The Last Days of Disco

The Last Days of Disco (1998) is such a strange movie, a movie about how the night can take on a life of its own, and how that which is sexy at twelve midnight is pretty pathetic at twelve noon.  It has writer-director Whit Stillman's signature mock-intellectual dialogue (which served him so well in Metropolitan), and a terrific soundtrack (provided you like disco music), as well as one of the best long party scenes I've ever seen, taking up the first half hour of the movie and imbibing it with a kind of fluid magic.

The characters might as well be carbon copies of those in Metropolitan. One of the actors from that movie, Chris Eigeman, even plays a thinly-veiled variation on his character from that film, and newcomers Chloe Sevigny and Kate Beckinsale could be the two main girls from it, except with different hairdos. Sevigny is understated and smart but critical, and Beckinsale embodies a kind of cattiness as her observant and opinionated friend/roommate. Together they inhabit a New York nightclub and it becomes a sort of stage to enact the drama of yuppie romance and friendship.

I liked Last Days for the same reason I loved Metropolitan: The conversations, as in Metropolitan, were generally interesting, and so other-worldly in their quasi-Victorian-ness that they left me somewhat dumbfounded and fascinated. But there was also something a bit false about Last Days of Disco. The dialogue always seems to be teetering between refreshing and ridiculous. It is rather nice to hear people talking in complete sentences and using correct grammar, but when the owner of a nightclub comments on someone's wrong usage of the past perfect tense, something feels disingenuous.

Then again, director Stillman often seems like he's toying with his characters' intelligence in the first place. He lets them get puffed up on their own sophisticatedness and then watches them become caricatures, although he doesn't completely dehumanize them. It's a lot more subtle that that. They're somewhere between soap opera and sitcom, book smart and street smart, bold and terrified. And all of these contradictions are masked by a veneer of success and confidence that we the audience can generally see through. 

The real problem with Last Days is that everything about the film feels too familiar, as if Stillman were simply unable to do anything but recycle old ideas. I think it's very likely he wanted to explore the same ideas in a slightly different context. He's too interested in these types of people--educated, privileged upper-class sophisticates--not to use them in his films. This at least makes them interesting for us, up to a point, but their intelligence often morphs into myopia, and this turns them into shallow, unappealing characters toward the end of the film.

And then of course, the fact that at some point this film is acknowledging a kind of reverence for the disco era is laughable, especially at the end when passengers on the subway begin dancing to "Love Train." Was that really such a great way to end a movie that's so self-consciously clever? It's difficult to know if the film is trying to be hip, ironic, or subversive. I think perhaps it's a combination of all three. The cast includes a lot of promising young actors including Mackenzie Astin, Matt Keeslar, Robert Sean Leonard, Jennifer Beals, Matt Ross, Tara Subkoff, and David Thornton. 114 min. ★★½

Friday the 13th Part 2

Because Friday the 13th (1980) was such a huge hit, more teenagers had to die in Part II (1981), which picks up a few years later, when another group of camp counselors is butchered one by one at the now infamous Crystal Lake. As with the original, the idea here is body count, and the uninteresting characters are dispatched in the usual ways. The writers even manage to steal the famous double impaling scene from Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood. But this is the kind of pedestrian thriller that makes you yearn for something a little more sophisticated, a little more clever, and a little more fun. However, it's a wonderful movie to heckle with a group of friends. Directed by Steve Miner. With Amy Steel, John Furey, Warrington Gillette, Betsy Palmer, and Adrienne King. ★½

Raiders of the Lost Ark

The template for all the big, overlong adventure films of the past quarter-century, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) still looks impressive, but it's a slightly overrated piece of pop, the product of H. Rider Haggard-inspired boyhood fantasies. It's from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, and a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan. As Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford, the modern-day Allan Quatermain, is an admittedly perfect casting choice: he's the right mixture of intellectual, heel, and romantic, driven by his singular fascination for the Ark of the Covenant. Karen Allen, as his girl Friday, Marion, is one of the spunkier heroines in American adventure films. She's right up there with Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley in her ability to hold her own, and that's a breath of fresh air. (Apparently she had to fight director Steven Spielberg on this; he must have chosen Kate Capshaw for Temple of Doom because he knew she wasn't above screaming and whining for the entire film.)

The creators of this behemoth once again show their inability to restrain themselves, pulling in everything from the Ark of the Covenant to the ancient Egyptians to the Nazis: it's set in 1936, when Hitler was allegedly doing research on the occult, among other things. Thus, Indiana Jones becomes involved in one of those dreary races against time, fighting Nazism, venomous snakes, giant, fast-moving boulders, skilled Egyptian sheiks, and any other potential obstacle that can be put in his way. The film is best when it lets a little levity into the mix, but it's such a busy production that Spielberg and company barely have time for such trivial things as humor.

Ultimately Raiders of the Lost Ark doesn't capture as much of the exotic charm and fascination of Egyptian culture (much of it takes place in Cairo) as it would like, despite good set design and production values. It's too much of a pastiche of other films, mixing some Humphrey Bogart vehicles (The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca come to mind) with King Solomon's Mines. As overblown movies go, Raiders isn't offensive (despite John Williams' overbearing music score, which announces triumph at the drop of a hat); but the fact that its success (along with Jaws and Star Wars) has made modern movies what they are--too big, too long, and too cookie-cutter--is quite offensive indeed. Raiders still manages to be entertaining, with noteworthy scenes including the chase scene in Cairo and a descent into a snake-infested tomb. With Paul Freeman, Ronald Lacey, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliott, Wolf Kahler, and Alfred Molina. ★★½