The Last Days of Disco

Released 1998
Stars Chloe Sevigny, Kate Beckinsale, Christopher Eigeman, MacKenzie Astin, Matthew Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Tara Subkoff, David Thornton, Jennifer Beals
Directed by Whit Stillman

Why did I rent this movie? Because I have always hated disco, and I was expecting a biting satire that really laid into this (thankfully) brief period of American pop culture. While the movie did take satiric swipes at the disco crowd, it was rather reverent toward the music itself. There were a number of uninterrupted songs which caused me to use my fast forward button, but that was ok. Since they were uninterrupted I didn't miss any dialoge, which was the reason I rented this in the first place.

I knew "The Last Days of Disco" was about an Ivy League crowd involved in the disco scene. That's an intriguing dichotomy, because it takes what should be one of our most intellectual groups and inserts them into one of our most unintellectual settings with the most anti-intellectual music. This has great promise and delivers to some degree, but the first 40 minutes has a lot of insipid dialogue. To begin with, the characters are about as anti-me as possible. I would never ever go to a club that has a crowd of losers trying to get in while some dork bouncer plays the gatekeeper, and I would never wait outside such a club desperately hoping to be selected. I think anyone involved in such a situation is pathetic. If you are one of these people, look within yourself and try to determine why you have such low self-esteem and are so desperate to be accepted. If you're one of the "cool" people, look in the mirror--you're not that cool. If you need to be told you're cool, you're not. There, I feel better. I had to get that off my chest, because most of the plot revolves around this club.

At any rate, the second half is much better. There's not much philosophical discussion, but there's a lot of semantics. In a way, it's like Seinfield, but these characters take themselves very seriously. Their self-absorption leads to much of the comedy. The first scene that made me smile was when Charlotte was asking the environmental lawyer about what made him go into his line of work and how admirable it was, but they were completely oblivious as they stepped around a six foot pipe spewing into the air. 

Summary by Bill Alward, October 13, 2001