calvinnme except my memory lane was in Dallas, not New York City. I just fell in love with this film and its characters, characters who could only exist as they did and together in that very late disco period.Actually, Stillman got some things wrong, and maybe he did so on purpose. "Disco Destruction Night", occurred in July 1979, and he's got it happening "in the very early 80s" at about the mid point of the film. Since disco was completely dead - and its death was like that of one struck down suddenly by a heart attack - by the fall of 1980, he is probably aware of the anachronisms here, and just spun the tale as it was to prevent himself from basically making a yuppie version of Saturday Night Fever. Stillman must have been acutely aware of not wanting to be that film because, did you notice the film is devoid of even one song by the brothers Gibb, who are practically emblematic of the disco era? The film's focus is on a group of recent college grads in their early to mid 20's. You could call them friends but they are more like acquaintances, and they all frequent one particular disco. The center of the film is the pair of - I guess you'd call them friends - Alice and Charlotte. Alice is a quiet girl. I'd almost call her an Amish girl in sequined clothes and platform shoes by night, business attire and sensible shoes for her job in publishing by day. Charlotte is a mess. She went to the same college as Alice, and she seems to seek out a connection with Alice much more than vice versa, even though Charlotte is the outgoing one. But she is constantly putting Alice down, steering her the wrong way in her relationships, and blurting things out that embarrass Alice. Charlotte seems like the kind of person who just wants other people around to make her feel better about herself. Among the men in the group we have an ad man who must be able to get clients into the club or he'll be fired, a lawyer, and an assistant manager at the club who avoids commitment by telling women he is gay.In short, there is something unlikable about all of these people except maybe Alice, yet I found them fascinating. It's like "The Asphalt Jungle" (minus the crime) meets "Friends".All of these people are college educated, some at the Ivy Leagues, yet they are underpaid, and in the case of Charlotte and Alice, doing jobs that in any other city would go to high school grads. They mate, decouple with varying amounts of pain and drama, are living their youth at a time when they believe "The H" - herpes - is the worst thing that can happen to you, and when disco dies, proclaim that it just CAN'T be dead. It's not disco they are mourning, it is their ing from one phase of their youth to a more mature state, although I doubt they even realize it yet. A youth lived in the most exciting city in the world in a time of unique cultural acceptance and sexual freedom, and now they are forced to march on to a more constrained existence. Their post college adolescence is over.My favorite parts - Robert Sean Leonard as an environmental lawyer who seems sensitive at first yet denies his sexual partners certain vital "need to know" information, a hilarious deconstruction of Lady and the Tramp as only Harvard grads could do it, and the closing credits superimposed on what could almost be called a music video featuring "Love Train" that sends the film out on a joyful hopeful note. Just a few words about the plot - there really is none. If you are looking for an action picture look elsewhere. But if you like films filled with great dialogue I highly suggest it.
tieman64 This is a review of "Damsels in Distress" and "The Last Days of Disco", two films by writer/director Whit Stillman.Released in 2011, "Damsels" stars Greta Gerwig as Violet, the leader of a band of young women. As they have been deeply scarred in the past, the girls invent new personas for themselves and attempt to help other wounded people by embarking on various altruistic endeavours. One of their schemes involve "inventing a new form of dance", in which dance becomes akin to a political movement used to spread "togetherness, love and happiness".Stillman's godfather, sociologist E Digby Baltzell, authored "Aristocracy and Caste in America" and helped popularise the term "Wasp". Stillman's films, meanwhile, tend to focus on the haute bourgeoisie, though he's more obsessed with questioning the naive assumptions they hold toward responsibility, culpability and leadership. In this regard, his films are preoccupied with characters whose well intentioned good deeds lead to disasters, or seemingly horrible characters who inadvertently help others. The intentions behind deeds are also examined: is altruism really altruism if it's unconsciously rooted in selfishness? Why do good deeds do damage? And why do the noblest of intentions oft lead to unforeseen disasters? All these questions arise during one subplot in which the girls date boyfriends who are less cool and less intelligent than they are (their intention is to transform the boys into something better). In another subplot, the girls hand out soap to unhygienic male students. Both plans backfire spectacularly, with the soap turned into a weapon/game and the girls' relationships with the guys having less to do with reformation than their own personal insecurities and hangups. The film then ends with our heroes dancing to "Things are looking up", originally sung by Fred Astaire in the 1937 film "A Damsel In Distress".Stillman was born into a very politically active, radically left-wing family. Many critics tout him as being one of the few "intellectual conservative directors", whilst others see his films as being reactionary responses to his parental upbringing. This is, after all, a guy whose films are often about "vindictiveness and self-centeredness unintentionally benefiting others" and "well-intentioned meddling causing damage", which is of course the credo of many far right groups. But Stillman really embodies a postmodern scepticism regarding both the political left and right. "When you're an egoist, none of the harm you do is intentional," characters in his earlier pictures state. And later: "Today barbarism is cloaked with self-righteousness and moral superiority." Elsewhere he has characters defending conservative values (marriage, monogamy etc) because, though they're simply rooted in "ritualistically enforced behaviour", such behaviour was itself "once deemed unconventional but has been adopted because it works for society". This argument is of course true, but also wrong in many instances. Stillman's films tend to present both sides of the coin.These contradictions become most apparent in Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco". Set in the mid 1980s, "Disco" centres on a group of articulate urbanites. They're descendants of wealth, but have a hard time making ends meet. This at first seems like an apologia for the upper middle classes, until various mouthpieces in the film mock the "troubles" of our cast, even as Stillman sympathises with them.The film then watches as the college graduates of the Me Generation set about co-opting disco trends and the totems of the sexual revolution. The "openness" of these social movements, however, quickly gets perverted into an arena of exclusivity, money, rules and regulations. The result is the creation of a false elite: those cool, attractive or pushy enough to get into the clubs and those willing to subject themselves to the club's arbitrary, superficial and capricious rules.The film then contrasts two characters. One's Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), who's elegant, sophisticated, and always unintentionally harming others with her needle-like tongue. The other's Alice (Chloë Sevigny), a quietly sensitive woman who has no idea what the sexual revolution means for people like her. Acting free and sexy gets her stigmatised as a whore, whilst acting bookish and intellectual gets her stigmatised a prude. The disco dance floors epitomise this new sexual minefield, where there are no known steps, no clear partners, where attentions constantly shift, where no one touches for long, yet where there seemingly exists no boundaries."Control your own destiny. Don't wait for guys to call." Charlotte says, which is your typical Stillman "fact", in that its conservative counterpoint is then shown to be also true. Infinite choice has its own problems and self expression need not be free but a product of influence.Interestingly, Alice embodies a modernist sensibility. She has standards, values and is constantly judging and categorising. Charlotte embodies a postmodern subjectivity, which, of course, is couched in a aura of "nonjudgementality", in which its deemed okay to insult and criticise because what's said is always just a "silly personal opinion" anyway. Charlotte's lines frequently highlight this contradiction: "People hate being criticised" she says, before complaining that Alice was "too moralistic and judgemental in college". Later Alice sleeps with a character called Tom, who promptly ditches her when Alice follows Charlote's advice to become a sexual predator. "I crave sentient individuals who don't abandon their principles," Tom says, disgusted with the cheapening of romance and relations, whilst, ironically, sticking to modern conventions of "openness" with these lacerating speeches (and it is he who gives her a STD!). "I'm beginning to think," Alice later says, "that maybe the old system of people getting married based on mutual respect and shared aspirations, and slowly, over time, earning each other's love and iration, worked the best." For Stillman, mores, commitments, values and manners have everything to do with what distinguishes us as human, they're just very fickle, unreliable things.8.5/10 - Worth one viewing.
jay393 This is a much better movie than a casual glance at existing reviews would indicate. It's already a cult classic -- take a look at the prices for OOP copies on Amazon -- and it provides a picturesque look at some of the wretched excesses of the end of the disco era. When it comes to understanding the American experience in the twentieth century, there are important parallels between the Roaring 'Twenties and 'Seventies. Both eras ended with a kind of hangover from the initial exuberance and expansion that kicked them off. Maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but in a limited way, the Last Days of Disco is as good a meditation on the end of its era as The Great Gatsby is about the end of the Jazz Age.Some people won't like this film because they'll have a hard time relating to the yuppies who are the major characters, but the character development (or lack thereof) is one of the movie's major strengths. Director Stillman is in perfect control of the dynamics of their interactions. He knows all these people very well from real life.Although it's a wee bit stilted at times, another strength of the movie is its dialog, which is very original and first class. The Last Days of Disco is a superb tableau of the morality of its times and deals with a number of themes that are central to the human condition.All in all, I think this movie deserved a better fate than it has received so far. I'm afraid that it was probably as big a failure as Barcelona was a success, and I find it sad that Stillman, whom I regard as a very original voice in American movies, has perhaps been unable to find backers for new projects since that time, although I understand that he may soon (2007) finally have another release in the offing. If you like The Last Days of Disco, you will almost certainly enjoy his two earlier films, Metropolitan and Barcelona.
