Movies Everybody Loves That I Hate: Episode 3 – “Grease”
- Today’s Movie: Grease
- Year of Release: 1978
- Stars: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing
- Director: Randal Kleiser
This movie is not on my list of essential films.
History brings us certain dates which as Franklin Roosevelt said “will live in infamy.” There’s the date of which he was speaking, December 7th, 1941. More recently there is September 11th, 2001. For my money, the Hollywood equivalent is June 16, 1978. This is the date that one of the most beloved Broadway shows of all-time was released as a major motion picture. It became one of the most beloved films; to this day “Grease” remains the top-grossing musical in American movie history.
An elephant on a steady diet of broccoli kale salad and chain-gunning Dulcolax couldn’t make a bigger shit-pile than this movie
Do you know the kind of people who like this movie? The kind of people who confuse “popular” with “good;” the kind of people who think Olive Garden is “good Italian” food. You could line up every cook from every Olive Garden and collectively they wouldn’t know Italian food if it kicked them in the taint. If you think “Grease” and Olive Garden would make a great dinner-and-movie date combination, please never have children. Invariably, you’ll fuck them up so badly they’ll end up liking that shit too.
Letting your kids eat Olive Garden is one thing; if you have no issues with your offspring becoming pre-diabetic gastropods before they are even out of middle school, that’s your deal. But if you let your kids watch “Grease,” you are virtually guaranteeing they will become reprobate pieces of shit because that’s the message this movie sends.
For over four decades, this film’s popularity has hidden it’s sinister undertones. That stops today because we here at Dubsism are here blow the lid off this thing.
1) Danny Zuko is monstrous piece of shit.
There’s a world full of feminist studies professors who love to deride this movie. Of course, these are all a bunch of ball-busting nags who have chin whiskers, arm hair, and a distinct proclivity to miss the point. They would have you believe that Grease is the most sexist, slut-shaming, virgin-shaming, dis-empowering, and discriminatory movie ever made against women. Even the people who are stupid enough to eat at Olive Garden understand that you have to be seriously retarded to ascribe even the slightest iota of pointed social commentary to this movie. Don’t get me wrong, those fat-butt, floppy-tit “vag-itarians” have a point, but who the fuck in their right mind can take this movie so seriously they think it can convey a social message?
Having said that, the point remains that Danny Zuko is an asswipe of the first order. First of all, what kind of a shithead wears a leather jacket to the beach? Even then, when he meets Sandy and falls for her, what better way is there to say “I love you” than rocketing a handful of sand into somebody’s face…TWICE!
After that, he spends the entire summer ignoring her, and when school starts and the star-crossed couple is re-united, he blows her off so he can “look cool” in front of his friends. The best part is all this nonsense comes after a tortuously long power ballad in which Danny’s friends urge him to share details about their sexual encounters, which a) never happened, and b) prompt Danny to insinuate he may have raped her.
If that weren’t enough, at the dance contest, he dumps Sandy for a hot spin with his ex. What a dick-breath.
2) All those fucking awful songs.
It’s only fitting that “Summer Nights” includes an implicit rape reference, because that’s what this whole soundtrack does to your ears. Worse yet, “Summer Nights” is the only song which came from the original Broadway production. All those other ear-fuckers like the title track “Grease,” “You’re the One That I Want,” and the ultimately terrible “Hopelessly Devoted to You” were all created just for the film. Not only that, but that last song propelled Olivia Newton-John’s career to a whole new level, needlessly subjecting the world to her bullshit. Look, there’s a reason why we deliberately placed Australia on the exact opposite side of the world, and nothing good comes from exporting Aussies back into civilization.
3) Sandy represents everything hate-able about white women.
Sandy is a walking embodiment of about 99.99999% of the reasons why those feminist studies professors go ape-shit over this movie. There’s a simple reason for that. Sandy is improbably good looking, and despite that, she manifests all the “(insert issue here)-shaming” white women love to self-inflict.
The average self-described “feminist” usually looks like Jabba the Hutt with “five o’clock” shadow; there’s just simply no such thing as a “hot” feminist. That’s why it vapor-locks their brains when a gorgeous woman like Sandy goes down the rabbit hole of self-defeatism over some nudnik of a man.
Think about it. If you’re a fugly-ass “feminist,” you’d kill to look like Sandy. You’d love to have every heterosexual male on earth and even a few of the gay ones kissing your ass. You can spew all the crap you want about “white privilege;” there’s NOTHING that trumps “hot girl privilege.” But Sandy pisses that all away for a shit-for-brains like Danny Zuko, which makes the feminist’s brains explode like a July 4th fireworks display.
In all actuality, Sandy is the complete package; she’s good-looking, not crazy, and has no vices. According to this movie however, these are all crippling qualities if you’re looking to keep a man, especially one you dated over the summer and on the first day of school acts like you never existed. Naturally at this point, even the non-feminists and Olive Garden customers are hoping this movie is about Sandy’s discovery that Danny is a fuck-tard and she realizes she is better off with him in her rear-view mirror. Sorry gang, but instead of this being an empowering tale of self-actualization and a journey about a nice girl finding a boy more worthy of her wholesome charms, this becomes an exercise in dysfunctional co-dependency.
Look at what this dumb-ass white girl does to try getting a man back who treats her like something he’d scrape off his shoe. She completely ruins her girl-nest-door golden locks with a rat-nest perm that would give any slut in an 80’s hair-metal video Aqua-Net envy. She trades in her sensible shoes for the tallest set of “fuck-me” pumps she can find, clads herself in a weird melange of spandex and leather which gives her a “biker whore meets dominatrix” look, and the piece d’resistance…she starts smoking!
But being the eternal optimists, the non-feminists and Olive Garden customers still cling to the idea that Sandy still has time to figure out she’s not being true to herself, does an “about face” and still ditches Danny. Head fake again, gang. Sandy’s descent into the maelstrom of denial and self-destruction is the HAPPY FUCKING ENDING!
Now…let’s get to the part that will get me called a “racist.” For the most part, the kind of women who would put up with Danny’s bullshit are white. White women are the ones who invented self-doubt. White women are the ones who body-shame themselves. White women are the ones who self-destruct over dickweeds like Danny Zuko. If you doubt that, imagine what would have happened if he pulled his crap with a black woman. He probably would have gotten the shit beaten out of him. Imagine what would have happened if he pulled his crap with a Hispanic woman. He might have gotten himself stabbed.
4) Rizzo is the world’s first feminist anti-hero.
This is an impressive accomplishment given the fact that Rizzo is a character of the 1950s and radical feminism doesn’t kick into high gear until the 1960’s. On the one hand, Rizzo owns her life. She is proud, resilient and resourceful. She has all the confidence and self-awareness modern feminism purports to be all about. She makes it clear she’s not content to stay home and wait for the “Mr. Right” to come along. Rizzo doesn’t change for anyone; she knows what she wants and she doesn’t relent.
At the same time, she is a glaring example of why the feminist movement of the 1960’s failed to achieve any of it’s major goals. Pre-eminent feminist Gloria Steinem is often mistakenly credited with the saying “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Regardless of who said it, it became a feminist rallying cry, and if it doesn’t tell you one of the goals was universal lesbianism, what will? After all, what’s left in a world with no men?
The problem is Rizzo isn’t a lesbian; she’s pretty damn far from it. Worse yet, for all her bravado, she’s as insecure as they come. That’s why when she gets slut-shamed, she takes such glee in virgin-shaming Sandy. But all the while she wants to be Sandy. Since her hidden insecurities give her a low self-esteem, she shits all over Kenickie who is the one guy who actually loves her, because she doesn’t feel she’s worthy of being loved.
5) Speaking of slut-shaming…
Let’s touch briefly on Frenchy, the beauty school dropout. You know she got that nick-name because she blew her prom date, and he put her business on the Danny Zuko News Network. Not only that, but this movie goes out of it’s way to destroy the aspirations of one of the only Rydell retards who is doing anything to further their life after high school. In other words, we are well on our way in this movie to sending the message to women that the only way you can be happy in life is to be a male-subjugated floozy.
Then there’s the matter of “beauty school.” Is that even a “thing” anymore? I’m no expert considering I look like a Milk-Dud with a chin-beard, but it would seem to me that the concept of being a white woman with a career as a hair sciences professional died with the abundant availability of Vietnamese refugees looking to escape SuperCuts.
6) Was Rydell the high school for retards?
Danny Zuko: High-School Senior and AARP Member.
Seriously, Rydell High School must have been the only high school in America where the average age of the student body was north of 30. How many times did these dilcues get left back to be still in high school when they are all almost too old to be drafted? Stockard Channing is the worst; Rizzo looks like she’s about three cycles shy of menopause.
7) The type-casting of…well…pretty much everybody.
Don’t get me wrong…I love Stockard Channing, but at the time this movie was made, she’s got the best current Hollywood resume of anybody in this film, and it isn’t exactly “block-buster” material. Granted, I think “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh” and “The Big Bus” are damn fine comedies, but they weren’t exactly cornerstones for an “A-List” filmography. Yeah, I know “Grease” features old-school “studio-era” icons like Sid Caesar and Even Arden, but even in 1978, they are so “25 Years Ago.” Like I’ve already mentioned, at this point Olivia Newton-John is little more than a “B-list” country singer; it will be three more years before she gets “Physical” with us.
As for John Travolta, John Travolta is in the middle of his “”Welcome Back, Kotter” run and he’s just coming off “Saturday Night Fever,” which at the time made him “trendy at best,” but…
7) Speaking of John Travolta…
Sadly for his career, he didn’t die soon enough after he made this movie. Think about it, if Travolta would have croaked two years after Grease, he probably becomes the “James Dean” of his generation. Dean became an icon for making one great movie which spoke to a generation (Rebel Without A Cause) and two fair-to-borderline crappy ones which were incredibly popular.
“Saturday Night Fever” is Travolta’s generational movie, even though it hasn’t aged well; people who weren’t alive in the 1970’s have a limited concept of what a dark and fucked-up time it was in America. You can argue amongst yourselves the fair-to-borderline crappy yet popular nature of “Grease” and “Urban Cowboy.”
8) Speaking of people dying…
When we get to the “car race” scene, nobody bothered to Olivia Newton-John how filthy the Los Angeles river is. Seriously, if you aren’t familiar the with L.A. River, it’s essentially the world’s largest drainage ditch. It’s bone-dry most of the time, but when it isn’t, “drainage ditch” is a euphemism for “gigantic open sewer.” In other words, I’m amazed that after she was running around in it with no shoes, she didn’t catch her death from something involving softball-sized infectious pustules and shitting blood by the quart.
9) The female “G-Spot” does not operate like a carburetor.
It’s almost as if somebody deliberately tried to make as many sexual allegories about cars as they could possibly fathom. It all starts when all of Sandy’s friends need to know if Danny has a car; the obvious inference is there’s no back-seat sluttery possible if there’s no back seat. Meanwhile the boys are frantically using their shop class to build a car solely for the purpose of making a woman climax…like that’s even possible. If men could create female orgasms with a socket set and a couple quarts of 10-W-30, we wouldn’t have feminists or lesbians; every woman in this country would be too busy getting their bolts tightened.
Then there’s the role that car plays in…
10) The Completely Fucked-Up Ending
Fuck…I hardly know where to start with this. There’s the climactic dance scene which is really just so much choreographed sexual harassment; there’s more grabbing, groping, and up-skirting here than at Joe Biden’s house. I skipped over the part about Rizzo’s pregnancy scare, but it does lead to her rejection of Kenickie, which in turn leads to the surreal and obvious homoerotic exchange between himself and Danny. There’s no way you can watch that scene and not think they are about to lube up each other’s dip-sticks right there in front of God and the world.
Frankly, I would have been happy to see Danny and Kenickie come out together because I love anything which makes hypocritical religious dip-shits foam at the mouth. Besides; at least that relationship wasn’t over-flowing with sexual violence like the one between Danny and Sandy. Don’t forget, this all started with the sand-throwing incident, and culminates with Danny trying to cop a feel at the drive-in, an act for which Sandy retaliates by trying to “Lorena Bobbitt” him with a car-door. Danny and Kenickie would have probably turned out to be a nice, quiet couple living in a trendy apartment above Sunset Boulevard; Danny and Sandy have “murder-suicide” written all over them… a pre-cursor to “Bud” and “Sissy” from “Urban Cowboy.”
Not only are Danny and Sandy so co-dependent they’re going to eventually kill each other, they do a complete role-reversal. Danny goes from leather-jacket wearing greaseball to varsity jock complete with the douche-baggy letterman’s sweater; Sandy shows up every bit the biker slut ready to gang-bang the entire movie set.
But the part that really tipped me off to the fact Danny and Sandy are going to end up dead is the fact they drive off into the clouds at the end. What’s even worse is not only does this movie foreshadow their deaths, but insinuates they are getting into Heaven despite the fact they are both completely hate-able.
That brings us back to that goddamned car. How many people do you know that got into Heaven and drove a stolen car to get there? Everybody gets so caught up in the “driving off into the sky” angle nobody picks on that fact they ripped-off Kenickie’s car. To prove what a complete fuck-up Danny is, not only does he steal Kenickie’s ride, he puts the nab on a car he made fun of Kenickie for buying in the first place. Danny does nothing but call that car a chunk of shit, lets Kenickie pump a summer’s worth of sweat equity into it, then straight-up swipes it. Not only that, he did so literally right in front of Kenickie’s face in broad fucking daylight…and right after he gay-cock-blocked him.
Conclusion:
If you’re all about completely nonsensical escapism, this movie is for you. Where else can you expunge all your own teen-ager trauma with fuck-awful songs sung by thirty-somethings and then jet away in a flying death-mobile? But for as much as I’ve just bagged on this movie, anything that simultaneously pisses off feminist lesbians and homophobe jerk-offs has clearly done something right.
Got a question, comment, or just want to yell at us? Hit us up at dubsism@yahoo.com, @Dubsism on Twitter, or on our Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook pages, and be sure to bookmark Dubsism.com so you don’t miss anything from the most interesting independent sports blog on the web.
About J-Dub
7 comments on “Movies Everybody Loves That I Hate: Episode 3 – “Grease””
Drop Your Comments Here
The Man Behind Dubsism
Dubsism on Pinterest
Click On JoePa-Kenobi To Feel The Power Of The Jedi Photoshop Trick. Besides, you can get the best sports-related recipes ever. This is the sports-related content you are looking for.
Blog Directories
Dubsism 
Bless you, Dub! I have never liked this film and cringe at the soundtrack. Where is the appeal of this nonsense? This is the line where musicals and I part ways.
LikeLike
The sequel to this was worse (most people don’t really remember that). Also, after doing an IMDB check, they were going to have two more sequels and a TV series (Grease 2 flopped, so they thankfully decided against it).
LikeLike
Brilliant, sir.
LikeLike
LOL! You are officially disinvited to my next Grease karaoke party! 😉
LikeLike
Trust me. You really don’t want to hear me sing 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thank you, just… thank you. I can’t verbally express how much this movie makes me Cringe with its detestable characters and downright awful ending.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: Movies Everybody Loves That I Hate – Episode 9: “Blow Out” | Dubsism