible, many first-rate teen series are able to live with insight, humor, entertaining, yet sensitive social commentary, and we have already seen that they managed to draw the attention of the younger generation to the dilemmas of previous eras – but here this mission was made more difficult by trying to do it all in the form of a musical to jump. And the hard part – we couldn’t list the really strong musical series for too long – we didn’t succeed. A lot of things would be forgivable if at least the entertainment was right – we could counter it with a light, funny, nice little musical on its own, without cleverness or progression, if we had a good time. Here, however, we are usually a bit bored, we feel like doing some washing or looking at Insta, and when it comes to songs, we either give in to these urges, or we experience a slight secondary shame, a feeling of shame, like when we have to congratulate a relative’s not-so-talented child on a singer-dancer production – our face Hide The Pain is set in Harold, and we hope it doesn’t take long.
Grease: The Rise of the Pink Ladies is a Paramount series, it can be watched here on Skyshowtime, the first two of its ten episodes came out at the same time, the rest are coming weekly. 24.hu: 5/10
#series #revive #cult #Grease