The Last Days of Disco: REALLY?

Why?

That was my initial reaction but then I realized that I rather enjoy Metropolitan. The dialogue rings true even if I do know nothing about that social strata.

Now the final decline and fall of disco was such a long delayed and much anticipated event that it should get its movie.
I’ll probably end up buying it.

Why? Because it’s darn great!

Since this is bound to become another Ben Button bitch-a-thon I’ll just say this:

Everybody do the Van Damme!

From what film is that scene, JP? Is it in the Criterion Collection like Benjie Button?

It should be, I’m guessing it’s from Bloodsport 2: Electric Boogaloo

Anyway to answer the original question this release is nothing out of the ordinary since CC has already released Metropolitan and the current region 1 release has been out of print for some time. I’m not a fan of the film either, if anything I see Stillman as a more high-brow Wes Anderson, but CC loves to find a director they can release multiple films from.

why?

because what other film finds educated young people at the intersection of drugs, disco, and divinity and allows them to walk out the other side relatively unscathed.

not to be rude mr belmondo, but i cannot see your point about stillman and wes anderson at all…anderson creates the worlds that exist only in his mind as to where stillman is a keen observer with obsessive detail of an overlooked time and social milieu. i would enjoy knowing what you see as their similarities.

if anything, it seems as if stillman is making highbrow versions of something akin to linklater’s dazed and confused, which is also great at capturing both a personal and shared history simultaneously.

Just noting that the film is available to watch free anytime on Hulu, if anybody’s interest was piqued…

@Troy

The Anderson comparison was not based on the directors’ styles, but because both directors came about in the 90s American independent circuit, but Linklater would work better comparison-wise since him and Stillman share commonalities.

I think Barcelona is going to get a Criterion release as well.

I really hated disco….I hope it really dies out :)

I liked this when i saw it years ago, might pick it up.

I’ve never seen Metropolitan or Barcelona. Are they best watched in order, trilogy style? Or will nothing be lost by watching as I get ahold of them?

If you have the opportunity to watch them consecutively, do it. Just sensible.

It is a wonderful trilogy. All three are some of the best scripts in the past two decades.

@TJ Geronimo The same characters pop up in them but you’ll not miss much by watching then out of order.

That clip is from Kickboxer

I just watched The Last Days of Disco. What shit. The conversations were so cliche and always analytical. You could really tell the writer was trying to make it sound natural, but that’s the problem: you could tell he was trying. It put off this vibe that it thinks the subject matter is so important, when the movie had nothing interesting to say.

I enjoyed it for the first 45 minutes or so, but then it got really tiresome. Maybe it would’ve made a better UPN or CW show than movie, but as a movie, it seemed long and smug. Maybe I just “don’t get it” since I didn’t live through disco.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE!
CHLOE SEVIGNY, AH…..

@Jim W

The humor from The Last Days of Disco stems from the inflated, self-indulgent way they speak. Of course they sound smug and ridiculous, they’re supposed to, and Stillman holds that talk up to ridicule (more so here than in Metropolitan, where the audience is supposed to sympathize with them a bit more (perhaps due to the characters in Metropolitan being 5-7 years younger than those of Disco, who ought to know better). These are kids fresh out of college whose idea of intelligence and maturity is to wildly over-analyze everything, themselves include, in speech which they consider adult and learned (take for example Kate Beckinsale’s lines about “new social models” in Disco and all of that talk of Fourier and Veblen in Metropolitan ). In all three of Stillman’s movies (which I’m starting to come into agreement form a sort of trilogy) self-indulgent youths are all slowly but surely brought down to Earth (despite his sympathetic view of the American upper-class, his two main influences appear to be Jane Austen and Luis Bunuel, which becomes more apparent with repeated viewing). I would be surprised if anyone actually liked these people or was eager to be in their company.

“It put off this vibe that it thinks the subject matter is so important, when the movie had nothing interesting to say.”

I don’t think Stillman considered the subject matter to be that important, though the characters do try really hard to think of themselves and their surroundings as important (only to have their egos deflated by the “disco sucks” crowd, and of course, the real world around them). Only when (I really apologize for using this word, and by-the-by SPOILER ALERT) things do become serious (when the Sevigny character contracts VD) do some of the characters begin (very slowly) to expand their perspective beyond their very closed world.

I will say that some of the line delivery in his films does grate on me (Taylor Nichols’ stutter especially (apparently he doesn’t really have one, so that makes it a little baffling)), but in the case of Metropolitan, a large portion of the cast was comprised of New York stage actors, and it’s clear that they were trained to deliver lines on stage in that much more mannered stage way and not as naturally as film requires. What feels appropriate on stage, feels too artificial on film.

Personally, I think The Last Days of Disco is Stillman’s best film, and maybe you ought to give him another chance.

(and just for the record, I didn’t live through disco either)

This is still available for free viewing on Hulu here: The Last Days of Disco

probably your last chance to see it free before it is released on DVD.

Chloe Sevigny is quite good in this; to me Robert Sean Leonard is as unwatchable here as elsewhere; I have no opinion on George Plimpton in this or any other film.

bump

FIGHT!

bump again

why won’t this bump? let’s get this discussion going.

Just saw this. After the first 10 minutes, I was ready to hate it, but as it went on and I became more acclimated to the sensibility of the film—particularly of the dialogue—and I really grew to like it quite a bit.

I love Des’s line near the end:

“We’re getting older. We’ve lived through a period that’s … ended. It’s like dying, a little bit.”

It just perfectly encapsulates the weird relationship these characters have with impending adulthood, this precocious attachment to the idea that something so devoid of meaning and substance has nonetheless become a concrete landmark in their lives.