the last days of disco

Rating: 7/10 (11 July 2010)

If you have a great home sound system and a big plasma TV then 54 can be a spectacular home experience. Unlike the real thing. STUDIO 54 as a disco scene is legendary but lemme tell ya, in Sydney in 1988-1994 we had the gigantic real thing: massive and spectacular dance parties (no NOT raves) but massive disco nights in a place that held 5000 people and staged Busby Berkeley sized massive dance entertainment. See any Kylie Minogue concert today to get a sense of we had for free at the time! They were called RAT parties and BACCHANALIA events. Often our own big disco clubs competed and it was massive and musical and a throb of wild night fun unlike anything I have seen in any movie anywhere. STUDIO 54 as a small movie version of what we know as gigantic and real in our own Australian lives and makes us look like Hollywood epic disco. What is in this film is quite puny and tacky compared to the real thing here. I thought the film was a good but could have been great disco drama. There has always been a call for a great BIG disco film or a dance party spectacular and Saturday NIGHT FEVER and 54 and even parts of WEST SIDE STORY about as close as we will get I guess. Ryan Phillippe is cute and Adonis and well cast as the pretty chipmunk bar boy, Brecken Myer believable in their NY suburban angst.... as is all the cast esp the girls Selma Hyack and gorgeous Neve Campbell...however the dialog at the end of the film where they reconcile is truly lame and lets the film down. I real life these characters would both end up as prostitutes. But it is Mike Myer pulling off another creepy performance (see CAT IN THE HAT for the other) that is the core of the film. Studio 54 as depicted in this almost-there setting looks like a stinky old cinema with nut-case clients and ghastly B grade celebrities. (Do The Time Warp, anyone?)
I am glad I wasn't there for real as what happened here was real and astonishing. I hear there is a very sleazy and sexually explicit directors cut of 54 and that would be more to the mark as this is an almost-Disney version of what we can see had greater depths of nude depravity... all to a pulsating disco beat!