It’s incredibly rare for a mediocre Broadway show to be adapted into a genuine movie classic, and indeed, this is the only time in the history of the form I know of it having happened.

The movie version of Grease is superior to the original Broadway show for two reasons. Firstly, while modern stage productions tend to be performed more like the movie, the original Broadway production of Grease was a raucous and slightly bitter spoof of Fifties youth culture. The movie, on the other hand, plays the material completely straight, as though it was an actually one of the Frankie Avalon—Annette Funicello films it’s deconstructing, because doing so only highlights the dark, gritty, subversive elements of the material.

Remember, this is a movie that features underage sex, a pregnancy scare, and a highly unwholesome pseudo-happy ending that is, at best, the cynical triumph of conformity over individuality, and at worst, the subtextual portrayal of a teenage girl choosing to have premarital sex purely to keep her boyfriend. The movie is so deadpan about treating this as though it were a legitimately happy ending that a surprising number of people have completely missed the fact that its disturbing implications were intentional, but the ending was already there in the original Broadway show, and as stated, that version was far more transparent about its brutally satirical intentions.

The second way in which the movie improves upon its source is in the score. The stage score of Grease did have a number of fine songs…several of the classics from the film version, including “Summer Nights”, “Greased Lightning”, and “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” were already in the Broadway version. But about half of the Broadway score consists of embarrassing clinkers like “It’s Raining On Prom Night”, “Alone At a Drive-In Movie”, and “Mooning”.

The film cut pretty much all of those duds, and added four new songs which, while some of them didn’t quite fit the show’s Fifties sound, all equaled or surpassed the highlights of the stage show. The love song for John Travolta as the leading man, “Sandy”, is not only a fine song but also a flawless evocation of the Fifties, and while the torch ballad “Hopelessly Devoted To You” and the climactic duet “You’re the One That I Want” may not fit in perfectly with the rest of the score’s musical idiom, they’re sufficiently fantastic songs that it seems churlish to stand on principle about that.

Besides, the only song in the film’s score to truly break faith with its Fifties sound is the title-song, and it essentially happens outside the story anyway. Remember, the original stage show began with a flashback, and the film replicates the feeling of the Seventies looking back on the Fifties with an evocative animated credits sequence set to a disco-style song sung by Franki Valli himself. In addition, the lyrics to that song (such as “Conventionality belongs to yesterday” or “We start believing now that we can be who we are”) takes on a biting irony in a film that offers us, not the triumph of individuality that most high school-based romances offer, but the crushing domination of conformity that consistently happens in such setting as real life. It’s as if the authors decided not to give us the inspirational bullshit we want to hear and are generally given by fiction, and instead chose to end the story the way it would have ended in real life.

The film’s cast is admittedly a bit of a mix, but you have to give enormous credit to director Randal Kleiser, given that he was dealing with a leading man who couldn’t sing and a leading lady who couldn’t act, and both those facts are barely discernible while watching the movie. Compare Travolta’s vocals here to any other instances of his attempting to sing, or Newton-John’s acting to her performance is Xanadu, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.

As I said, this movie is so skillful and subtle at what it does that its artistry and penetrating honesty are often entirely missed by less discerning audiences, but there’s more to its genius than the classic songs and John Travolta’s dancing, and it stands not only as a classic, but a more complex and substantive classic than it is generally given credit for.

This is an entertaining and excitingly theatrical film, but it loses a great deal of the allegorical content that made the original stage musical so interesting. The film follows the plot of the stage show fairly closely, but discards the interval between the two acts; in this version, the Giant’s initial attack interrupts Cinderella’s wedding to the Prince. This makes for an effective shock value, but it costs the film the events of the second act’s prologue, which examines the character’s reactions to getting everything they ever wanted and makes the show’s message much more nuanced and complex.

Dispensing with the Narrator character was more understandable, since this extremely theatrical role would have been almost impossible to convey effectively in a film, but the decision to not kill off Rapunzel severely weakens the Witch’s motivation and lessens the impact of her great “Last Midnight” number. The infidelity between the Baker’s Wife and the Prince is somewhat bowdlerized, but since the original production left it ambiguous as to whether or not they actually had sex, this isn’t all that radical a change. There were a few other attempts to soften the material, but it’s actually quite surprising what was left in, including Cinderella’s Stepsisters having their heels and toes cut off and being blinded by birds.

In addition, most of the score is retained, with the only major losses being “No More”, the first-act finale “Ever After”, the reprise of “Agony”, and “Maybe They’re Magic”, and the cast is generally excellent. Meryl Streep is expectedly marvelous as the Witch, singing gloriously and giving an extremely powerful and suitably intimidating performance, but the real surprise is Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, who proves to be a wonderful singer and does an absolutely superb job at capturing the character.

The choice to split the dual role of the Wolf and Cinderella’s Prince into two roles is another move that costs the film some allegorical subtext, but both Johnny Depp’s terrifying wolf and Chris Pine’s roguish and subtly predatory Prince are sufficiently excellent to justify the change—Depp in particular steals the show with his deeply creepy rendition of “Hello, Little Girl”.

The actors playing the Baker and his Wife take their inspiration from the London production of the show, with working-class British accents, but they both turn in strong performances, even if the Wife’s central paradox…an amazingly likable character who is also the most immoral figure in the show, thus highlighting the show’ “nice/good” dichotomy…is somewhat lost in this version.

On the other hand, Jack and Little Red Riding Hood are cast far too young: since both characters’ establishing solos are metaphors for sexual awakening, they should be sung by actual adolescents, not children too young to actually understand and convey their contents. This was probably done to soften the risqué subtext of those songs, but it isn’t an effective solution, and has the effect of making them more uncomfortable, not less.

Still, for all the film’s faults, it certainly turned out better than any of the previous three Sondheim feature films, and if it isn’t really as interesting as the video recording of the original production, it would still probably be completely satisfying to anyone unfamiliar with the stage show.

Made in 1954 but not released on DVD until 2011, this underrated classic is subtler and more intelligent than your typical Operetta film like the Jeanette McDonald-Nelson Eddy series. Based on the biggest Broadway hit of Sigmund Romberg’s career, it was already dealing with a plot more bittersweet and grounded in reality than the average operetta of the period.

It concerns an uptight Prince who, after being rejected by his betrothed princess for lacking any social graces beyond his military training, is sent to Heidelberg University, more for a social education than an academic one. There, he quickly loosens up and learns how to enjoy himself, and falls in love with a pretty young barmaid named Kathy. But when his grandfather the King dies, he cannot escape his responsibilities and has to say a heartbreaking farewell to his happy youth and the woman he loves.

The score is full of images of spring and bittersweet odes to youth, with titles like “Golden Days” and “Thoughts Will Come To Me Of Days That Are No More”, and the overall message of the show is that the happy days of our youth are bound to come to an end, but that the memories they leave behind can help sustain us in the days after.

What the movie did was take this already unusually mature story for an operetta and drew it out into a far more relaxed and natural pace. Many have found the movie too slow-moving for this reason, but this unhurried pacing gives it what no operetta had yet had at the time…a believable naturalism of character. In the stage version, for all its improvements on the usual operetta formula, the lovers are still singing the rhapsodic “Deep In My Heart, Dear” almost as soon as they’ve met each other. In the movie, the Prince has time to gradually loosen up from an arrogant, uptight jackass to a nice, fun-loving young man, and he and Kathy have time to believably fall in love as they would in a higher grade of literary work.

Granted, the Prince’s behavior toward Kathy early on may seem a bit excessively clingy by modern standards of courtship, but if you’re going to demand that every movie made in past decades perfectly conform to modern relationship parameters, you’re probably never going to be able to watch a romantic film from any earlier than 1980. The comedy is hit or miss, as in most operettas, with a couple of comedy relief scenes that are almost wince-inducing, but the script is consistently literate and has its share of passably witty repartee.

This movie offers ample rewards for those patient enough to sit through its gradual process of character development, and that’s having not even mentioned the music. Nearly every major number from Romberg’s score made it into the movie, including the still-famous standards “Serenade”, “Deep In My Heart, Dear”, “Golden Days”, “Drink, Drink, Drink”, and “Come Boys, Let’s All Be Gay Boys” (the latter of which might provoke some snickers from more juvenile audiences, especially as it features the chorusmen dancing arm-in-arm as they sing it, but it’s still a wonderful piece of music). Three wonderful new songs were also written for the film, one of which, the soaring hymn “I’ll Walk With God”, has become an enduring standard and is still regularly recorded by standards-singers with sufficiently high tenor voices.

Originally, the great Mario Lanza was the play the Prince, but while there are conflicting account as to exactly why, he ended up leaving the project. However, his vocal tracks were retained, and are used to glorious effect in the finished film. The actual actor who plays the lead, Edmund Purdom, is a bit stiff and wooden, but he’s serviceable enough, and Lanza’s vocals do a lot to compensate for Purdom’s lack of emotional range.

Fortunately, movie musical stalwart Ann Blyth is both a wonderful singer and a winning actress as Cathy. The rest of the cast give generally understated performances that suit the tone of the film, although there is a stereotypical Yiddish comedian playing an innkeeper who seems quite out of place in these surroundings, and is responsible for several of the weakest comic set pieces. This film isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than it’s generally given credit for, and in many ways has actually held up better than several more famous operetta films.

If you were disappointed with the Hollywood film version of Phantom of the Opera (and let’s be honest, who wasn’t?), you may want to look into acquiring this on video instead. In contrast to the misguided changes that plagued that movie, this is quite simply a filmed production of the stage show, so its fidelity is beyond question. It does use the lyrical revisions added to the show during its run, but those are mostly improvements anyway, and the direction is actually much closer to Harold Prince’s original vision than most actual stage productions of the last fifteen years or so.

The leads are, with one exception, superb. Ramin Karimloo is an excellent Phantom, beautifully sung, compellingly acted and with palpable sex appeal that puts Gerard Butler’s to shame. Sierra Boggess is not only an exceptional singer, but arguably the greatest actress ever to record the role of Christine. She takes especial advantage of the opportunities offered by the camera, and brings out the erotic side of Christine’s relationship with the Phantom especially strongly, spending both the “Music of the Night” and “The Point of No Return” scenes simmering with transparent arousal.

The only weak link is the cast is Hadley Fraser’s blustering Raoul, who sings nicely but comes across far too cold and strident for the character, and is ultimately not sufficiently sympathetic to serve the show’s overall dynamic. A proper Raoul should have a certain measure of moral ambiguity in the second act, but if he can’t come across as sweet and sincere in his scenes with Christine, the shock of his echoing the Phantom’s “So, there is to be war between us” speech (essentially, the realization that he is becoming not all that different from the Phantom in his attempts to bring him down) is completely lost. This might have something to do with the production’s links to the ill-advised sequel Love Never Dies (two of the leads were also cast in that show), where Raoul was subjected to a similar process of dehumanization.

Nevertheless, this one casting misstep isn’t enough to keep this from being a satisfying and at times thrilling production of the show, and a more than viable alternative to the movie version. If you want a version of the show you can watch in your own living room where the story is intact, the score is well-sung throughout and the Phantom doesn’t look like a boy-band member even with his mask off, this is probably the version for you.

This movie isn’t an earth-shaking masterpiece, but it isn’t nearly bad enough to deserve the dismissive reaction it generally gets, and is actually a really solid, enjoyable viewing experience. The movie has been called on the carpet for having a clichéd plot, but since it’s essentially a tribute to early Hollywood musicals like those of Busby Berkely dressed up in a thin façade of modern trappings, the abundance of familiar backstager tropes was presumably deliberate, and actually helps the movie to achieve its intended effect.

It gets compared a lot to Showgirls, especially by ignorant online critics too young and stupid to know about the movies it’s attempting to pay tribute to, probably because of the setting (or rather the title, since the movie establishes very clearly that despite its name, the titular club is not a strip club). But it has nothing in common with that famous disaster beyond a few extremely superficial features that could be just as easily applied to any number of other films. They aren’t even referencing the same archetypical Hollywood plot; Burlesque is imitating 42nd Street, where the innocent young talent gets to go on because the previous star stormed out, whereas Showgirls was going for the more sinister All About Eve, where the up-and-comer creates her own opportunity to go on in the star’s place through treachery.

In any case, the primary point of the old-school film musicals Burlesque draws on was to showcase wonderful musical performances and production numbers, and that quota is more than filled here. The visuals are eye-poppingly sumptuous, almost on the level of Moulin Rouge but in a film that lacks that effort’s distracting problems in music and story, and Christina Aguilera acquits herself far better in her film debut than any of the other female pop singers to attempt it in the recent past. Her acting is merely adequate, but she reads lines convincingly and comes across as sufficiently likable, and her singing is the same spectacular work she’s always brought to her career as a pop singer. Offered a chance to perform an entire tunestack of the classic Jazz and Blues standards that have always suited her voice so well, this film’s soundtrack represents the finest set of songs Aguilera has ever laid down.

Her co-star Cher, while she brings a suitable grandeur to the Burlesque Club’s imperious, world-weary owner, doesn’t participate in the music as much as might be expected, but she does gets one stunning moment to shine with the epic ballad “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me”. Probably the best thing ever to come from high-profile Easy Listening hack Diane Warren’s pen, it was clearly intended as a bid for a Best Song Oscar and frankly deserved at least a nomination.

This isn’t an ambitious film, but for what it is it is a near-complete success, spectacular in its musical and visual showcase moments and more than watchable in the spaces in between, and it deserves much better than the dismissive reviews and lukewarm success it has received. I guess that, ironically enough for such an unambitious and unpretentious work, it takes a certain level of culture these days to accept the bygone conventions this movie tries to resurrect, but if you have a fondness for olden-day Hollywood musicals and a willingness to accept a pop singer trying her hand at classic standards, I think you’ll find this movie to be a very enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours.

I have a lot of bad things to say about this show, but I also believe it was one of the best things to happen to popular music in the modern era. Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first, starting with the show’s crippling script problems.

First, there is the show’s smug, condescending tone. The writers often seem to be doing bad work on purpose for their own amusement, and seem to invite the audience to be amused at their condescension, too. They also apparently think that acknowledging a problem with their writing and making a joke about it is the same thing as fixing it, particularly regarding things like racist, sexist and otherwise offensive content, which is often included just so it can be treated as a joke.

The second problem is that the characters aren’t very likable: it’s often hard to understand why we should care about these people. Matthew Morrison’s Will Schuester is portrayed as a hypocritical sleaze whose positive influence in the kids’ lives is frequently announced but rarely borne out by what we’re actually shown. Lea Michele’s Rachel is the embodiment of the diva-as-rottweiler archetype, ready to throw those who care about her under a bus anytime if she thinks it will help her career. Gay-rights poster boy Kurt comes off as a manipulative narcissist perfectly willing to use his minority status to get away with his inappropriate behavior. And so forth through all the major cast members. This problem only gets worse as time goes on and the characters do horrible things that the show generally expects the viewer to just forget about.

Then there’s the fact that each of the show’s writers is essentially working on a different show, and they don’t make the slightest effort to integrate them from episode to episode. As a result, the show swings wildly between inspirational afterschool-special territory and mean-spirited black comedy, which is incredibly frustrating and unsatisfying and makes it impossible to get emotionally invested in the characters. This is particularly harmful to what could been the show’s most effective character, colorful villainess Sue Sylvester. Instead, she constantly vacillates between a sympathetic antivillain with integrity and a hidden tender side, and a sadistic psycho who does most of her evil for her own amusement. Either version of the character, individually, is highly entertaining and the funniest thing about the show, but Sue just keeps switching back and forth depending on which is more useful to the current episode’s plot, making her character merely a construct rather than a person.

On top of the script problems, the show has a seriously uneven acting pool. The three main adults, Morrison, Jane Lynch and Jayma Mays, and the three most important of the kids, Michele, Chris Colfer and Cory Monteith, all range from good to superb in their acting, but several of the other kids (Amber Riley and Kevin McHale being two of the most severe examples) were pretty obviously hired for their vocals, and leave a lot to be desired on the acting front. All this is in the first three seasons alone—after that, the show went off the rails entirely, with an awkwardly forked narrative and a bunch of new characters who were simply modified retreads of the original cast.

But for all its problems, the show has one enormous strength that makes it hard to simply dismiss. The vocal performances on the show are incredible, and anyone who says otherwise is simply wrong. Morrison and Michele were practically Broadway royalty long before they appeared on this show, and several of the other performers, particularly Chris Colfer and Amber Riley, are almost good enough to match them. Granted, the show’s attempts at original songwriting have mostly fallen flat, but the show tunes and covers that make up the bulk of their output are often spectacularly done, and their covers of contemporary pop songs routinely surpass the originals. There is the occasional misstep, like Mathew Morrison’s awkward attempts at rapping or Kevin McHale’s insipid performing style, but, at least during its heyday, the show featured far more good performances than bad.

In addition to their sheer merit as music, Glee’s covers have had a genuine positive effect on popular music as a whole. Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You”, Fun’s “We Are Young”, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” and Imagine Dragons’ “It’s Time” were all launched into hit status after being covered on Glee, and it’s arguable that the Indie Rock crossover trend of 2012 would never have happened without the show’s support. The show was on life support by the time it ended, and even at its peak it was never good television, but it was, for the most part, good music, and it served an important role both in launching Indie Rock onto the pop charts and in helping bring modern Broadway into the mainstream consciousness, so for all its flaws, I’m deeply grateful that it exists.

The show this movie was drawn from was neither good television nor good music, but I get why it needed to exist. In its own way, it was the show that helped reestablish the long-defunct musical sitcom model that would lead to the creation of shows like Glee and Smash. The musical numbers don’t occur in every episode, but they are built into the premise of the show and occur fairly frequently, and were even released in a tie-in album form. Despite being inferior even to such competitors as High School Musical, the show certainly caught on for a brief window, and its popularity certainly had a role in birthing other, better shows in the same vein.

However, the show is certainly more interesting as a historical link than as a viewing experience. Apart from the occasional musical numbers, the show is pretty much a standard-issue Disney sitcom, with its lame jokes and hammy acting. Miley Cyrus is certainly a better actress than singer—you have to admire the way she throws herself into the role, and with better writing she might actually have been a pretty good sitcom actress, but for all her talent and obvious effort, she can’t make the jokes she gets here funny.

And it doesn’t help that her supporting cast is weak and her real-life father Billy Ray Cyrus, playing a fictionalized version of himself named Robbie Ray Stewart, is such a terrible actor that it actually makes one nostalgic for his singing career. The music itself is bland, forgettable teenybopper pop, and Miley Cyrus is one of the worst singers in the history of pop music—even Britney Spears was more vocally qualified than this.

The show was by no means the worst TV sitcom Disney ever produced (indeed, the progenitor of the genre, Full House, was far harder to watch than this), and apart from two memorably horrible individual moments, there’s nothing record-settingly awful about the movie itself either. That said, it’s still pretty hard to watch if you’re not a preteen girl yourself—like the show, it’s basically two hours of pandering girly wish-fulfillment.

The earnest, melodramatic tone of the film is completely different from the punchline-driven sitcom style of the television series, and the actors are clearly having serious trouble adjusting…all the series regulars who appear here come across as lost and confused, and Miley Cyrus’ performance makes it clear that she has no idea how to act without a laugh track (which explains why her attempts at a movie career went nowhere).

The film does admittedly manage one thing the show never achieved…it contains one genuinely memorable musical number. However, in this case that isn’t a good thing. It’s led into by one of the all-time most terrifying warning lines in movie history—”I’m gonna add a little hip-hop to this hoedown”—and what follows is the only number in this franchise’s history distinct and memorable enough in its sheer awfulness to qualify as a bona fide floppo number.

This film also makes you realize why the show tended to avoid plots related to its actual premise (teen girl with pop-star secret identity) in favor of standard-issue sitcom plots about Miley’s everyday life. The premise of the show is, when you actually think about it, profoundly fucked-up, amounting to emotional child abuse, and this movie takes it to its greatest possible extreme in its horribly-forced tacked-on ending.

The movie was reportedly planned to end with Miley rejecting the Hannah persona and going home to live a normal life, but then her sitcom got renewed for another season, so the final scene was subjected to a horrifying rewrite.

After Miley reveals her identity to a crowd of onlookers and ‘bares her soul’ by singing the utterly banal ballad “The Climb”, an adorable little girl in the audience starts shouting “Please be Hannah!”, the crowd openly rejects her personal revelation and promises to ‘keep her secret’, and Miley puts the wig back on and surrenders to the very pressures that were clearly shown earlier in the movie to be ruining her life. It’s actually a really disturbing ending, and it elevates what might have been a mediocrity akin to the original television show into a genuine disaster.

This film was a disastrous commercial failure, but that was less due to its quality than certain basically unfixable issues with its publicity campaign. The film is, in effect, a deconstruction of exploitation films. It’s about a white Southern girl with nymphomania, and a black blues musician who, after finding her left for dead, chains her to his radiator in an attempt to ‘cure’ her.

The amazing thing is that none of this vintage exploitation plot it handled in an exploitative way. Leading female Rae’s nymphomania is consistently and vividly portrayed as terrifying and tragic rather than even slightly titillating, and despite the copious nudity, I guarantee you that there is not one second of this film that is remotely sexy.

Also, despite its prominent role in the publicity, the chaining up aspect is actually rather downplayed in the actual film. He doesn’t keep her chained up all that long—it last a couple of days in-story, but it’s really only about fifteen minutes of the actual film. After that, he gives her the freedom to go and she stays with him anyway because she’s concluded that he really is her best hope to get better. The relationship between the two leads is complex and fascinating, particularly since there is absolutely nothing sexual about their odd connection.

This dark and painfully honest drama is played out by one of the best casts of the decade. Samuel L. Jackson, here offered a chance to play a serious character instead of his usual cartoon roles, comes through beautifully, giving a searing and incredibly intense performance that still has enough humanity and nuance to avoid turning into melodramatic caricature. He also performs most of the blues songs that make up the soundtrack himself; he learned to play guitar for the role, and he shows a surprising affinity with the style.

Christina Ricci, who was so dedicated to this role that she starved herself until skeletally thin for it, gives probably the single best performance of her career as Rae, coming across as a tragic, emotionally bruised waif who just wants to be loved, and simply cannot control the horrible addiction that is destroying her life. Justin Timberlake, as Rae’s nice-guy fiancée, manages to hold his own against these two incredible turns, and gives a heartfelt and honest performance in his own right.

The problem with the film was that, for all its considerable merits, it was basically impossible to market. The actors, particularly Ricci, complained about the film’s marketing campaign making it look like a straight-up exploitation film, but to be honest, I don’t think they really had much of a choice—anyone who hears this movie’s plot premise without actually seeing it is going to think ‘exploitation film’, and no publicity campaign could really get around that.

Meanwhile, the actual audience for exploitation films wouldn’t find this appealing in the slightest…not only is it possibly the least sexy movie of all time, but it deconstructs every standard aspect of the genre and is basically telling them they’re bad people for finding the idea of nymphomania sexy in the first place.

So the film failed to find its audience at the time, but I’m still extremely hopeful that we haven’t heard the last of it. Time, after all, has a way of doing this kind of marketing much better and more thoroughly and accurately than a studio publicity campaign, and given this movie’s staggering dramatic impact, it looks like a perfect candidate for the status of a genuine sleeper classic.