grease 2 is absolutely not what i expected i genuinely thought i would watch this
and hate every second of it it would be a cheesy gimmick but actually it's not bad now i'm not
going to say that it was amazing or that it was the best one i've ever seen that would be bending
the truth quite a bit but it wasn't terrible and there were some surprises in it with regards to
certain cast members from the first film who had decided to stay on for the sequel there will be
some small spoilers in this with regards to those cast members and certain other aspects of the film
but i won't spoil the overall story narrative development so this sequel was released in 1982
and this is directed by patricia birch written by ken finkelman
and this is set i believe two or three years after the end of the first greece film
and we are back at rydell high we have some new tea birds and pink ladies i do have a question
how do you become a pink lady because these pink ladies and t-birds are in their final year of
high school so once frenchie and john and rizzo and sandy etc all left do we just get new pink
ladies in the final year but these pink ladies have definitely been pink ladies the year before
so how do you become a pink lady and when do you become a pink lady i'd love to know the answer to
that question because they always just seem to be in their last year of high school and there are no
younger pink ladies although that is an exception here which i thought was a particularly weird
um very weird character decision but i'll talk about her in a moment um in this film we have
as i said new pink ladies and new t-birds it's basically about their relationships
and you know the usual high school problems of not sure what they want to be when they're growing up
not sure what kind of relationship they want to be in all the usual things we found in greece the
main difference of course is that we don't have danny and sandy it's not really focusing on them
although sandy is is mentioned but we do have a kind of similar narrative of a
girl and a boy will they want this should they be together are they polar opposites
it's kind of flipped here a little bit because this time round we have our leading lady um
michelle pfeiffer who plays a character called stephanie who is the leader of the pink ladies and
i wouldn't say that she's quite as much of a bad girl as danny zuko was a bad boy
with regards to motorcycles and smoking and all these things that make him seem
hip and cool if you like um but she's certainly the bad influence compared to
michael carrington who is played by maxwell caulfield and he is actually an english exchange
student at rydell and he is sandy's cousin so that is how that is tied in right there pretty
forced way of tying sandy into this film but it works you know it's not a problem and obviously
straight away he looks at stephanie with a little bit of admiration but he's not a t-bird
should he try and become a t-bird should he try and convince stephanie that pink ladies don't
need to be with t-birds there are a whole lot of different ways that this film could go and i'm not
i'm not going to say which way it goes but i'll say it worked you know it worked quite well i have
no issues with the development of the narrative it made sense um it felt less forced than greece
i've mentioned before that greece i'm kind of fed up with because i've seen it so many times
i was obsessed with it growing up but even but you know when i look at it now i can see that
there are a lot of problems particularly with the treatment of the female characters in greece
and sandy having to change her entire identity just to be with a boy let's not go there
i would say this narrative of greece to greece ii is less problematic than greece
but it's still not you know perfect and not even insofar as it being a product of its time i just
think some of the representations of certain characters are a little bit questionable but not
as bad as greece so the narrative is pretty much what i expected but a little bit more enjoyable
what i loved before i talk about the characters i actually really thoroughly enjoyed the music
i thought the choreography was really good the songs were really engaging it starts off with back
to school again which is actually pretty really entertaining and i liked it it's quite a a big
number with a lot of um dancers in it and that's what the choreography was great there wasn't
really a song in this that i thought would be good enough to stand up to the song quality of greece
obviously the grease soundtrack is massively iconic but they were enjoyable and i liked them
like i can't really fault them the choreography was very good the costumes were great the set
designs were fine the casting obviously really good the characters are interesting so we have
some characters from greece that have come back and the one that kind of surprised me the most was
frenchy for somebody who dropped out of high school
and then dropped out of beauty school it's quite admirable to see her coming back to vidal
to get her chemistry as she says and so that she can go and mix her own
cosmetics you know she's she's got dreams and aspirations i think that's brilliant go for it
um and i've always liked frenchie we also have principal princess principal mcgee um eve arden
absolutely love her we have coach calhoun eugene's back really really you know nice little
nods to the previous film um there were other characters i would have liked them to have
brought back but i think it worked pretty well the main characters of the t-birds and the pink ladies
the the t-birds i felt like were just carbon copies of each other i didn't really care but
the pink ladies definitely have standout personalities um aside from stephanie
we have um sharon paulette rhonda and dolores and dolores is paulette's younger sister
and she's basically just being like a personal slave to paulette with the hope that she will
become a proper pink lady she's kind of like an honorary pink lady and she is younger um she said
something about when she's in the 12th grade she will xyz so she's at least 11th grader younger
i don't exactly know how old that is because i'm in the uk and it's a different system
but just for context and that again made me question well how old is a pink lady are they
always the final year of high school and then when they drop off to new cohorts take over i don't
know i'd be curious to know but i feel like it's a plot hole that nobody else cares about but i
really want answers for um but i found that character be quite creepy brilliantly acted played
by and pamela seagal i thought she was a very engaging character very mesmerizing almost she was
for me a bit of a scene stealer because she was obviously out of place with the other pink ladies
but obviously given her age it just on the age of the character it just felt
a little bit weird um it's a very interesting decision to
put that character in there but i guess it helped mix it up from the original film
so grease 2 is a very pleasant surprise again i'm not going to say that it's this amazing
brilliant film that will withstand the test of time and that everybody should go and see
but if you've been looking at it thinking yeah it's not going to be any good give it a chance
if you like musicals i think you'll like it it's certainly if you like greeks and you like musicals
if you don't like greece you won't like it if you don't like musicals you won't like it
but if there's a chance that you may engage with it give it a go
it's definitely nowhere near as bad as i expected