Disco died 40 odd years or so. Wilt Stillman's 'The Last Days of Disco' went public almost 20 years ago. If you remember the heady days of disco, Stillman's film is a pale ghost of those days. The real deals of the short life of disco that gay liberation and the drug culture and the turning of society's back on the long war in Vietnam, the mean days of Nixon and the fear that the best days of America had gone away. In way, Don McLean's 'American Pie' says it all in a way. The script poorly frame the period from putting its raw,rude face to the days of disco. The story narrowly focus on mostly self-centered 'golden youth' fall in and out of bed. Stillman lifts the veil of a group of recent university graduates, who come to New York to find a career, a husband or a wife and find a way to hook up for the night (and perhaps longer) for a roll in the hay. The young men are from Harvard,the women from a sister (Ivy League) school. Parents subsidize the women who cannot make ends meet, working as readers in a publishing house. Now if you know anything about New York in those heady days, rents were affordable,cheap restaurants... The group of friends of 'Last Days of Disco' are children the easy classes;they are accustomed to a life style and privileges that do not mirror the daily life of the working class, the lower middle classes and the like. Obliquely in the world of disco this 'golden youth' cuts obliquely through the prism of money, sex, marriage,greed and guilt and power. In a way, it naively paints a picture of suburban, well-heeled young people's fall from dignity...momentarily at least. Stillman offered a break through role for Chloe Sevigny who emerges scarred but successful. Kate Beckinsale seems born to the role of spoiler, who smashes all friendship if a rival at work or for a bed mate stand in her way. She plays the innocent when deliberately she blurts out Sevigny's character has the clap, even those the girls share a flat in the upper east side. The men are dismal but for one a lawyer who chase rainbows and are superficial,albeit Harvard graduates. Society then called them' yuppies' (upwardly mobile professionals). They foreshadowed the nest generation, in image and the terror of reality that at the end of film finds them at the labor exchange looking for work, but not Sevigny who begins to climb the world of publishing ladder to success. But the film never conveys the hopelessness that the millennials experience, no future, a life inferior to a style mum and dad and grandparents enjoyed. Stillman creates a disco that is a pale shadow of say a Studio 54; it is a toothless tiger of the days of disco: no hit of ubiquitous use of drugs, the wild abandon of sex in the loos. The absence of gays, beautiful people, the blacks and Latins who gave the disco days,the biting taste and lust. The saving grace is the music. A potpourri of the hits of Disco that set the feet tapping and gives you envy to stand up and dance. a And possibly in a reverie, dreaming that discover died or went away. And perhaps it didn't for you who went to a discotheque. Today in fast food burger spots, they pipe in the songs of Disco, as you chew your burger or sip your soft drink. The film offers no frisson, no shudder of delight. And there is no hint of AIDS that inhabited the discotheques, among other venues.

It's the very early 80s in NYC. Alice Kinnon (Chloë Sevigny) and Charlotte Pingress (Kate Beckinsale) are recent graduates working at a publishing house as low pay readers. Dan Powers (Matt Ross) is their annoying co-worker and Holly (Tara Subkoff) is their quiet roommate. Jimmy Steinway (Mackenzie Astin) tries to bring his elderly client into the club. His club manager friend Des McGrath (Chris Eigeman) throws him out. Tom Platt (Robert Sean Leonard) is a charming environmental lawyer who gets together with Alice. They and others spend the nights in and out of the disco club.The cast of characters is a bit too large. I wish Whit Stillman could trim a few out of the group. Alice and Charlotte are quite a pair. They're not real friends but rather opposites stuck together. Their relationship is fascinating. There are fun bits coming from Charlotte like Des' gay mouth. Chris Eigeman continues to be the best of the Stillman disciples. Dan is probably a necessary evil. I would like this movie more if the membership in the group is more stable and restricted to fewer people.

Back in '98, it was "The Last Days of Disco" soundtrack I'd bought, trying to get into the genre (just look at the song list, a better disco primer there ain't). If a CD can wear out, it would've been that one. Fantastic album.As for the rest of the movie - which I just got around to actually seeing . . . well it's not that I need a plot to enjoy a movie, just that the dialogue used to carry this one emanated from characters I really didn't like. Credit Whit Stillman's ear for dialogue, but there's also a vapidity to these people (ivy league educated but they've got no damn sense). It really was the music that kept me watching this. Although it seems the only thing that can sour a good Bernard Williams bassline is a proceeding Blondie song (agh!).One other thing about this; that can't be what they thought the early '80s looked like. Outside of the workplace scenes, these actors could've stepped onto the streets of 1998 with no crowd reactions. It's bizarre.5/10

Disco was a high energy, drug fueled, frantic, primal experience that was beyond rationality, that defied nature, that reveled in absurdity. But this film is a bland, somber, melancholic chat fest that demands that its audience forget everything its ever heard about or seen of or actually experienced at a disco. It's beyond stupid. The whole premise is flawed, that disco died in the early eighties - it didn't, it mutated into an even more frantic, outrageous club scene. But this true fact doesn't deter the film's creators from their inaccurate pointless fantasy.A couple of discos may have closed down or changed style in Manhattan but clubs where people danced were actually even more popular and numerous. The celebrity glitz factor may have faded, but the intense social scene was charging ahead. Cocaine was everywhere by the bucket fulls at the time, not just up Hollywood's noses, and the nightlife was running hot on its power. It was insane, deranged, unbelievable. But this dumb flick wants you to believe that a whole world was collapsing, that an entire generation of party animals quickly went extinct. Wrong.If this movie is meant to be a comment on the virus like spread of Reagonomics into every aspect of American culture throughout the 80s, then having a grand Disco as the setting pretty much mandates that the film be a broad parody. But it isn't, it's just a self conscious exercise in style. But even the style is wrong. Power suits and ties wouldn't be fashionable till the next decade. No real urban hipster in the 80's would be seen dead in a pinstripe. Designer jeans were what the heavy weights were sporting, even the upper crust. So the "look" is off, which leaves the substance to carry the project. What substance there is is vacuous, vapid, and very annoying.The dialog is all stilted, awkward and overly literate - unnatural. It's like listening to a lit student read his or her first script. The acting is uneven and unfocused. No one seems to know what the point of this movie is, and all the talk and gestures don't add up to anything greater than themselves. It's just a series of smugly clever comments and shallow observations, but there's no direction to any of it. Chloë Sevigny is interesting to look at for a little bit but her "acting" is so flat and boring. Her partner, Kate Beckinsale, tries to do pump some life into the lame words she's given but there's only so much she can do with this corpse of a script. As wrong, and absurd, and demented as it was, Disco was a massive whale of an international phenomenon, but you'd never know it from this puny limp fish of a failure.