THE TRUE STORY OF THE TRAVOLTA
Here's Johnny !
You know, love and loathe my passion for greasy comedians. And if there's one who outshines the rest in embodiment, stature, toothy grin and Church of Scientology membership, it's Travolta. Travolta has stirred me since I was 5 years old. I think that's how old I was when I saw Grease at the Maison-Alfort cinema across from the train tracks. With its chiseled soundtrack, madcap romance and fantastic acting, wonderful dance numbers and Travolta's splendid drawl, I was immediately drawn in. I loved Olivia Newton John, of course. But the character who turned me around was John, straight away.
On leaving the cinema, I went to the record shop to buy the musical's title track. The 7' never left my record player for two or three years.
Grease took Chapi-Chapo's place in my heart, and it was no mean feat to take it from the twins in the hats. After the record shop, I headed off to the Prisunic shop, where I asked my nanny to kindly get me a small tube of hair gel to recreate Johnny's quiff. To congratulate me on my good grades and points, my parents bought me the movie poster. I hung it on the ceiling to open and close my eyes to it.
Saturday Night Fever
In my teens, when Berlusconi was arriving with his billions of lire to burst the French broadcasting and its wave of insanity called "the 5", I was able to discover John's earlier work: Saturday Night Fever. Obviously, the
film is harsher, darker. It's the NY of the 70s, hard, rocky, the one that preceded Walter Hill's Warriors. But the soundtrack, one of the best-selling with the Bodyguard (a bad example, isn't it!), is of a "Blanchet-like" perfection and, well, helped the film's performance.
I COULD ALSO MENTION PERFECT WITH JAMIE LEE CURTIS AND ITS CHOREOGRAPHIES SIMULATING SEX SCENES THAT BECAME CULT IN THE GIF ERA. NO HARM SEEN/NO HARM DONE.
I could go on and on about his fantastic filmography, Look who's talking, Pulp Fiction, Carrie, Blow Out, and even Pulp Fiction (this repetition is just to show you that it's not an AI that's writing these texts), which I saw in Cannes after emptying kegs and kegs of beer before the screening.
But in the end, what I'm getting at, his true masterpiece, his crowning achievement, remains and will remain, forever, Face Off.
His second collaboration with John Woo. It is grandiloquent, even grotesque, and must have aged like a Beaujolais wine from a box, but when it came out, I went to the cinema 4 times just to feast my eyes on it.
It's for all these reasons, but also because he can fly a 747, that I adore Travolta and thought I'd dedicate him a pump to match his greatness.
As you may have noticed, the Travolta pump is topped with a peacock feather. This artifact is a symbol of the good eye and permanent resurrection. And that's what Travolta is all about. Just when the whole of Hollywood thought he was in the doldrums, he came back to center stage time and time again.
He made two thunderous comebacks.
